Rhetorical Theory

This course will investigate certain of the critical philosophical interventions in the fields of ethics, politics, and epistemology from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Our aim will be double. On the one hand, we will engage in a survey of the major thinkers who queried and defined the notion of “critique”: Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. On the other hand, we will concentrate specifically on the dialectical relation of these authors. We will attempt to reconstruct, through textual exegesis and commentary, the dialogues ignited by their works, especially the movements from the Kantian “Copernican Revolution” and its aspirations towards an autonomous reason to Hegel’s “absolute idealism” to the critiques and philosophical perspectives and methodologies that emerge in their aftermath. We will also commit to a reading of one French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze whose monographs on Hume, Kant and Nietzsche concentrate particularly on the nexus of knowledge, sensation, subjectivity and ethics.