Below is a listing of the Graduate classes being offered for Spring 2010. For information on specific times, days and instructors, please check  the Master Class Schedule on NOVASIS.

PHI  7340- 001  Top: Marx & the Lefthegelians  CRN: 33939

Days: W 6:00 - 8:30

Marx famously denounced religion as “the opium of the people” in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and claimed that “the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.” Usually Marx is considered to have abandoned these early concerns with the critique of religion and philosophy in favor of his later critique of political economy. In this course we will question this narrative by first studying some of Marx’ early work in the context of works by the Young Hegelians (Bauer, Feuerbach, Stirner, Ruge) and by then attending to key passages in Capital. We will examine how the critique of religion relates to the critique of the liberal state and political economy in these works. In order to consider the ways in which a critical understanding of religion and theological thinking remains crucial to Marx’ critique of capitalism, we will also pay special attention to the role that rhetoric and dialectics play in both Marx and the Young Hegelians. Time permitting, we will conclude the semester by opening our discussion onto some subsequent accounts of secularization, sacralization, and profanation in relation to the logics of capitalism (Weber, Simmel, Benjamin).

Instructors: Annika Thiem
Restrictions: Must be enrolled in one of the following Levels: Graduate Arts and Sciences
Comment: Open to students in other departments only with the permission of the Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy

PHI 8230 - 001  Sartre CRN: 33942

Days: T 2:30 - 5:00

This course will examine the development of Sartre’s philosophy from its early studies in phenomenology, through Being and Nothingness and the important approach to ethics and history in What Is Literature? to the existential dialectic of Search for a Method. (His later works will be briefly touched upon.) Emphasis will be placed on Sartre’s politicization and the evolution of his thinking. Comparisons will be drawn to several of his contemporaries as well as subsequent thinkers.

Books: Cumming, The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre
             Sartre, Being and Nothingness
             Sartre, What Is Literature?
             Sartre, Search for a Method
Requirements: examination, paper, class presentation

Instructor: Thomas Busch
Restrictions: Must be enrolled in one of the following Levels: Graduate Arts and Sciences
Comment: Open to students in other departments only with the permission of the Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy

PHI 8350 - 001 Foucault  CRN: 33943

Days: W 3 - 5:30

“It is,” Foucault tells us, “through sex – in fact, an imaginary point determined by the deployment of sexuality  – that each individual has to pass in order to have access to his own intelligibilty, to the whole of his body, to his identity.”

We will devote ourselves in this seminar to unpacking this thought among others collected in the fifth part of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, called in French La volonté de savoir; we will call it “The Will to Know.”  Our devotion will include attention to what Foucault was discussing in his seminars in the mid-1970s as well as the published writings collected in Power/Knowldge, some writings collected in Michel Foucault: Power, Discipline and Punish and, of course, the other four parts of “The Will to Know.”  We will want to understand the full impact of Foucault’e statement before asking whether it decribes the conditions for a fatal quietism or the possibilities for bodies, pleasures and knowledge that can copunter the “tyranny of sex.”  An exploration of those conditions and possibilities will include discussions of Taylor, Frase, Butler, McWhorter and others.

Instructors: John Carvalho
Restrictions: Must be enrolled in one of the following Levels: Graduate Arts and Sciences
Comment: Open to students in other departments only with the permission of the Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy

PHI 8710 -001  Sem: Politics of Nature  CRN: 33945

Days: R 2:30 - 5

How are we to understand in a political context what we call "nature"?  Ever since Aristotle (and even more pronouncedly in Hobbes, Rousseau and modern philosophy in general) the legitimacy of political authority has been grounded in an understanding of nature and human nature.  This course will examine and critique this connection between "man" and nature.  Obviously this question raises issues about animality and the human animal’s relationship to other animals. What does it mean to be animal, human or otherwise? In the era of the so-called post-humanities, and certainly in the age of ecology, what does it mean to interrogate human "nature" and human animality?  Conversely, what happens when we begin to consider whether the things that supposedly make us “distinctly human” can be found beyond the sphere of anthropocentrism?  How far are the foundations of western philosophy shaken by the possibility that what we call “human” is as much a political construction as it is a biological or evolutionary one?  How has the category of the human been produced through exclusions? Does the fact that historically people of color, women, and other subordinated groups have also been excluded from the category of the human entail a political affinity among these groups? Why have Western humans so fiercely policed the boundary between our species and others, why has that boundary been eroding recently, and what does this imply about the kinds of subjectivities that are produced in the material-semiotic spaces of the political? What does it mean to investigate the inhuman, the posthuman, and the transhuman in a world in which we becoming increasingly aware of the need to direct our philosophical, ethical, and political attention toward our embeddedness in the more-than-human world?

