Lessons on Being & Becoming

An upper level course introducing students to
modern philosophy through a selection of readings
from works by Hume, Kant, Schelling, Hegel,
Husserl, Heidegger, Bergson, Wittgenstein,
Sartre, de Beauvoir, Levinas and Derrida. The
course follows the themes of Being and Becoming
in modern philosophy, varying in range of
philosophical texts from issues such as
empiricism and rationalism to idealism,
phenomenology and existentialism to
deconstruction. We will follow both expositions
and critiques of various conceptions of Being and
Becoming in respect to questions concerning the
nature of reality, representation and cognition.
The first section will focus on Hume, Kant,
Schelling and Hegel and epistemological questions
concerning Being: Hume's problem of induction;
Kant's demarcation of knowledge; Schelling's
teleology and Hegel's philosophy of history and
dialectics.
The second section will focus on Husserl,
Heidegger, Bergson and Wittgenstein: Husserl's
phenomenological analyses of Being, Heidegger's
conception of Being and time and poetry,
Bergson's notion of duration and Becoming and
Wittgenstein's socio-linguistic philosophy and
his concept of language games.
The third section will explore some aspects of
Being and Becoming in the writings of Sartre, de
Beauvoir, Levinas and Derrida. Sartre's
existential psychoanalysis in Being and
Nothingness; de Beauvoir's early conception of
feminism in The Second Sex; Levinas' conception
of Being, temporality and the other and Derrida's
critical assessments of both Being and Becoming
in relation to western philosophical thought.