Course Descriptions
CTMP 3345 The Theory of the Gift
CREDIT HOURS: 3
Is it possible to give, freely, without expectation of return? That is, can generosity ever really exist? Or are we trapped in restricted economies of exchange which find us always calculating some profit to ourselves, whether in this world or the next? The problem of the possibility of generosity and altruism is of central importance to current deliberations about ethics and economics. This seminar will read its way through the modern genealogy of the thinking of the gift, beginning with its foundation in anthropological studies of so-called 'primitive' economies. It is of some interest that the modern concern with the gift appears in the guise of anthropology rather than from its well-established place in the Christian theological tradition. This course will consider the debate over the gift among anthropologists such as Mary Douglas and Marshall Sahlins, in the extraordinary theses of Georges Bataille, and will place special emphasis on the importance of the gift in the work of Jacques Derrida.
FORMAT: Seminar
CTMP 3350 Rewriting Gender
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This class dissects the dominant, binary (male/female) notion of gender, as it has been constructed in relation to heteropatriarchal norms and systems of signification. We look at the dissolution of these rigid concepts and consider alternative (and multiple) sites of gender-identification through the lens of gender theory, fictional works (novels and poetry), and visual material (art, film, and music). We ask in what way these gendered subversions of traditional discourses engage (or fail to engage) the intersections of gender with race, sexuality, class, ability and other identity categories.
FORMAT:
CROSS-LISTING:
GWST 3350.03
CTMP 3410 Studies in Contemporary Social and Political Thought in the 20th Century
CREDIT HOURS: 3
Topics vary each year.
NOTES: No more than two studies courses (one full credit) can be taken for credit towards the Contemporary Studies Program. Students can enrol only once in
CTMP 3410.03.
FORMAT: Seminar
PREREQUISITES: Students must complete at least two years of university study (minimum 10 full credits) prior to enrollment.
CTMP 3411 Studies in Contemporary Science and Technology
CREDIT HOURS: 3
Topics vary each year.
NOTES: No more than two studies courses (one full credit) can be taken for credit towards the Contemporary Studies Program. Students can enrol only once in
CTMP 3411.03.
FORMAT: Seminar
PREREQUISITES: Students must complete at least two years of university study (minimum 10 full credits) prior to enrollment.
CTMP 3415 Studies in Contemporary Aesthetic and Critical Theories
CREDIT HOURS: 3
Topics vary each year.
NOTES: No more than two studies courses (one full credit) can be taken for credit towards the Contemporary Studies Program. Students can enrol only once in
CTMP 3415.03.
FORMAT: Seminar
PREREQUISITES: Students must complete at least two years of university study (minimum 10 full credits) prior to enrollment
CTMP 3610 Memory, Politics, Place: Berlin’s Twentieth Century
CREDIT HOURS: 6
This course provides an intensive introduction to the themes of collective memory, public space, inter-generational responsibility, and historical trauma, with a focus on Berlin. Taught entirely on site, this course offers students the opportunity to consider the ethical, aesthetic, and public struggle to memorialize the victims of Nazi fascism and Cold War Stalinism through daily visits to museums and public art installations, as well as more informal explorations of memorial initiatives ‘from below.’
FORMAT: Seminar
FORMAT COMMENTS: Taught on-site in Berlin.
CROSS-LISTING:
GERM 3610.06
CTMP 4001 The Deconstruction of the Tradition I
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This class focuses on deconstruction as a philosophical movement which aims to challenge totalizing models of thinking in favor of forms of discourse that can accommodate pluralism and alterity. The ‘linguistic turn’ – so important for deconstruction - foregrounds the promise and limits of language, and invites inquiry into its epistemic, ethical, political, and cultural determinations.
NOTES:
CTMP 4001.03 &
CTMP 4002.03 must normally be taken in the same academic year to fulfill the requirements of the CTMP Combined Honours degree.
FORMAT:
EXCLUSIONS: CTMP 4000.06
CTMP 4002 The Deconstruction of the Tradition II
CREDIT HOURS: 3
While the main practitioners of deconstruction sought to interrogate traditional concepts of identity, selfhood, representation, truth, essence, and origin, their own writings are not free of epistemic – and even ontological – violence. We will re-examine these texts through the lens of post-colonial, feminist, and race theory, and inquire into the continuing value of deconstruction in the contemporary world.
NOTES:
CTMP 4001.03 &
CTMP 4002.03 must normally be taken in the same academic year to fulfill the requirements of the CTMP Combined Honours degree.
FORMAT:
PREREQUISITES:
CTMP 4001.03 or permission of the instructor
EXCLUSIONS: CTMP 4000.06
CTMP 4011 The Lecture Series
CREDIT HOURS: 3
See
CTMP 2011.
FORMAT: Other (explain in comments)
CROSS-LISTING:
CTMP 2011.03,
CTMP 3011.03
CTMP 4105 European Nihilism
CREDIT HOURS: 3
In the latter half of the nineteenth-century a number of European thinkers and writers came to sense a profound loss of meaning and significance at work in their culture. The term that was coined to describe this experience was "nihilism." The purpose of this course is to explore the thought of those who gave expression to this new phenomenon. We will begin with the literary explorations of Dostoyevsky and Baudelaire, and then turn to the thought of Nietzsche as the most complete explication of European nihilism. The course will conclude by considering the twentieth-century's most important commentator on nihilism, Martin Heidegger. In particular, the course will consider Martin Heidegger's set of lectures from the late 1930s that were published as Nietzsche. This set of lectures as reflections on Nietzsche's account of European nihilism formed, according to Heidegger's own recounting, a crucial transition in his own thought, the famous "turn" from the "early" to the "late" Heidegger. This course will examine the lecture series in the context of Heidegger's other writings at this time and his much-debated involvement with Nazism to try to understand the exact nature and import of his "turn." In all of this the course will be exploring the connections between a deep cultural experience - that of European nihilism and its social and political implications.
FORMAT: Seminar
CTMP 4110 Modernity in Ruins
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This course explores the current preoccupation with ruins in two ways: first, we shall establish lines of continuity between older forms of the pleasure of ruins (Ruinenlust) from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Second, we shall consider what characterizes the contemporary admiration for decrepitude and decay: We will consider modern and contemporary examples of ruins, wreckage, and decay to highlight a critical blurring of boundaries, in the ruin, between the present, past, and future; between presence and absence; between nature and history; between destruction and disclosure.
FORMAT:
CTMP 4117 Beginning with Being: Reading Parmenides from Plato to Heidegger
CREDIT HOURS: 3
In this course, we shall stage an encounter between the two great thinkers - Plato and Heidegger - whose thought has often been thought to mark the ‘beginning’ and the ‘end’ of the Western philosophical tradition. Taking Parmenides’ pregnant insight (“Being and Thinking are the same”) as the poietic site of this encounter, we will ask what it still means to engage in philosophy today.
FORMAT: Lecture
CTMP 4124 Walter Benjamin's Materials
CREDIT HOURS: 3
Following the diversity of Benjamin's own interests: “literature, philosophy, architecture, journalism, photography, the city, film, children's toys, fashion, rubbish,” we will read his essays on culture and the media alongside writings by Baudelaire, some artworks, and selections from The Arcades Project, Benjamin's collection of quotations and observations about mall life and modernity in Paris.
FORMAT: Seminar
RESTRICTIONS: Restricted to students in their 2nd year and above.
CTMP 4125 Hannah Arendt: Terror, Politics, Thought
CREDIT HOURS: 3
In this course we examine the trajectory of Hannah Arendt's long path of thinking: from her early political writings (on the state of Israel, on totalitarianism), to the more theoretically ambitious writings of the 1950's and 1960's (on action, power, and the creation of political spaces), to the late work on the life of the mind (on thinking, willing, and judging). We will attempt to understand how Arendt's overarching 'love of the world' informed her thought at every stage of its development, giving rise to a powerful critique of liberal democracy and preparing the groundwork for a new 'post-totalitarian' thinking of the political.
FORMAT:
CTMP 4126 Kafka, Scholem, Benjamin: On Law and Crisis in 20th Century Jewish Thought
CREDIT HOURS: 3
In this course, we will examine the illuminating disagreement between Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin - two of the giants of 20th Century Jewish thought - on the meaning of the Law in Franz Kafka's stories. We will see how their respective interpretive strategies have dramatically informed the theoretical landscape of contemporary Jewish and non-Jewish thought.
FORMAT:
CTMP 4130 The Frankfurt School: Critical Theory from Horkheimer to Habermas
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This course will focus on some of the most important and influential aspects of the critique of society developed by critical theorists from the 1930s to the 1960s. Themes and topics will include the task and methods of critical theory, reason and freedom, the role of technology in monopoly capitalism, fascism, the decline of the individual, the critique of the culture industry, and psychoanalysis. We will read selections from the works of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W.Adorno, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas.
FORMAT: Seminar
CTMP 4140 Phenomenology and its Legacy: Back to the 'Things Themselves'
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This course examines some of the major figures in the phenomenological movement. We begin with an examination of Edmund Husserl's attempt to establish a "radical" science of phenomenology. The method of phenomenology, the intentionality of consciousness, perception, and the Lebenswelt are among the topics we will consider. We then turn to various reformulations and critiques of Husserl's conception of Phenomenology in selected works from Heidegger to Derrida. Topics and concepts for discussion will include Being-in-the-world, the nature of consciousness, the lived body, temporality, the priority of otherness and hermeneutics.
FORMAT: Seminar
CTMP 4150 Derrida and Deconstruction
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This class is an in-depth examination of one of the most challenging and provocative thinkers of the last century. We will examine Derrida's thought - from the development of deconstruction, through his innovative exploration of works of art and literature, to his politically inflected late writings on the gift, forgiveness, and hospitality. We will look at deconstruction as a "method" and at its relation to the "tradition."
FORMAT: Seminar
CTMP 4200 Philosophies of Technology: From Techne to Technology
CREDIT HOURS: 3
What does it mean to live in a “technological society”? In a certain sense, technology forms the very ground of what it means to be “modern”. We moderns are technological beings. This course will explore the history, structure and associated problems of our coming to be technological, beginning with technical arts and instrumental reasoning of Enlightenment and industrial ideology. Post-Enlightenment critiques polarizing around the place of “machine” and alienation in Karl Marx, and in the “question concerning technology” in Martin Heidegger will then be examined, leading up to the present state of technological discourse. In each case, we shall mark the importance of contextualising the debate by examining the actual historical evolution of technology. Weekly lectures will be devoted to presenting a social and historical background to the development of modern technologies. Student-led seminars will focus on the reading of primary texts in the field.
FORMAT:
CROSS-LISTING:
HSTC 4200.03
CTMP 4201 Contemporary Technologies: Living with Machines
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This topical seminar course will explore in detail the implications of powerful contemporary debates concerning the meaning and place of technology. What do we mean by technology? Can there be a philosophy of technology? What are the political and cultural ramifications of going technological? Topics will include: technological determinism in history, feminist critiques, technology and development, the meaning of expertise, technology, art and the “lifeworld”, social-construction vs. actor-network theory, Donna Haraway's concept of cyborg culture and the “modern technological sublime”. The course will be conducted in seminar format with particular emphasis placed on the elucidation of historical and contemporary case-studies. Whenever possible, guest lecturers from the “real world” of technology will be invited to participate in class.
FORMAT:
CROSS-LISTING:
HSTC 4201.03