History and Texts of Philosophy of Modern Times

Teacher(s)

Maesschalck Marc; Schmutz Jacob;

Language

French
> English-friendly

Prerequisites

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Main themes

The course is intended as an introduction to the study of texts and doctrines of modern philosophy.

It identifies the main aspects of the history of modern philosophy, its key trends and prominent thinkers, and will develop students' critical reading of the great works of modern philosophy. Authors studied will include Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Kant and Hegel.

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit, the student is able to :
1	By the end of the course, students will be familiar with the major movements and significant writers of modern philosophy, and will be able to identify its key underlying issues and describe the important ongoing debates. They will be able to comment on, analyse and critique one or more major modern philosophy texts and situate them in the overall context of modern philosophy, from Bacon and Descartes to Hegel.

Content

Culture and Counterculture: From Maimon to Fichte
The course presents the overall movement of modern Western philosophical thought by insisting on the succession of the great discourses of method and the heralding role of the 16th century in relation to this larger movement that culminates in German idealism and romanticism. The secondary thematic thesis of the course concerns the dialectical relationship inherent in this intellectual movement which, after having opposed its past, ends up opposing itself and preparing its own overcoming as a necessity, which it has itself helped to establish. Thus, in one of his most accomplished texts, The Characteristics of the Present Time (known as the Grundzüge), from 1804, Fichte proposes a meticulous analysis of the mental distortions that characterize his era, so proud of its modern science and at the same time, according to him, so far from the wisdom of ancient science. His time appears to him as divided between two tendencies, one that consists in arbitrarily restricting the rational judgement to the domain of perceptions and the sensible, the other that uses this lack of reflection on the limit inherent in the dominant empiricism to free itself from it and to seize there a point of passage towards the repressed power of the imagination and the unconscious. According to Fichte, this distension is constitutive of the blockage that prevents his time from moving to the true science, the one that manages to give an essential role to the relation with the limit of its knowledge.

Evaluation methods

Evaluation methods:
Students will be asked to write a 10 page paper to be based off of a reading of one of the proposed texts. After emailing the paper, the student will receive a question on the paper to be prepared for the oral exam.
The student will have approximately 15 minutes to present this answer during the oral exam.
The paper may be written in French, English, Spanish, or German, with the professor’s agreement.

Other information

English-friendly course: course taught in French but offering facilities in English.

Bibliography

Bibliographie

• Fichte J.G., Le caractère de l’époque actuelle, trad. Par I. Radrizzani, Vrin, Paris, 1990, en ligne sur google books. [Fichte J.G., Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters, in Sämmtliche Werke, Bd. 7, en ligne sur www.zeno.org]
• Maesschalck M., La théorie spéculative du destin collectif dans les Grundzüge, in Droit et création sociale chez Fichte, Une philosophie moderne de l'action politique, IIe partie/Chap.1, Bibliothèque Philosophique de Louvain (44), Vrin/Peeters, Paris/Leuven, 1996, pp. 189-219.
• Maesschalck M., La religion dans les Grundzüge de Fichte, in Revue Philosophique de Louvain, 89, 1991, pp. 581 à 605.
• Marx Otto M., « German Romantic Psychiatry », in E. R. Wallace and J. Gach (eds), History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology, Springer, New York, 2008, pp. 313–351.
• Radrizzani I., Préface in Le caractère de l’époque actuelle, traduit par Radrizzani I., 1990, Vrin, Paris, pp. 7-16.
• Radrizzani I., Quelques réflexions sur le statut de l’histoire dans le système fichtéen, in Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie, 123(1991), pp. 293-304.
• Regenspurger Katja u. Zantwijk Temilo van, Wissenschaftliche Anthropologie um 1800 ?, Steiner, Suttgart, 2005.
• Vergniolle de Chantal H., Une œuvre peu connue de Fichte : les « Caractéristiques du temps présent », in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger, 171(1981), pp. 273 à 281
• Weiner D. B., « The Madman in the Light of Reason. Enlightenment Psychiatry. Part II : Alienists, Treatises, and the Psychologic Approach in the Era of Pinel », in E. R. Wallace and J. Gach (eds), History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology, Springer, New York, 2008, pp. 281–312.

Faculty or entity

EFIL