PHIL 343

PHIL 343: Kant to Nietzsche
Instructor: Alan McLuckie

Course Description:

This course will survey some of the key texts of six influential European philosophers in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Mill, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche). In terms of its philosophical richness, the historical period from Kant to Nietzsche is vast and various. As such, there are countless ways one could approach these writers (not to mention those important figures we simply cannot cover in a course of this nature), and any method one might adopt would hardly begin to scratch the surface of philosophy of this period. To the extent that there is a 'guiding theme' to this incarnation of the course, we will focus on questions that typically fall under the rubric of 'practical philosophy.'

Immanuel Kant famously claimed that the interests of reason in its cosmopolitan sense are exhausted in four questions: 1) What can I know? 2) What ought I to do? 3) For what may I hope? 4) What is the human being? Kant suggested that metaphysics answers the first question, morals the second, religion the third, and anthropology the fourth. However, Kant emphasized that, at bottom, the first three questions come down to the last, suggesting that questions about 'human nature' are ultimately the sine qua non of philosophy. Although we will not explicitly address Kant's theoretical philosophy in this course (strictly speaking, this is the material Kant sees as addressing his first question), we will in some sense adopt Kant's four questions to guide our inquiry, focusing, as Kant did, on questions about human nature. We will consider topics concerning the nature and origins of morality, the self, history, the state, religion, and the nature of capitalism.

The course aims at helping you to learn:

  1. how to read texts written at another time and for a different audience from ourselves,
  2. to think about the issues in practical philosophy that are raised in the writings of these philosophers and about how these questions might be relevant for ourselves here and now in the modern world,
  3. how to write a well-organized expository paper in which you show your comprehension of the assigned writings and your ability to interpret and criticize their philosophical content.