General Information
Course Description
9577 - Re-Visiting Idealism - This course will take up some of the seminal figures in Idealism from Leibniz to Schelling, and will suggest that "theory" itself was first developed in the context of (post)Kantian philosophy: an inter-discipline that was by no means limited to philosophy in its narrow sense. An exploration of what constitutes theoretical "writing," of the implicit interdisciplinarity of this writing, and of what differentiates a "theoretical" from a philosophical reading, will therefore also be one of the goals of this course. While the corpus is potentially vast (and could also include Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Novalis, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche etc.), we will focus on five thinkers who will also be used to reread one another: Leibniz, Kant, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel and Schelling (with the emphasis on the last two). Readings of these philosophers will be informed by the way(s) they have been reread in contemporary theory, and differences between these re-readings will be used to disclose tensions in the philosophers themselves, as well as openings and missed encounters in the contemporary theoretical corpus itself. For instance Kant will be looked at via the French (as distinct from Anglo American) de-regulation of his corpus, with specific emphasis on Lyotard's and Derrida's readings of him, and on issues of judgment and justice. Schelling will be looked at through (post)Heideggerian and late Marxist re-readings of his work (the Frankfurt School, Žižek), as well as through his connections to (post)Heideggerian French philosophy. A rethinking of intellectual history in ways that exceed the model of "history" (or even genealogy) will thus be a further aim of this course, which will a) try to develop figures for connecting temporally separated bodies of thought that are not bound to models of "influence" or "development;" and b) reflect on why certain theorists reflect or refract their own projects through past thinkers, and how this past functions as an analytic scene for their work.
