Philosophy

Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud have been referred to as the 'masters of suspicion'. These late nineteenth and early twentieth-century thinkers examined the reasons that people fall prey to forms of mystification, and sought to lift the veil from our eyes so as to emancipate us from domination and repression. Some of the key topics to be examined include repression, alienation, commodity fetishism, revolution, nihilism, genealogy and the unconscious.

This class provides a special opportunity for students to engage in an in-depth, sustained study of the work of one of the major thinkers of our philosophical tradition. Generally speaking, the figure chosen will be one whose work has not been the central focus of one of our other courses. Examples might include Augustine, Descartes, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Derrida and Foucault.