Spring Quarter

What (or who) is the human being? Does the human being have an essence, and if so, what is it? What is the difference between human beings and other living beings? Is this a difference of degree, kind, or something else entirely? In this course we will treat these and related questions in the works of Aristotle, Kant and Heidegger. We will focus on Aristotle’s De Anima, various of Kant’s writings with a special emphasis on his late text Religion within the Bounds of Mere Sense and Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism.

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Rousseau is among the most influential and controversial philosophers of the 18th Century. While Claude Lévi-Strauss viewed the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality as seminal to modern anthropology, Rousseau’s political reflections, and the issues they continue to raise, have been and still are at the center of political philosophy. In this course, we will first examine the method of his anthropology, which, he described in his Letter to Christophe de Beaumont as a “genealogy,” and deployed in his Discourse on Inequality and in the Émile. We will then address the problematic articulation between this method and his “Principles of Political Law,” which is to say the normative political theory exposed in the Social Contract. Attention will also be paid to lesser-known political writings and early drafts of the Emile and the Social Contract. All texts and issues will be examined in light of the philosophical debates at the time of their production (with Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Sidney, Grotius, Leibniz, Malebranche, Diderot…), as well as in light of their broader philosophical legacy (Kant, Hegel, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Althusser, Strauss, Rawls, Shklar, Cohen, Walzer…). Reading comprehension of French secondary sources is useful but not required.