A growing body of empirical and theoretical enquiry in fields ranging from political philosophy, evolutionary ecology, and the philosophy of biology to feminism and critical race theory suggests that species difference may be as culturally constructed as race and gender, and that the pervasive but counterfactual belief in a firm and fast divide between the human and non-human serves much the same purpose as race and gender essentialism: to congeal the social superiority of groups in power.  This course will examine questions of nature and animality in the context of politics.  We will examine the concept of nature, the traditional attempt to define the human being in contradistinction to nature and the animal, and the shifting boundaries separating species, through a variety of disciplinary lenses including: continental philosophy (Derrida, Agamben, Latour), feminism (Haraway, Butler, Plumwood), cultural studies (Mortimer-Sandilands, Wolfe) cinema (Grizzly Man) and activism (Foreman, Adams, Sturgeon).  

Requirements: Regular, active attendance; a 20-30 page paper and a presentation. Students will also have the opportunity, as part of their coursework and in collaboration with the instructors and other classmembers, to submit a proposal for a conference on Zoontotechnics (Animality / Technicity), held at Cardiff University, featuring plenary speakers Bernard Stiegler, David Wills, and Joanna Zylinska.

Required Texts:

Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am
Giorgio Agamben The Open: Man and Animal

Bruno Latour Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy
Matthew Calarco  Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida
Donna J. Haraway When Species Meet

Instructors: Chaone Mallory and Walter Brogan
Restrictions: Must be enrolled in one of the following Levels: Graduate Arts and Sciences
Comment: Open to students in other departments only with the permission of the Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy

PHI 8710- 002 Beyond Reason: Higher Modes of Cognition in the Writings of Thomas Aquinas CRN: 35320

Days: R 5:30 - 8pm

Thomas Aquinas’s account of natural human reason is well known among philosophers.  What is less well known, though, is that Thomas’s major discussions of human reason are always located in the textual wake of discussions about divine knowing and angelic knowing.  Moreover, while Thomas takes natural human reason to have a robust power to know the world and even God, Thomas also presents rich descriptions of higher modes of human cognition—viz., faith, prophecy, rapture, and beatific vision—that rise far above the capacities of natural reason.  In a sense, then, natural human reason—for all that Thomas makes of it, and for all that would be made of it by later thinkers—can be construed as the lowest, most fragile type of cognition in Aquinas’s writings.  This seminar will explore Thomas’s views on the higher modes of cognition, which some would call “supernatural” or even “mystical,” with an eye toward understanding how they shape Thomas’s views on knowing in general.  Along the way, we will also pay careful attention to the ways in which these views are worked out in conversation with various pagan, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinkers.  Most notably, we will explore the engagement with Aristotle that informs Thomas’s thinking about natural reason, and the dialogue with Augustine, Maimonides, and Avicenna that shapes Thomas’s writings on faith, prophecy, and rapture.

Instructor: Michael Waddell
Restrictions: Must be enrolled in one of the following Levels: Graduate Arts and Sciences
Comment: Open to students in other departments only with the permission of the Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy

PHI  8710 - 003  Nature in Romanticism/Idealism  CRN: 35633

Days: T 5:30 - 8:00

Nature was arguably the theme of German Romanticism and Idealism. It was an inspiration and a challenge, a philosophical question, and a matter of empirical investigation. Why was nature such a central—essential—element in Romantic and Idealist thought? How did the Romantics understand the relation between the natural and the human—between nature and reason? What were their motivations, methods and goals? And, ultimately, what distinguishes the Romantic-Idealist approach to nature from that of their predecessors?

These are the questions which we will be considering throughout the semester. While the readings will be primarily philosophical, we will also consider poetic writings and a novel. Requirement: presentation and final paper (6,000 words).

Readings:

Herder, God: Some Conversations
Kant, Critique of Judgment (Hackett)
Goethe, Scientific Studies (Suhrkamp)
Schelling, First Draft for a Philosophy of Nature (SUNY)
Hölderlin, selected poems
Schiller, selected poems
Novalis, Novices at Sais (Archipelago)

Instructors: Dalia Nassar
Restrictions: Must be enrolled in one of the following Levels: Graduate Arts and Sciences
Comment: Open to students in other departments only with the permission of the Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy