Philosophy for Scholars of Literature

4 credits · Graduate

This course will provide an introduction to major philosophical thinkers, aimed at scholars of literature and literary theory. We will begin with the narrative conception of universal history in Kant and Hegel. We will then turn to the “as if” of Kant’s critical work, which makes him so useful to students of fiction, reading short excerpts of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals, before studying his aesthetic theories in Critique of Judgment. We will then turn to Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of world history and his criticisms of Kant’s moral philosophy; here the goal is to understand Hegel’s arguments as well as the poetic and rhetorical tools upon which his philosophy depends.