SOCIOLOGY OF MODERNITY I

Autumn 2003

 

Readings from PHILOSOPHIES OF HISTORY (eds. RM Burns and H. Rayment-Pickard), Blackwell.

 

Week 2 (9 Oct): Enlightenment

David Hume – Enquiries concerning human understanding and the principles of morals, 2nd edn

Marquis de Condorcet – Sketch for a historical picture of the progress of the human mind

Immanuel Kant – Political writings

 

Week 3 (16 Oct): Classical Historicism

Johann Gottfried Herder – ‘Yet another philosophy of history’

Wilhelm von Humboldt – On language; ‘On the historian’s task’

Friedrich Schleiermacher – Hermeneutics: The handwritten manuscripts

G. W.F. Hegel – The Philosophy of history

Leopold von Ranke – The theory and practice of history

 

Week 4 (23 Oct): Positivism

Auguste Comte – Essential Comte

John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic, Book VI

Henry Thomas Buckle – History of Civilization in England, 3rd edn

 

Week 5 (30 Oct): Secular Historicism

Wilhelm Dilthey – ‘A Critique of Historical Reason’

Wilhelm Windelband – ‘History and natural science’

Heinrich Rickert – The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science

Georg Simmel – The problems of the philosophy of history

Max Weber – The methodology of the social sciences

 

Week 6 (6 Nov): Hermeneutics

Edmund Husserl – ‘The origin of geometry’ (appendix to Crisis of the European Sciences)

Martin Heidegger – Being and Time (‘The nature of historiology’)

Hans-Georg Gadamer – Truth and Method (‘The rehabilitation of prejudice’)

Paul Ricoeur – ‘Existence and Hermeneutics’

 

 

 

 

 

Week 7 (13 Nov): Kulturkritik

Karl Marx – The economic and philosophical manuscripts; The German Ideology

Georg Lukacs – History and class consciousness

Walter Benjamin – ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’

Juergen Habermas – ‘Communication and the evolution of society’

 

Week 8 (20 Nov): Narrativism

Claude Levi-Strauss – The savage mind

Roland Barthes – Image Music Texts

Hayden White – Metahistory; ‘The fictions of factual representation’

Paul Ricoeur – ‘Life in quest of narrative’

 

Week 9 (27 Nov): ‘Reading Week’

 

Week 10 (4 Dec): Suprahistory and Posthistory

Arthur Schopenhauer – The World as Will and Representation

Søren Kierkegaard – Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Friedrich Nietzsche – Untimely meditations, The Will to Power, The Gay Science

Michel Foucault – The Order of Things; ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’

Jean Baudrillard – ‘The Year 2000 will not take place’

Francis Fukuyama – The End of History and the Last Man