PHILOSOPHY 314 - MAJOR RECENT PHILOSOPHERS

        R       2:30-3:50       TUTH    327 GREGORY HALL        SCHACHT

        Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger are arguably the two most important German philosophers since Hegel.  Both have long been associated with each other and with the “existentialism” popularized by Sartre and Camus.  Yet these associations are highly questionable; for they are in fact radically different both from each other and from French existentialism on many matters.  One such matter on which they differ, both methodologically and substantively, is how to think about and understand ourselves, or “human reality.”  Heidegger’s project of interpreting human reality (“Dasein”) in his important early book Being and Time in terms of the “phenomenological” analysis of our manner of “existence” came to be known as Existenzphilosophie or “the philosophy of existence” or “existential philosophy,” and was the inspiration of Sartrean “existentialism” (from which, however, Heidegger sought to disassociate himself).  Heidegger subsequently came to think rather differently about human reality, in such later writings as his “Letter on Humanism,” written in part as a critique of Sartre.   Heidegger was also very critical of “philosophical anthropology,” conceived as a naturalistic interpretation of ourselves as human beings focusing upon the kind of nature(s) we have come to have in the course of the various biological and social developments that have made us the kind(s) of creature we are.  But that was precisely the sort of reinterpretation Nietzsche called for, and attempted to undertake.  In this course, after a brief look at earlier conceptions of human reality, we will spend the remainder of the first half of the course examining various writings by Nietzsche relating to his thinking with respect to what he calls “the type man,” and then will devote most of the second half of the course to Heidegger’s account of human reality as “Dasein” in Being and Time, concluding with a look at his later reinterpretation of our humanity.

        Primary texts: By Nietzsche, The Gay Science and On the Genealogy of Morals.  By Heidegger, Being and Time.  Plus a course pack.

Requirements: one short paper at mid-term, one longer paper at the end of the semester, and a final exam.