Modern European Intellectual History

Undergraduate / Graduate

Ideas move across time and space, live many lives and afterlives, are translated, appropriated, misread, fought over, forgotten, and rediscovered. They are also produced by people living in time and space - in other words, they are profoundly contextual. So, to what extent can we "historicize" ideas? With attention to the methodological challenges that intellectual history poses, this course will survey major topics in modern European intellectual history from the late 18th century through the 20th century. Authors include Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel, Weber, Marx, Heidegger, Blumenberg, Adorno, Marcuse, Arendt, Fanon, Foucault.