Marx, Nietzsche, Freud

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

By calling into question the pervasive inequalities throughout history and within the dominant capitalist economic system, by challenging the very foundation of Western philosophy and culture, and by interrogating our psychological conception of ourselves, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud respectively have undeniably changed our world by revolutionizing the way we think about it. These three emerged from the intellectual and political tumult of the 19th century with new visions of humanity and its place in the world. This course will serve as an introductory guide for students to these revolutionary thinkers’ ideas as presented in their writing, placing it in its intellectual-historical context while also exploring its consequences for the present by looking at its resonance in contemporary culture. We will analyze these philosophers both in terms of their individual contributions to philosophical discourse as well as their collective position as the “masters of suspicion” in the words of the French philosopher Paul Ricœur, inaugurating a new age of skepticism toward the traditional underpinnings of Western culture from social organization, religion, and morality to human agency and the very act of thinking.