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Complete Course Title: A Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing: an Introduction to Marx In the mid-nineteenth century, a young Karl Marx wrote, in the form of a published open letter to Arnold Ruge: “But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly...

The Worst of All Possible Worlds: an Introduction to Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer is a true oddity in the history of philosophy. Although a great metaphysical systematizer in the tradition of Leibniz and Hegel, Schopenhauer posed a worldview entirely antithetical to the “optimism” characteristic of traditional Western philosophizing. Whereas...

How can we, as finite beings, grasp the concept of infinity? Yet humans have been contemplating infinity for millennia, whether inspired by nature, philosophy, spirituality—or mathematics. This course is a historical and conceptual approach to the latter realm, the mathematics of infinity. Our topics will include the ancient Greeks’ discovery...

F.W.J. Schelling is (in)famous for his seemingly ever-changing views and proliferating “systems.” But underlying his philosophizing was a single obsession: to heal the rift between nature and reason that had been newly ruptured in the work of his immediate and venerable predecessor, Immanuel Kant. Schelling developed a philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie...

In the process of investigating and treating the enigmatic disorder known as “hysteria,” Sigmund Freud established the discipline of psychoanalysis—and by so doing, profoundly altered Western subjectivity. By insisting that the bodily symptoms of hysterics represented unconscious conflict, Freud established a new way of thinking about human experience,...

The Counter-Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Critique of Reason Was there a counter-enlightenment? If so, when did it take place? In English the idea originated with Isaiah Berlin’s eponymous essay, widely promulgated by his many admiring followers. The usual story casts so-called counter-enlightenment figures—such as Giambattista Vico, Johann...

“For the philosopher,” writes Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project, “the most interesting thing about fashion is its extraordinary anticipations.” In other words, fashion is, in itself, an avant-garde: it shows us what the world will be like before that world has fully arrived. Its uncanny relation to the new is by no means the only...

Simone de Beauvoir: Existentialism, Phenomenology, Feminism Simone de Beauvoir—activist, author, social critic, philosopher—is considered one of the pioneering figures of existentialist and feminist philosophy. Although her work spans multiple genres and address numerous modern social questions and classic philosophical dilemmas, it was the 1953...

How are we to understand loneliness today? It appears that we are facing a mass epidemic of loneliness—one perhaps exacerbated by virological pandemic of COVID-19. Britain has appointed a Minister of Loneliness to counter rising rates of isolation. Approximately 20-43 percent of American adults over the age of 60 experience “frequent or intense...

Philosophy, Ideology, and Jokes: an Introduction to Slavoj Žižek Slavoj Žižek is among the most influential, prolific, and provocative European philosophers of his generation. Amidst a period of tectonic changes, as Soviet socialism came to an end and neoliberalism spread across Europe, Žižek’s thought developed against the grain—due in...

Kant’s publication of the Critique of Pure Reason was a seismic event in the history of western philosophy, whose effects continue to be felt today. Enacting a “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy, Kant subjected reason itself to critique—attempting to answer the question: how do we know things at all? What structures and categories does...

Angela Y. Davis’ 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, is arguably the foundational text for the intellectual and political work being done by the prison abolitionist movement today. More broadly, Davis’ wide-ranging writing and political activism over the past five decades mark her as one of the most important contemporary intellectuals.In...

What is Deconstruction? The critical term, coined by Jacques Derrida, is notoriously hard to define. Derrida himself insisted  that “deconstruction” is not a method of reading, nor an analytical approach, nor even stable in its own meaning. And yet, deconstruction became the cri de coeur of literary theory in the United States: to its proponents,...