Category Archives: Penn State University

Asia/Europe: What is Self-Consciousness?

Below the draft syllabus for the course I’ll be teaching in the Winter semester (Oct 15 – Feb 4) at the University of Heidelberg. Brief description:

Every idea of the modern includes a concept of the primitive. Primitive humans, we are told, inhabited a world without self-consciousness: in daily life, no gap between action and belief (Mircea Eliade); in aesthetics, no “representation,” only presentation (Heidegger); and in history, no fracture between the event and its possibility (Hegel). This course ranges across many of the central theorizations of modernity in order to ask questions about the nature of our contemporary self-understanding as moderns.

See more for the daily reading schedule, assignments, and so on. Continue reading

Posted in Courses, Penn State University | 1 Comment