Seminar in Twentieth Century Philosophy

Catalog description

This course builds on its precursor ( PHIL 204 : Twentieth Century Philosophy) to provide a more focused understanding of selected trends, topics, and questions specific to the period. The twentieth century is marked by a parting of the ways among rival (and often mutually hostile) approaches with distinct questions, styles, and agendas. Analytic philosophy of language emerges as a synthesis of Frege¿s formal logic with an empiricist theory of meaning; its early proponents (e.g., Russell, Moore, Carnap) aim to expose much of traditional philosophy as futile engagement with "pseudo-problems" and replace it a logically perfect language in which genuine problems can be posed and scientifically resolved. Phenomenology (e.g., Husserl, Merleau-Ponty) and existentialism (e.g. Heidegger, Sartre) revolt against the nineteenth century's overblown metaphysical systems and assert the importance of returning to an intuitive engagement with "things themselves" and with the lived experience of the human condition. Critical theory (e.g. Benjamin, Adorno) emerges as a synthesis of Marxism, aesthetic criticism, psychoanalytically informed sociology. Around mid-century, each of these streams of thought undergoes a period of crisis and renewal, associated with names such Wittgenstein and Quine in the case of analytic philosophy, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze in that of phenomenology and existentialism. Newly emergent critical philosophies such as feminism and decolonial thought heighten the sense of intellectual ferment. Students will emerge from the course both with a deepened understanding of one or more of twentieth century philosophy's key concerns (e.g., language and logic, history, power, the structure of reality, the nature of value and normativity, the relation of theory and practice, art and aesthetic experience, gender and identity) and canonical authors, and a sense of how they relate to the rival schools of thought.