Philosophical and Theoretical Roots of the Humanities

Philosophical and Theoretical Roots of the Humanities:

Comparative Humanities Spring Seminar

Spring 2017

Rajesh Sampath, PhD

Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Justice, Rights and Social Change

Heller School for Social Policy and Management

Brandeis University

Waltham, MA, 02453

Description:

This seminar is designed as the Spring follow-up course to the Fall proseminar for the one-year MA program in Comparative Humanities. The course explores the theoretical and philosophical roots of the comparative humanities and the underlying epistemologies of the humanities across historical time and different cultural contexts. The underlying assumption is that although the Western canon has predominated in defining the nature and the humanities in the twentieth century, our twenty-first context mandates a dramatic and substantial change in thinking locally and globally. Our goal is to understand modalities of exclusion and repression within the Western canon while introducing non-Western contexts through an intersection lens: postcolonial studies, critical race and ethnic studies, feminist and alternative sexuality epistemologies and questions of local and global justice that permeates the work of the humanities across different contemporary cultures. Much work today develops radical subaltern resistance to a dominant Western, male, white, heteronormative patriarchic landscape, which has dominated humanistic thinking from the European Renaissance through the 1960s and slightly beyond. The task at hand is to imagine alternative landscapes that go beyond this dominant tradition.

Thereforethe course presents an intellectual-historical and philosophical-historical context to understand the genesis and expansion of the humanities in the twentieth century while presenting differentcritico-radical themes, subjects, fields and topical areas pertinent to the comparative humanities, particularly the philosophy of history, postcolonial studies, gender, sexuality and feminist studies and critical race and ethnic studies. Although drawing initially from the Western (Anglo-American and continental European tradition), the course explores ways to bring different cultural traditions of the humanities into dialogue today. Methods deployed in these sub-fields and topical areas involve the use of critical theory, feminist theory and epistemology, critical race theory, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, hermeneutics, poststructuralism and deconstruction.

Goals:

gain a firm grounding in the theoretical classics of the twentieth century, which have impacted the contemporary humanities

leverage different, methodological forms of inquiry to engage in graduate-level research in the humanities

discover the genealogical roots that make contemporary interdisciplinary work operable, which is essential to comparative work in the humanities

Justification: this course will reveal the significance of the philosophical and theoretical foundations of the humanities in so far as the humanities has broad appeal in furthering applied ethics, human rights, and theories of justice in interdisciplinary contexts cutting across the humanities, social sciences and even the natural sciences. [Beyond the humanities this could have broad appeal to the Heller School for Social Policy and Management and those in the social sciencesinterested in theoretical approaches to global studies and globalization and comparative sociology and anthropology.]

Requirements:

Do weekly readings and come prepared to discuss them for each class meeting.

Complete a final research paper due at the end of the semester. Length and scope TBD.

We will read short chapters and sections from the following texts highlighted in redbut, obviously, will not be able to cover everything listed.

Statements on Race, Gender, Sexuality- Diversity and Inclusion

Schedule and Required Readings:

Weeks 1, 2 and 3: Introducing the ‘Classics’ ofPoststructuralism, Postmodernism and Deconstruction:

Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other” (1963)

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (1966)

Michel Foucault,The History of Madness (1961)

The Order of Things (1966)

The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971 and “What is an Author?” in Part I: Truth and Method in Paul Rabinow, Ed., The Foucault Reader (1984)

Discipline and Punish (1973)

History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1977)

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967)

“The Ends of Man” and “White Mythology: The Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” in Margins of Philosophy (1972)

The Gift of Death (1995)

The Beast and the Sovereign(2001-2002 lectures)

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972)

Thousand Plateaus (1987)

Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)

Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (1975)

Michel Serres, Genesis (1982)

Bruno Latour, Science in Action (1987)

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (1992)

Recommended – Not Required: Critical Responses to French Poststructuralism:

John Searle, “The Word Turned Upside Down,” New York Review of Books (Oct. 27th, 1983)

Hillary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (1981)

Thomas Nagel, What Does it All Mean? (1987)

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989)

Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourses of Modernity (1985)

Quentin Skinner, The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (1990)

Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992)

Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987)

Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (1989)

Weeks 4 and 5: Postcolonial Studies

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1963)

Edward Said, Orientalism (1979)

GayatriSpivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” in Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean, eds., TheSpivak Reader (1996)

