Prof. W.R. Newell, who teaches HUMS 4000, is offering two seminars in the upcoming academic year that might be of interest to 4th-year and particularly keen 3rd year students. The descriptions are as follows:
PSCI 4809/5308 Fall. CONCEPTS OF POLITICAL COMMUNITY I — Justice, Tyranny and The Common Good.
Fridays 8:35 – ll:35 am
Plato’s REPUBLIC, the classic search for the best form of government and the rejection of tyranny in favor of the philosophic life, emerged against the backdrop of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (the first superpower conflict) and the moral and political crisis it sparked in history’s first democracy. We will consider how the Athenian Empire rose from the Greek victory over the Persians, the emergence of Greek tragedy and philosophy as responses to the crisis of Athenian civilization as it grappled with the contradiction between self-government at home and imperialism abroad, and how Plato drew together all of these elements in his exploration of a regime based on justice and reason.
Texts
- Thucydides, THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR
- Sophocles, OEDIPUS TYRANNUS
- Plato, GORGIAS, SYMPOSIUM, REPUBLIC
PSCI 4809/5309 Winter. CONCEPTS OF POLITICAL COMMUNITY II — The Modern Search for Political Wholeness
Wednesdays 8:35 – 11:35 am
G.W.F. Hegel sought in THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT to recover the Platonic account of the soul’s search for transcendence so as to off-set the widespread feeling that the Modern Age of the Enlightenment and liberalism had debased the human spirit with its excessive emphasis on individual self-interest and materialism. We will consider how Hegel’s attempt to synthesize Platonism with the progress of history emerged from the thought of Rousseau (who was, along with Plato, Hegel’s favorite thinker), Kant and Schiller. We will then examine how Hegel’s grand synthesis of history and transcendence was attacked from both the left and the right by Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger, with the result that Hegel’s moderate political progressivism was increasingly set aside in favor of ever more revolutionary expectations for the future transformation of the human condition, a Third Age of collective bliss variously evoked by Marx’s proletariat, Nietzsche’s Superman and Heidegger’s vision of the German “community of destiny.”
Texts
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau. BASIC POLITICAL WRITINGS.
- Immanuel Kant. GROUNDWORK OF THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS.
- Friedrich Schiller. LETTERS ON THE AESTHETIC EDUCATION OF MAN
- G.W.F. Hegel. THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT.
- Karl Marx. “The Communist Manifesto;” “On the Jewish Question”
- Friedrich Nietzsche. BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
- Martin Heidegger. AN INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS.