Instructor: Hoover (Fall 2008)

This course will familiarize students with a recent period of European philosophy from1770 to 1900.  Students will become acquainted with the work of some of the more influential thinkers of this period, especially the writings of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Marx. Students will be exposed not only to central ideas in the writings of these philosophers, but we will also attempt to gain a sense of how the thought of this period developed in the course of these hundred-plus years, and the extent to which the leading ideas of this period differ from those of the early modern period.

This course fulfills, in part, the history of philosophy requirement for philosophy majors.  Discussions and writing assign¬ments will revolve around careful examinations of primary texts.  One of the main objectives of this course is to improve our skills at reading and understanding complicated philosophical texts.  We will attempt to come to an understanding of the thought of these figures through exposure to a variety of their primary texts. Since many of the important works of these figures are quite lengthy, we will often have to sacrifice reading texts in their entirety and read shorter selections in order to gain a broad sense of the thought of these figures.  Accordingly, we will be reading anthologized and edited versions of their works.

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Class meetings will be a mixture of discussion of the reading for that particular day and input from the instructor, who will supply back- ground information and clarification of important ideas.  Students will be expected to come to class already having prepared the reading for that day, not that they understand it all, but that they are able to raise questions about the material and point out passages that would be good for further clarification and discussion. The instructor will also expect students to spend time outside of class with secondary material in order to  make sense of these texts, some of which can be difficult to interpret. This class also includes a web-based discussion room (see course website), where students can pose and respond to questions related to course materials. A class participation grade will be assigned and will be weighted as one-sixth of the course grade.  Class involvement will be graded on the basis of student perform¬ance in three areas: attendance; preparation; and the quality of in-class participation (including on-line forums).

Students will be required to write frequent short exegetical/analytical essays.  These essays should be at least a page in length and no more than two pages.  They will usually consist of exegesis of specific passages in the text or analysis of specific ideas and will be due by class-time on the day in which these passages are assigned as reading (in other words, these are to be completed before the material is covered in class).  The passages/ideas to be analyzed will be assigned one class-period in advance of their due date.  The prompt for these essays will also be posted on the "Posted Work" web-page for the course.  Students essays are to be posted as replies to these prompts on the same website.  (Instructions for posting can be found on the website, but posting them as MS WORD files works well).  The instructor will give you some feedback on the quality of your essays, at the very least I will indicate whether they are unsatisfactory, satisfactory, or superlative, using a  +, √, — scale.  Your work on all these essays taken together at the end of the term will be assigned a grade that will count the same as two exam grades (one-third) of the course grade.

Each student will also be required to complete three rather substantial essay exams.   Each exam will be count one-sixth of the course grade. 

The course grade is broken down as follows: 1/6 = class involvement grade; 2/6 = exegetical essays; 3/6 = three exams.

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