To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world -- and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.

Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air, 15

This course provides a high-level introduction to American and Western European philosophical thought in the twentieth century. To give this chaotic and diverse century some thematic unity, we will read major twentieth century philosophies as responses to the so-called "problem of modernity" -- roughly, the problem of how to know one's world and one's culture when the traditional understandings of world and culture are radically altered by contemporary science and the advent of global culture. Three major intellectual traditions address the peculiar historical problems of modernity: British Analytic Philosophy, Continental Phenomenology & Existentialism, and Postmodernism.

While there are no specific prerequisites for this course beyond Philosophy 301, this is an upper division history of philosophy course, cross-listed as a graduate course. Like other similar courses, it involves reading, discussing, and writing about very difficult texts. The reading load for this course is pretty heavy. Students should browse the reading material to determine the suitability of this course for their interests and abilities.

"The spiritual image of Europe" -- what is it? It is exhibiting the philosophical idea immanent in the history of Europe (of spiritual Europe). To put it another way, it is its immanent teleology, which, if we consider mankind in general, manifests itself as a new human epoch emerging and beginning to grow, the epoch of a humanity that from now on will and can live only in the free fashioning of its being and its historical life out of rational ideas and infinite tasks.

Edmund Husserl, "Crisis of European Man"

Specific Course Topics

The first thing we need to do is to establish the "problem of modernity." Then, in separate units of the course, we will sample British Analytic, Continental Phenomenological and Postmodern philosophical work. The four units of the course are:

The Problem of Modernity (2 weeks)

1. Introduction: The Contemporary View of the Cosmos and Society

To study the problem of modernity in its historical context, we would have to go back at least to the nineteenth century and follow the development of contemporary physics and read Nietzsche's scathing attack on European culture. Other writers on modernity would have us look carefully at the industrial revolution for an understanding of the distinctive features of life in the twentieth century.

Some of this historical background is referred to in the reading from Marshall Berman, the introduction and part of the first chapter of his book, All That is Solid Melts in the Air, and in the reading by Allan Wheelis. Berman and Wheelis give what might be called a "cultural introduction" to the problem of modernity because they attempt to show how the idea of modern culture has developed in a variety of cultural enterprises. Berman also gives a very accessible conceptual definition of modernity as the dominance of the search for development. The introductory chapter of W.T. Jones' history of philosophy will help us make a transition from this cultural statement of the problem to its expression within the discipline of philosophy. My hope is that once you see how broad cultural issues are reflected in philosophical problems, you will be able to make the connection for yourself as you think about the development of culture and philosophy in the twentieth century. At the end of the course, when we study Postmodernism, we will look at the interpenetration of philosophy and the broader culture of which it is a part. (Unit begins: September 1)

2. Realism, Analytic Philosophy, Positivism

The displacements and confusions engendered by modernity might lead one to doubt the adequacy of traditional philosophical conceptual schemes and methods. New developments in mathematics, mathematical logic, and physics, also led philosophers like Bertrand Russell to question the cogency of much traditional (pre-twentieth century) philosophy.

If you believe, as Russell did for most of his career, that a philosophy is only as good as the logic it employs, then the new logics of the contemporary period might lead you to some disdain for the old philosophies. But we "late moderns" can now look back at some of the early 20th century's anti-metaphysical project and ask whether the new realists, analytics, and positivists didn't after all have their own traditional positions. I'll provide some background information on positivism in the late 19th century as preparation for reading about Logical Atomism and Logical Positivism. (Unit begins: September 20)

I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups.

C. P. Snow, Two Cultures 3

As philosophical movements, phenomenology and existentialism are so thoroughly intertwined that it makes sense to talk of thinkers who are part of each movement without being part of the other, as well as "existential phenomenologists" and "phenomenological existentialists." The fundamental starting point of existential philosophy is, to put it too simply, a belief that traditional philosophy somehow misses an account of the concrete data of lived experience.

Everyday language is a part of the human organism and not less complicated than it. From it it is humanly impossible to gather immediately the logic of language. Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized. The tacit conventions for the understanding of everyday language are enormously complicated . . . . Most questions and propositions result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language. . . . It is a merit of Russell's to have shown that the apparent logical form of the proposition need not be its real form.

Wittgenstein, TLP, 4.002 - 4.0031

It may be for example that all enquiry on our part is set so as to exempt certain propositions from doubt, if they are ever formulated. They lie apart from the route travelled by enquiry.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty #88

From our coverage of major figures in this movement, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, you should be able to see why phenomenology would be attractive to existentialists. The method of accounting for phenomena is oriented toward the experience of actual intending subjects. However, it should also become clear why these two philosophies may have separate destinies. The point of studying phenomena for a thinker like Husserl is to intuit essential structures of Being which transcend the local occasion of our experience. Many existentialists are suspicious of the movement away from the uniqueness of the particular individual's experience.

Before we try to understand their interrelation, we are well advised to study them separately. Chapters by Jones give reasonably good introducions. However, as you'll be able to tell from the excerpts, the primary source reading in this tradition is very difficult. (Unit begins: October 11)

Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is -- history. Expressed differently: what nature is to things, history, res gestae, is to man.

Ortega y Gassett, "Toward a Philosophy of History"

4. Later Analytic Philosophy

It may be that professional philosophers do not appreciate just how different later analytic philosophy is from its early form, especially in the analytic tradition. While we'll explore various ways of establishing continuity between, say, the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and the later one of On Certainty, there remains a huge difference. We'll make this comparison in class and following it in contemporary works by Wittgenstein and Dennett. (Unit begins: November 8)

Postmodernism is a difficult movement to characterize. In part, this is simply because of its newness. Like existentialism, the postmodern label applies to a wide variety of thinkers, not all of whom would even accept the label. Another similarity between postmodernism and existentialism is that both movements involve a suspicion about (if not a rejection of) traditional philosophic method. Postmoderns believe that philosophers have paid too little attention to the conditions under which thought is represented, accepting an overly simple distinction between thought and its representation in language. This suspicion often takes the form of a skepticism about the possibility of transcending the conditions of language. Our study of postmodernism will mix readings which gives us concrete instances of the "culture of postmodernism," including two very short stories which are written from a postmodern sensibility, with discussion of the more abstract and philosophical approaches of postmodernism. (Unit begins: November 17)

Contemporary Philosophy 420/520 - Fall 1997