20th Century German Phil

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

The course is a survey of some but not all of the main streams of German philosophy in the 20th century. In particular, it is focused on the development of phenomenology by Edmund Husserl; on Martin Heidegger’s attempt to extend and ultimately replace phenomenology with something called "fundamental ontology" (which got the nickname, “existentialism”); on the movement of neo-Kantianism which formed an important couterweight both to phenomenology and Heidegger’s thought (represented here by one figure, Ernst Cassirer); the movement that came to be called “Western Marxism” with its neo-Hegelian and humanist elements, as seen in the work of the Hungarian philosopher, Georg Lukács (who wrote in German) and in Ernst Bloch (who rethought Marxism as a kind of non-theistic endorsement of Biblical themes); Heidegger’s post-war “turn” from his earlier work to his later thought on “being”; Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reworking of Heidegger’s early work into the movement called “hermeneutics”; Dieter Henrich’s new beginning with a metaphysics of self-knowledge; finally, a quick overview of Frankfurt Critical Theory, an attempt to mate philosophy and empirical social science into a left-leaning emancipatory comprehensive social theory (Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth).