Course detail: PHIL554
CONTEMPRY CONT'L PHILOS
Human beings live in a world permeated and defined by meanings. How we discover, create, communicate, and comprehend meaning has been one of the central questions of continental European philosophy over the past century. In this seminar course, designed for students with no previous background in philosophy, we will explore why meaning plays such a central role in all attempts to understand human consciousness, experience, behavior, and culture, and how this insight has profoundly influenced major trends in contemporary thought. Starting with an introduction to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the subsequent development of modern philosophic existentialism by critics of Husserl such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we will examine the important ifluence of phenomenology and existentialism on contemporary trends in French, German and American philosophy, including hermeneutics, deconstruction, post-modernism, cognitive science, and post-analytic philosophy, as exhibited in works by Paul Ricoeur, Hans Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and others.