Abraham Anderson

The goal of the seminar is to investigate the development of the "Right" in European political thought after the French Revolution. We will read selections from Joseph de Maistre, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, and other things yet to be determined.

We will read German Romantic thought and Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics to understand the unfolding of modern aesthetics after Kant.

The habit of asking questions, which constitutes Western thought, has its primary origin in Greece. In this class, we will read Greek epics, tragedies, histories, comedies, and works of philosophy in order to think about how our thinking got started.

What is “aesthetics”? It is often understood, nowadays, as a philosophical reflection on art. This is not, however, how it began. “Aesthetics” begins in Plato’s reflection on the beautiful, which is also a reflection on law, custom, and religion. It emerges as a separate field of enquiry in the 18th century, when it is bound up with the problem of the Enlightenment or the possibility of a public order founded on reason rather than religious authority. This problem poses the question of the relation between philosophical rationality and a shared sense of the fitting, one aspect of which is the sense of the beautiful. This topic may be of particular interest to today’s students because of the challenges to the Enlightenment put forward by Christian fundamentalism, radical Islamism, and multiculturalism. Can the 18th-century reflection on the beautiful offer a response to these challenges? Or do they show that the reflection was a means of evading reality? The focus of the seminar will be on Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Schiller’s Letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of Man.

Philosophy, since ancient times, has understood itself as an attempt to understand and to treat superstition, fanaticism, and “enthusiasm.” (The term “enthusiasm” was often used in the 17th and 18th centuries to mean the claim to possess direct inspiration from God.) In the 18th century, philosophy in the West, via natural science and political doctrines, largely replaced religion as a source of public authority. As a result, the understanding of philosophy as an opponent of superstition, fanaticism, and enthusiasm was largely forgotten. We shall seek to recover it. We shall begin by reading Euripides’ Bacchae and Plato’s Ion, which consider enthusiasm. (Some of the works listed in this paragraph will be read for class; others, for group conference.) We shall then go on to Cicero’s On Divination and Plutarch’s On Superstition. We shall then proceed to read selections from Irenaeus’ Against Celsus, an attack on the Gnostics, who claimed a quasi-philosophical kind of wisdom, and from Aquinas’ Summa Against the Gentiles, whose target, the Albigensians, were Manicheans, a Gnostic group. We shall then read the Preface to Hooker’s Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, which contains a reflection on the psychology of the Puritans. We shall go on to Samuel Butler’s comic epic Hudibras (also about the Puritans), Shaftesbury’s Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. We shall conclude with selections from Burke’s Reflections Concerning the Revolution in France, Maistre’s Treatise on Sacrifices, and Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. The last few authors on this list are concerned with a new kind of enthusiasm: a political enthusiasm emanating from philosophy itself.

In the preface to The Critique of Practical Reason, Kant says, “The concept of freedom is the keystone of the whole building of reason, theoretical as well as practical, and alone prevents it from falling into the abyss which skepticism has prepared for it.” Why does Kant think that the awareness of freedom, which in his view can only be had through the consciousness of moral law, is the only means of sustaining reason against skepticism? Does skepticism about knowledge really arise from a concern with freedom? This question will lead us back to Descartes. The seminar continues the investigation begun in the fall semester, Scylla and Charybdis, but will be open to students who have not taken that course—though students who have taken it will be given preference in admission to the seminar.

In the second edition of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proposes that we seek safe passage between two “cliffs,” skepticism and “enthusiasm,” by which he means a claim to knowledge of what lies beyond the world of experience and the fanaticism that is associated with such claims. In so doing, he indicates that The Critique is concerned not just with knowledge but with living a rational life—in particular, with avoiding fanaticism. The aim of avoiding “enthusiasm,” understood as delusive claims to knowledge and the fanaticism associated with these, we shall see, is also crucial to The Critique of Practical Reason, in which Kant investigates the possibility of morality. We shall investigate what this aim means and how Kant attempts to help us achieve it.

Is knowledge possible? If so, what kind? And why do these questions matter? I shall argue that they matter because they have to do with the question of authority and freedom: Is there a God or gods that we must obey, must we follow custom or “culture,” or must we find our own way in life; and if so, is there some standard that we can follow? We will begin with Socrates and pass on to the three Hellenistic schools—the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the skeptics—in all of which the treatment of knowledge is inseparable from the question of how to live. In group conference, we shall discuss the transformation of these schools in Montaigne, Descartes, and Hume.

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, first published in 1781, set the terms of philosophical thought ever since; however, there has always been considerable disagreement about what the Critique actually says, its purpose, and what we can learn from it. In this seminar, we will read the Critique of Pure Reason in its original form—the First Edition version. We shall take account of works to which the Critique was responding, particularly Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, Descartes’ Meditations, and certain articles from Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary. In the second semester, we shall also consider Kant’s revisions of the Critique in the Second Edition version and attempt to understand why he made these changes. Our aim will be to understand not just particular arguments within the Critique but also its purposes and implications.

In Animal Farm, George Orwell sought to show how the ideal of equality can lead to despotism. In 1984, he sought to show how the pursuit of a rational politics can have the same consequence. In this course, we will begin by reading Animal Farm and 1984 and seek to understand what Orwell is saying about modern politics. Then we will proceed to a reading of Plato’s Republic, a work by which Orwell was clearly inspired in writing 1984. We shall investigate what Plato had to say about the ideal of a rational politics, about the claims of equality, and about the political dangers posed by those two ideals. We shall then read a number of the comedies of Aristophanes, which are inspired by the ideals of democracy and their consequences. Some of those comedies are concerned with the question of the status of women; others, with other implications of democracy—including the political dangers posed by philosophy itself, which Aristophanes considers in The Clouds. Next, we shall return to Plato to see his response to Aristophanes’ questioning of philosophy in The Clouds and also to consider Aristophanes’ influence on Plato’s writing. We shall then read selections from Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, Xenophon’s Hellenica, and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives in order to better understand the historical events behind Aristophanes’ plays and Plato’s dialogues.