Class 2: The Heritage of the Enlightenment

“You see, gentlemen, reason is unquestionably a fine thing, but reason is no more than reason, and it gives fulfillment only to man’s reasoning capacity, while desires are a manifestation of the whole of life. . .”—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground. HIST 271/HUMS 339: Eur ...  Show more

“The truth is the whole.” –G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit. HIST 271/HUMS 339: European Intellectual History since Nietzsche is a survey course designed to introduce students to the dominant trends in modern European intellectual history. The class aims to sketch a na ...  Show more

What does eternal recurrence mean in the historical sense? Nietzsche invites us to explore that question in his raising of the Problem of Science, and the notion of conflict as central to life. Today, in the penultimate episode of the season, we'll take a look into a section from ...  Show more

The conclusion of our two-parter on Erich Heller, and the conclusion to season five! We discuss Nietzsche's friendship with Jacob Burckhardt, and how Burckhardt's view of history can inform our understanding of Nietzsche's divergence from him. We also consider Goethe's four ages ...  Show more

In this episode, we talk about Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s audacious and influential text Intellectual and Manual Labor. A fellow traveler of the Frankfurt School, Sohn-Rethel argued that the social activity of commodity exchange involves a set of real abstractions that actu ...

Breht listens to, reflects on, and critically engages with a public lecture by the late philosopher Michael Sugrue entitled "Nietzsche and the Death of God". He discusses the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the poli ...