PHIL 758

European Continental Philosophy 2


Please note: this is archived course information from 2014 for PHIL 758.

Description

The Phenomenon of Life in 20th Century French Philosophy.

The question of life presents itself as an unusually sensitive weather vane for charting the changing climate of French philosophy throughout the C.20th. At the very beginning of the century one finds Henri Bergson attempting to overcome an opposition between thinking and life, only to resolve the problem by revealing a series of tensions and polarities within life itself. With Georges Canguilhem we are confronted with the opposition between an objective or scientific knowledge of life and life understood as an individually experienced phenomenon. With Michel Foucault, however, life is controlled socially and disciplined almost to the point of being neutralized. Within the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry, life is a phenomenon that appears both on the side of appearing phenomena – as something presented to consciousness and as the very essence of consciousness itself. For Gilles Deleuze, who rejects phenomenology’s prioritization of consciousness, the life of the subject is merely an epiphenomenon of the life of the world. Though representing seemingly opposed positions, Henry and Deleuze both stand open to the objection that they deal solely with ‘life in general’ and ignore individual lives. Contemporary philosopher Renaud Barbaras, with whom we close this course, finds life characterized at the very articulation point between life as subjective experience and life as a phenomenon in the world.

Availability 2014

Semester 2

Lecturer(s)

TBA

Points

PHIL 758: 15 points

Corequisites