FREN 4140

Thinking With Montaigne: The Essays in The History of Philosophy and Theory

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2024-2025 Catalog.

Western modernity and humanism have been the target of decisive critique over the past decades in philosophy and theory.  But these trends are not contemporary in any simple sense; they have strange affinities with the premodern modes of writing and thinking put forth in the Essays (1580-95) of Michel de Montaigne. This seminar interrogates the contemporaneity of Montaigne by rereading the Essays in dialogue with influential philosophers and theorists, such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Adorno, Heidegger, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, Derrida, and Haraway.  While studying Montaigne's untimely place in intellectual history, we will examine related aesthetic modes and explore how the unprecedented (anti)philosophical gesture of the Essay resonates with posthumanist styles and questions in ecological thought, philosophy, politics, and indigenous studies.

Distribution Category (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

When Offered Fall.

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