Syllabus
1419 International Seminar on Political Theory (ISPT):
Knowledge, Experience and Understanding
The ISPT of summer 2012 will explore knowledge, understanding, and experience in a political, theoretical, and historical perspective.
Melissa Lane (Princeton University) focuses on knowledge and politics, covering both ancient (Plato, Protagoras) and modern classics (John Stuart Mill).
Peter Baehr (Lingnan University, Hong Kong) presents a wide range of approaches to understanding and ‘false consciousness’ including ‘countermeasures’ such as ‘unmasking’ and ‘disclosure’; texts range from Marx and Nietzsche, via Freud and Bourdieu, to Hannah Arendt and Sloterdijk, to name just a few.
Wolfgang Leidhold (University of Cologne) will explore the history of experience and its changing modes from mythological sources and ‘theoretical reason’, down to empiricism and the psychology of the unconscious.
All in all: a tour de force covering the entire history of ideas!
Course requirements: All participants will have to prepare a 1-2 page summary of a selected text (assignment of topics on April 12, 5:45pm-7pm, lecture hall, Gottfried-Keller-Str. 6).
Seminar will be held on May 18-20: Friday, 2pm-8pm, Saturday and Sunday, 10am-1pm and 2:30 pm-7/8pm, lecture hall, Gottfried-Keller-Str. 6.
We will provide a reader containing the most important texts.
The complete list of literature with the details regarding chapters, extracts and publishers of the books or essays can be examined and downloaded after the registration for the seminar.
In the following, you can find some of the literature which is the seminar’s background.
Melissa Lane:
Estlund, David: Making truth safe for democracy, 1993
Copp, David: Could political truth be a hazard for democracy?, 1993
Singer, Peter: Moral Experts, 1972
Plato: Protagoras
Vlastos, Gregory: Socrates’ Disavowal of Knowledge, 2005
Cooper, John M.: Plato’s Statesman and Politics, 1999
Aristotle: Politics III
Ober, Josiah: Democracy and Knowledge: innovation and learning in classical Athens, 2008
Mill, John Stuart: Considerations on Representative Government, 1991, Utilitarianism, 1960, On Liberty, 1979
Riley, Jonathan: Mill’s Neo-Athenian Model of Liberal Democracy, 2007
Peter Baehr:
Marx, Karl: On the Jewish Question, 1975, as well as Capital I
Nietzsche, Friedrich: Beyond Good and Evil, 1907
Freud, Sigmund: The Future of an Illusion, 1989
Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Clause Passeron: Reproduction in Education, 1990
Arendt, Hannah: The Social Question, 1963
James, William: On a certain blindness in human beings, 2000
Durkheim, Emile: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1995
Katz, Jack: Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil, 1988
Fay, Brian: Critical Social Science: Liberation and its Limits, 1987
Sloterdijk, Peter: Critique of Cynical Reason, 1987