HomiBhaba, ed., Nation and Narration (1991)

Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (1991)

Gloria Anzaldua, “Towards a New Consciousness” in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, eds., The Postcolonial Studies Reader (1995)

Weeks 6 and 7: Gender Justice and Feminist Epistemologies:

The Analytic Tradition:

Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality and Species Membership (2006)

Susan Moller Okin, Gender, Justice, and the Family (1991)

Poststructuralism, Continental Philosophy and Hybrid Traditions:

Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (1989)

Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993)

Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (1995)

LuceIrigary, “Sexual Difference” (1984)

Weeks 8, 9 and 10: Intersectionality, Critical Theory and Philosophy of Race:

Kimberle Crenshaw, ed., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (1996)

Cornel West, Race Matters (1994)

Angela Davis, The Angela Davis Reader (1998)

Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, “What is Intersectionality?” in Intersectionality (2016)

Albert Atkin, The Philosophy of Race (2012)

Adrien Katherine Wing, ed., Critical Race Feminism, 2nd Ed. (2003)

Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, The Latino Condition, 2nd Ed. (2010)

Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott LauriaMorgensen, eds., Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics and Literature (2011)

Weeks 11 and 12: Building Theoretical Landscapes of Comparative Humanities

Latin America

Eduardo De Viveiros, The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds (2016)

Africa

KwasiWiredu, ed.,A Companion to African Philosophy (2004)

Asia

Tu Wei Ming and Xinzhong Yao, eds., Routledge Handbook of Confucian Studies (2017)

Middle East

Samir Amin, Global History: A View from the South (2010)

Eurocentrism (2010)

Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution (2012)

Weeks 13: Applications for the Comparative Humanities in the 21st Century:

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006)

AbdulazizSachedina, Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (2009)

GayatriSpivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012)

Journal of Chinese Humanities, Vol. 1:1 (2015)-

Enrique Dussel, Ethics of Liberation (trans. 2013)

Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010)

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Truth of Democracy (2010)

GiorgioAgamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and the Forms-of-Life (2013)

Alain Badiou, Philosophy and the Event (2013)

Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement, Updated Ed. (2009)

Stanley Fish, “Will the Humanities Save Us?” (2008)-

Recommendations for Primary Sources:

Precursors to the modern European and Anglo-American context:

J. G. Herder, Ideas on the History of the Philosophy of Mankind (1784)

I. Kant, The Critique of Judgement (1790)

G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History (1830)

K. Marx, The Economic Manuscripts and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844)

A. Comte, A General View of Positivism (1844)

S. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (1844)

J.S. Mill, On Liberty (1859)

W. Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, Vol. 1 (1883)

F. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals (1887)

Foundational Texts:

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1911)

Ferdinand de Sassure, Course in General Linguistics (1916)

Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1922)

Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936)

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1929)

Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit (1934)

Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936)

Raymond Aron, Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity (1938)

Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (1944)

Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (1943)

R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1945)

Jacques Maritain, Existence and the Existent (1947)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror (1947)

Jean Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1945)

Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (1945)

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1944)

Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (1949)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (1953)

Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957)

Critical Theory:

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “Theses for the Philosophy of History”in Illuminations (from the 1969 English translation)

Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Essays on Mass Culture (1972)

Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964)

Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (1961)

Structuralism:

Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1966)

Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (1968)

Jacques Lacan, Écrits(1966)

Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology (1968)

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974)

Hermeneutics:

Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960)

Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations (1969)

Week 6: Philosophy of History and Historical Criticism:

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1963)

Louis Mink, Mind, History and Dialectic (1969)

Reinhart Kosselleck, Futures Past: The Semantics of Historical Time (1979)

Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner, eds., A New Philosophy of History (1995)

Secondary References:

Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality (1984)

Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in 20th Century French Thought (1994)

Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts and Language (1983)

Alan Megill, The Prophets of Extremity (1987)

Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (1980)

Alvin B. Kernan, ed., What Happened to the Humanities? (1997)

Harold Bloom, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002)

Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010)

Peter Brooks, ed., The Humanities and Public Life (2014)

Jeffrey Di Leo, Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Academy (2013)

Poul Holm et al., World Humanities Report (2015)

W. Patrick McCray, “The Technologists Siren Song” (2014)-

Steven Pinker- “Science is Not Your Enemy” (2013)-

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