REVOLUTION AND THE LIMITS OF REASON
During the Fall semester
of First-Year Seminar, the course focused on the constructive agenda of
“enlightenment.” The authors we read
gave life to Kant’s dictum, "Have the courage to use your own
reason!" to describe the world they saw and how they thought it should
be. The Spring semester begins with the
eventful culmination of Enlightenment thinking, and then explores the complex
and ambivalent re-evaluation of the Enlightenment’s ideals throughout the 19th
and 20th Centuries. Our
readings and discussions will show how enlightenment thought was challenged by
its encounters with different cultures and traditions, as well as its own
limitations. Throughout the semester,
our readings and discussions will contrast different approaches to the
challenges faced during these historically and intellectually tumultuous times.
The reading list will be:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
Mary Wollstonecraft:
Selections from A Vindication of
the Rights of Women
Immanuel
Kant: Groundwork for the Metaphysics of
Morals
William Blake: The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes
from Underground
Friedrich Nietzsche:
Also Sprach Zarathustra
Karl Marx: The
Communist Manifesto
Max Weber: Selected essays
Albert Einstein: Relativity
Sigmund Freud:
Civilization and Its Discontents
Lu Xun: The Story of Ah Q
Chinua Achebe: Things
Fall Apart
Beyond the reading
assignments, students and faculty will explore enlightenment in other
ways. Seminar discussions and extensive
writing throughout the semester will challenge us all to actively engage in
addressing difficult questions, rather than to take the writings of any our
predecessors as the last word on a subject.
Weekly symposia will supplement our text-based studies with lectures and
other presentations that will focus on historical, artistic, and scientific perspectives
of the ideas raised in the course.