Course Description: Fall 2010

HUHI 6305.001 Ideas In Contexts Bambach C

cap: 20 W 4:00 PM - 6:45 PM

Description:

This graduate seminar will focus on the problem of literary/philosophical interpretation

as a model for reading works in the humanities. In that spirit we will spend most of our
class time reading a series of texts carefully -- from the early Greek philosophical
tradition and from the modern German poetical-philosophical tradition. As background
material we will begin with works of Anaximander and Heraclitus and then try to
measure the influence of such works on Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida.
My hope here is to begin a dialogue between Greek and continental philosophy as a way
of reading the crisis of subjectivity/ethics/metaphysics/history that afflicts the modern
epoch. By paying close attention to structural, rhetorical, and poetical detail as well as to
the philosophical sources of modern European thinking, I hope to introduce students to a
hermeneutical way of reading that aims to affect their approach to reading itself.

Requirements:

A Protokoll of 1-2pp., a paper proposal of 1-2 pp. and an essay of 13-15 pp. length due at
the end of the semester that covers some aspect of the problems that we deal with during
the term.

Textbooks:

Anaximander, Fragment
Heraclitus, Fragments
Hölderlin, Hyperion
Hölderlin, Selected Poetry
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking
Derrida, Athens, Still Remains