Current and Recent Courses
SPRING 2006
What is the relation between reality, fantasy, and the unthinkable or unthought? How does the human organism separate from its linguistic, social, and physical environment in order to experience itself as an agent? Does ethics protect humans against aggression or channel their aggression? This course explores the continuing philosophical significance of the tradition of interpretation, therapy, and social criticism inspired by Freud despite empiricist trends in popular thinking about psychology. Students will be introduced to basic themes in the work of Freud and Lacan as well as feminist, Marxist, and neurological adaptations of psychoanalytic theory.
- PHIL 101 Introduction to Philosophy Spring 2004
What names do we use to define our species, our national or sexual identity, our philosophical or religious positions? How do those names change what we can do and what it means for us to exist? Is it possible to be in conflict with our own identity or the language through which we name it? This course will investigate ways in which historical and contemporary philosophers have tried to free themselves from identities imposed by certain systems of thought and action. By discussing Plato, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, and Gandhi, we will investigate what moods and values underlie our concern with identity, and consider who we might become and what kinds of action we might find acceptable if we were able to leave certain identities behind. Finally, we will ask whether the recent concern with terrorism has made it easier or more difficult for Americans to be critical about the ways in which they take on a political, cultural, or technologically mediated identity.
Fall 2005
- Phil 334/Posc 354 Social and Political Philosophy
The first amendment to the US Constitution declares that ÒCongress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.Ó But religion is just one of many traditions through which citizens bind themselves into communities, establish analogies between family order and civic order, and exchange or transmit property between generations. Political power, religious freedom, and economic freedom cannot be conceptualized in isolation from one another. Using key texts by Western thinkers who were aware of the diversity of cultures and religions at their time, this course will examine conceptual links between citizenship, tradition, and contract which structure today's conflicts between liberals and cultural conservatives. We will ask how colonialism shaped the political meaning of tradition in the United States and in newly modernizing nations. Finally, we will also ask how these conceptual links strengthen or weaken the American commitment to the rule of law in a security-conscious age.
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