PHIL 336: Twentieth-Century Continental Thought: Existentialism

PHIL 336-001: Existentialism
(Spring 2020)

10:30 AM to 11:45 AM TR

Section Information for Spring 2020

Fulfills the requirement for a course in the Continental Tradition for the Philosophy major.

Two facts about human beings are certain: we are born, and we will die. How should we go about making sense of what unfolds in between? Is human existence ultimately meaningless and absurd? Can the possibility of meaning emerge out of that very realization? What kind of freedom do we have to choose or create the meaning of our lives? To what extent is our existence given meaning by how others see us? What responsibility do we bear for the meaning of our own lives, as well as for the lives of others?

On this course we will approach these questions via key writings by Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Frantz Fanon. We will then look more closely at birth and death themselves. In much of the western philosophical tradition, including existentialism, death and mortality are taken as the defining horizon of human existence, as exemplified in Heidegger’s work on ‘being towards death’. Here we will spend some time with the work of Havi Carel, who engages with Heidegger to reflect on her own relation to serious illness.

We will go on to use thinkers such as Adriana Cavarero and Alison Stone to ask: what difference does it make if we take birth and natality to be at least equally important existential horizons as death/mortality? We will conclude by exploring how the horizons of both birth and death are exploited and violently transformed by colonization and the transatlantic slave trade, and ask what re-imagined existential horizons might be needed to navigate what Saidiya Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery.

 

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Course Information from the University Catalog

Credits: 3

Examination of existential philosophy from its 19th-century origins to its 20th-century expressions. Philosophers studied include Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, De Beauvoir, and Buber. Limited to three attempts.
Recommended Prerequisite: 3 hours of PHIL or permission of instructor.
Schedule Type: Lecture
Grading:
This course is graded on the Undergraduate Regular scale.

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