Tracie M. Matysik

This course introduces students to themes  and methods  in the study  of European Intellectual History. We will address what it means to read philosophy and social theory  in historical context, understanding close reading  as historical  methodology. In terms  of chronological focus, the course will concentrate on the modern  era broadly understood, roughly  1600-present. We will examine  how reason came to be a dominant and contested category  of philosophical inquiry in the seventeenth century and then follow  its vicissitudes into the twentieth century. Along the way we will witness the embrace  and rejection of what has come to be known  as the "Enlightenment tradition." Readings will be primarily philosophical and socia l ­ theoreticaI.

Readings (subject to change):

Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

Baruch Spinoza, Short Treatise  on God, Man, and His Well-Being

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Friedrich  Nietzsche, On the Birth  of Tragedy

Jurgen Habermas, selections

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization

Grading:

Short  paper (four  pages): 25°/o

Short  paper (four  pages): 30°/o

Final exam:  35°/o

Participation: 10°/o

Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher of Portuguese descent, has been alternately labeled the instigator of the “radical enlightenment” (Jonathan Israel), the “renegade Jew who gave us modernity” (Rebecca Goldstein), the betrayer of the Jewish tradition (Hermann Cohen), a “savage anomaly” in the western intellectual tradition (Antonio Negri), and the theorist of the one kind of god in which a physicist of the twentieth century might conceivably believe (Albert Einstein).  In his own seventeenth-century Amsterdam context, his writings – and even mere rumor of them – were enough to earn him full excommunication from the Jewish community.  Yet in subsequent centuries those scandalous writings have become a crucial chapter in histories of western philosophy.  G. W. F. Hegel, for instance, would argue that only after Spinoza could one really begin to philosophize properly.  This course will introduce students to the core of Spinoza’s writings that have produced such diverse reactions over the centuries, as well as to exemplary moments in those reactions.  We will examine Spinoza’s refusal of a transcendent god or ideal, as well as of the mind-body dualism so prominent in western thought, understanding along the way the unique intellectual modernity he made possible. Reading

Baruch Spinoza, “Ethics”; “Theological-Political Treatise”; and “Political Treatise,” all in Spinoza: Complete Works, ed. Michael Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2002), ISBN: 0872206203.

Genevieve Lloyd, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza and the Ethics (New York:  Routledge, 1996), ISBN:  0415107822.

Grading (using the +/- rubric):

• 12- to 15-page paper: 45% (includes evaluation of outline and/or draft)
• Presentation: 20%
• Final Journal: 25% (includes credit for timely submission of quality response papers)
• Participation: 10% (includes attendance and regular and constructive contribution to class discussion)

This course introduces students to the writings of Karl Marx as well as to those of his westernintellectual successors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will treat the nineteenthcenturycontext of industrialization and democratization in Europe in which Marx formulated hissocial, political, and philosophical critique, as well as the theoretical and philosophical legacythat followed through the twentieth century. The course will not focus on Soviet Marxism, butwill examine how western Marxism’s critique of capital evolved in complex relationship to theexistence of Soviet Marxism. We will spend roughly eight weeks reading Marx’s writings, andthen seven weeks reading his western intellectual successors (including writings from RosaLuxemburg, Georg Lukács, Walther Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, Jean-PaulSartre, Louis Althusser, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Slavoj Žižek). Students shouldexpect to read significant amounts of philosophy and social theory.

GRADING (using the +/- system)

First paper: 25%

Second paper: 25%

Option II or III: 10- to 12-page paper: 50%

Final Journal: 30%!Class Presentation: 10%

Participation (including attendance and also sustained constructive contribution to classdiscussion): 10%

TEXTS

Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition (New York: Norton, 1978).Vincent Barnett, Marx (New York: Routledge, 2009).