BASC62111 - Alumni Sequence: The Modern Tradition I
Course Description
The modern tradition is characterized by relentless and sometimes blind insistence upon individualism and the value of individual experience. It begins with what Kenneth Clarke describes as “the discovery of the individual”—around the early fifteenth century—as both a social and political fact and a new, historically unprecedented reality, and proceeds through all of the contemporary pathologies of narcissism and therapeutics. But what kind of “discovery” is this? What does it mean to be—or to become—“individual”? How is the fact of individualism linked to the emergence of modernity? How is it connected to memory—to the construction of a personal past and an orientation toward a personal death?
Autumn begins the exploration of Modernity as characterized by the emergence of an entirely new and unprecedented form of consciousness: one that is critical, uprooted, autonomous, and intensely self-reflexive.
Course Outline
Reading List:
Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History: with selections from The Philosophy of Right, Hackett, Publishing Company, ISBN 978-0872200562
Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0521424462
Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Illych, Vintage, ISBN 978-0307951335
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, SUNY Press, ISBN 978-1438432762
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1, Penguin Classics, ISBN 978-0142437964
Notes
Taking a Graham School Remote Course: You will receive an invitation to join Canvas about a week before the course begins. Please accept the invitation and create a log-in for Canvas using your email as the user name and create a password. Then go to the Dashboard and click on your course. Next click on Zoom Professional Education and you will see the link to "Join" your classroom. Canvas houses the course information including the course syllabus, announcements, and discussions. You will not be able to participate in your online class unless you accept the Canvas invitation and set up your account.
For help visit, https://grahamschool.uchicago.edu/academic-programs/online/learning-resources/liberal-arts to find step by step instructions and to sign up for a Student Training Session.