Courses

An oft-repeated theme over the last two centuries of philosophy has been the need for a radical criticism and overhaul of the entire Western tradition. Karl Marx (1818–83) told us that everything we believed about human history was wrong, and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was similarly dismissive of our moral commitments. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) announced that the tradition was tainted because it had ignored what he called “the question of being,” a notion he formulated for the very first time. Finally, Hannah Arendt (1906–75) argued that our inherited political categories prevent us from appreciating what is truly significant about political action itself. Each of these thinkers, moreover, attributed some conspicuous ills of modernity (alienation for Marx, nihilism for Nietzsche, technology for Heidegger, and the atrophy of political judgment for Arendt) to defects in the tradition from which they were attempting to free us. This course provides an opportunity to evaluate the arguments, ideas, and aspirations of these four pivotal thinkers.