Mar 28, 2024  
Catalogue 2018-2019 
    
Catalogue 2018-2019 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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PHIL 340 - Seminar in Continental Philosophy

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)


Topic for 2018/19a: Philosophies of Difference. This upper-level philosophy seminar examines 20th and 21st century philosophical accounts of difference to ask: What are the different ways continental philosophy hears the word ‘difference’? In what ways does difference diverge from, and converge with, diversity? This course examines the various meanings, and deployments, of the word ‘difference’ in 20th and 21st century continental philosophy, including its ontological, metaphysical, political, aesthetic, ethical, and social meanings. Is difference a superficial attribute of a thing, or person; or a substantive and constitutive aspect of something’s, and someone’s, being? Philosophy’s attempt to deal with ‘difference’ registers the difficulty of being open to difference without reducing it to a logic of sameness, or similarity. Furthermore, whenever philosophy has attempted to think differently about difference, it is not long before it is attacked as promoting a nihilistic, unjust, meaningless, and false message. By examining the various ways individuals and social groups speak of difference, this course inquires into the meanings and effects of such expressions, verbal and non-verbal. Additionally, the course will address the philosophical texts on difference in response to contemporary charges and attacks on postmodern thought as being opposed to any conception of justice and truth, as a way to nihilism, if not an unhealthy skepticism. Such a response entails nothing less than answering: what is the use (and abuse) of philosophy, what are philosophers for? Osman Nemli.

Topic for 2018/19b: Frames of the Invisible. Politics of Photography. (Same as MEDS 340 ) The transformation of textual into visual culture and the retooling of the cellular phone as a camera have given photography a new political role. From the self-immolation of a street vendor in Tunisia that unleashed the Arab Spring to the images of police brutality in the United States, photographs have mobilized grass root movements of political resistance against atrocity and oppression. The thesis of this seminar is that our visual culture is governed by a “regime of visibility” that regulates the background of what is represented. The snapshots and the photographs taken by ordinary people possess the unique power of eluding this “staging apparatus.” We discuss these images as performative statements of moral outrage and appreciate how they expose both patterns of dispossession and the uneven distribution of human suffering across world populations. This enables us to question whether the ethics of photography, and especially of photographs of human rights abuses, should not be directed at what is shown within the photographic frame but rather at the active and unmarked delimitation that lies beyond it, which limits what we see and what we are able, and unable, to recognize. Texts by Walter Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Vilem Flusser, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Edward Said, and Jacques Derrida, and images by Sebastiao Salgado, Gilles Peres, and Sophie Ristelbueber. Giovanna Borradori.

One 3-hour period.



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