Comments | capandschiz: One Quick Correction about "continental philosophy"

sodapopinski51 in capandschiz

One Quick Correction about "continental philosophy"

Apr 08, 2009 22:45

Continental Philosophy is not the same thing as Critical Theory. If anything Critical Theory is a smaller sub-genre of Continental Philosophy. Crit. Theory probably can be said to have originated with the Frankfurt School (Benjamin, Habermas, Marcuse, Adorno, etc.) but Cont. Phil goes back 150 years and includes Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel, the German ( Read more... )

Comments 9

sodapopinski51 April 9 2009, 02:59:43 UTC

Oh... perhaps Beyond the Chains of Illusion by Eric Fromm

vacant_thomas April 9 2009, 04:43:53 UTC

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit by Martin Heidegger. My edition is roughly 150 pages, so it should be easy to fit into a course with other texts.

anfalicious April 9 2009, 04:54:11 UTC

Is that accessible for someone who knows nothing at all about Philosophy? I'll admit I've not read it, but I've read a quite a bit of Heidegger, and none of it has been easy to absorb and understand. Not only that, but I was the only person in my 2nd year Heidegger course to actually continue on reading him, everyone else hated it and couldn't wait for the unit to be over.

vacant_thomas April 9 2009, 05:06:07 UTC

How accessible something is really depends on the person and their temperament and mindset. I'd rank it as being slightly less accessible than Hegel himself, but not quite as inaccessible as Heidegger's other work.

It's been quite some time since I've read it, so I'm about to reread it straight through again. I can come back to this thread and give you a better judgement at that point.

Once one has dealt with Derrida and Lacant, it can be a bit hard to judge the accessibility of other philosophers.

anfalicious April 9 2009, 07:00:27 UTC

How accessible something is really depends on the person and their temperament and mindset

The person, temperament and mindset in this circumstance is a class full of first year college students, hence my concern that it wouldn't work. I just had a quick skim on google books, and it doesn't seem to be too bad, looks like it'd be a great way into phenomenology, but I can also see it turning a lot of people off if this was their first introduction to Philosophy.

Thread 5

anfalicious April 9 2009, 04:55:28 UTC

What about On The Genealogy of Morals? It would fit nicely with Marx and Freud.

sodapopinski51 April 9 2009, 18:56:49 UTC

Nietzsche, Freud, Marx... it would be a Modernist Extravaganza :) Probably could work well.

(The comment has been removed)

sodapopinski51 April 17 2009, 02:13:44 UTC

I just want to add that I'm most likely going to teach this at a Community College, not a University. SO... that said the level of difficulty should be a real factor. I'm also teaching a "trailer course" which means its a shortened semester consisting of only ten weeks so I need to grab them and hold them for a brief intense moment.

I think Aristotle's Nicomachaean Ethics would take up probably 2-3 weeks, Marx's Comm. Manifesto would take two-three weeks, Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra might work because its really closer to a novel/philosophical text so it would appeal to those wanting to simply read a great book laden with philosophical symbolism (Plus he says "God is Dead" in that book which will stir up a great conversation)

And then I was thinking of something like Camus - Myth of Sysyphus (To build on existentialist themes initiated in Nietzsche and Aristotle)... or Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling (to work a "Pro-God" argument into the mix so as not to alienate true-believers)