BA 2nd Year Core Electives 2011/12
WINTER TERM
Weeks 1-4:
CE212 Core Elective: The Scientific Revolution
ECTS credits: 2,5
Cecelia Watson (C.Watson@ecla.de)
The idea that science undergoes revolutions is controversial: historians and philosophers disagree about whether the sciences have, or could, shift so quickly and comprehensively as the term "revolution" implies. Still, there is no denying that in the period often referred to as the Scientific Revolution (1600-1800), conventional Western ways of understanding the natural world transformed dramatically, and the methodologies and principles we recognize as undergirding modern science were invented. With this new science came new problems, as scientific findings troubled traditional views of cosmology, theology, politics, economics, medicine, and culture. Aristotelian natural philosophers sparred with proponents of natural magic, Copernicus reorganized the heavens, and Paracelcus took physicians to task. The consequences of challenging authority-or, as a layperson, choosing to believe the wrong authority-could be deadly: radicals were burned at the stake, and credulous consumers died from quack medical cures. How could anyone living during the 17th and 18th centuries decide what and whom to believe? We will also consider whether this question-the problem of what and how we can know about the natural world- is still "live" in our own modern scientific age.
CE210 Core Elective: Foucault's Madness and Civilization
ECTS credits: 2,5
Katalin Makkai (K.Makkai@ecla.de)
This core elective will pursue a close reading of Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, a text in which Michel Foucault undertakes an "archaeology" exposing the development of the concept of "Madness" and its shifting relations to "Reason".
Weeks 6-10:
CE214 Core Elective: King Lear
ECTS credits: 2,5
Katalin Makkai (K.Makkai@ecla.de)
In this core elective, we will study Shakespeare's King Lear with an eye to considering its engagement with so-called skepticism regarding "other minds". Along the way we will draw on one or two contemporary essays on the topic.
CE Core Elective: Mysticism and Logic: Bergson and Russell
ECTS credits: 2,5
James Harker (J.Harker@ecla.de)
In this core elective, we will look at two philosophers who had a major influence on twentieth-century philosophy and literature: Henri Bergson and Bertrand Russell. Bergson's philosophy of time emphasized the reality of the subjective experience of time and influenced areas as far apart as modernist literature and political theories of anarchism. Russell was a forerunner of the analytical philosophical tradition, devised a philosophical system that required no subjectivity, and yet was also important to literary figures such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D.H. Lawrence. In a reading of Bergson's Time and Free Will and Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy, we will seek to discover both what separates these two philosophers and what joins them. Finally, we will look at a few short samples of literary works with a "Bergsonian" or "Russellian" influence.
AUTUMN TERM
Weeks 1-5:
CE211 Core Elective: Plato's Euthyphro and Laches
David Hayes (D.Hayes@ecla.de)
These two short dialogues foreground the subject of character. In the Euthyphro, Socrates discusses piety with a self-proclaimed prophet who is prosecuting his own father for murder. In the Laches, Socrates discusses courage with two Athenian generals, one of whom was arguably responsible for the downfall of the Athenian empire. We will be asking questions about the characters within the dialogues-especially Socrates, that most peculiar character; about the content and status of two ancient virtues (piety and courage) which have fallen on hard philosophical times; and about the nature of Plato's writing as a combination of impersonal thought and character-based drama.
CE213 Core Elective: Character in the Novel: Virginia Woolf's The Waves
James Harker (J.Harker@ecla.de)
Virginia Woolf thought of her most radical experiment, The Waves (1931), as a novel "without characters at all." In this course, we will closely read The Waves and grapple with some of the questions that it immediately raises: What do we do when we encounter a novel in which the effort s not make the fictional characters seem lifelike? Furthermore, are there ways of learning about human character from literature that seems intent on questioning the very idea of a fictional character? In tandem with our reading of The Waves we will look at a few excerpts from critical works on the nature of the fictional character.
Weeks 6-10:
CE215 Core Elective: Huckleberry Finn
David Hayes (D.Hayes@ecla.de)
A close reading of the novel which (according to Ernest Hemingway) is the solitary source of modern American literature, and which is probably both the most beloved and most censored book in American history (with a new controversy just this year).
Special attention will be paid to the novel's eponymous hero ("There is no more solitary character in fiction" -T.S. Eliot). Otherwise, class discussions will be grounded in the details of the text, but open-ended with respect to abstract themes. The novel is commonly thought to concern themes such as: freedom and slavery; nature and culture; Europe and America; romance and adventure; lies, disguises, and hidden identities; realism and cynicism; magic and religion; friendship, self-reliance, and lonesomeness; conscience and goodness.
CE217 Core Elective: A Stoic Guide to Character
Martin Gak (M.Gak@ecla.de)
Stoicism was not only an important school of Greek philosophy whose many figures made colossal contributions to ontology, ethics and logic-just to name a few-but was also a loosely grouped community of practice that spanning 5 centuries established the grounds for the close relation between existential self-understanding and therapeutical improvement by way of philosophical analysis that we see today in modern psychotherapies. The stoic elucidation of human nature and its necessary dressage as part of the pursuit of happiness and virtuous character was greatly influential in religious practices and the presentation of the politics of self-negation and self-restraint that became important to different forms of moral projects in politics. In this class, we will read Diogenes Laertius sections of The Life of the Philosophers and Epictetus' Enchiridion to introduce students to some of the core elements of stoic philosophy and to help trace the political and social pedigree of many of the idea that still populate our political discourse.