Graduate Program (& Advanced Certificate) Status
In the more than two hundred years since Kant, continental philosophy has taken many different directions, answering very different questions with divergent concepts and presuppositions. This makes it difficult to cover in a single course. In this course, we will focus on tracing continental philosophy’s existentialist themes. Existentialism is a philosophical account of what is distinctively human that is not narrowly centred on our rationality or intellectual capacities. The central authors we read include Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir and Foucault
By the end of the course, students who have done the required work will have become familiar with some central problems and authors in Continental European philosophy since Kant, in particular with regard to existentialist thought, will have become better able to discern and evaluate arguments in (older) philosophical texts and will have developed their argumentation and writing skills to articulate their own position on key questions presented in the course.
Based on participation, one class presentation and a final exam scheduled by the department after the end of term.