Module Catalogue 2025/26

Pre Requisite Comment

N/A

Co Requisite Comment

None

Aims

This module aims to introduce students to responses to Kantian philosophy that can be broadly classified as anti-idealist, materialist, or realist. It will explore a variety of philosophies that attempt to escape the issues that entails.

The module then aims to introduce students to the great period in philosophy that follows Kant’s Copernican revolution, with a particular focus upon the movement known as German Idealism, along with Kant one of the two pinnacles in later Modern thought, and indispensable reference points for almost all 20th Century continental philosophy . A number if not all of the three great thinkers of German Idealism, J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel will be considered.

Outline Of Syllabus

Students will cover certain of the key thinkers associated with the idealistic and materialist movements that flourished in the wake of the Kantian revolution, including but not limited to
Early theories of the will (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche).
F. H. Jacobi
Moses Mendelssohn
Karl Reinhold
Solomon Maimon
J. G. Fichte,
F. W. J. Schelling,
G. W. F. Hegel

Intended Knowledge Outcomes

Students will:
- Understand the stakes of the materialist development of the Kantian philosophy
- Understand the stakes of the idealist development of the Kantian philosophy
- Understand the limits in the way in which Kant developed his own critical insights, as delineated by his German Idealist and Materialist successors
- Learn of the new possibilities for thought that were broached by the post-Kantian idealists, including speculative dialectic, absolute idealism, and the philosophy of nature.

Intended Skill Outcomes

Students will:
- Develop detailed and critical knowledge of key philosophical concepts
- Learn the importance of the history of philosophy and its most elevated moments for philosophy as such and be able to apply this knowledge in assessment and discussion
- Develop a new method of thinking and a critical awareness of the limits of our previous conceptions of what it means to think

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

This module complements the examination of Kant’s critical philosophy, and Hegel’s response to it, presented in PHI2001, by subjecting the paradigm of idealism in philosophy to philosophical-historical analysis. The study of Freud’s work and Deleuze’s reading of Freud not only challenges the modern presumption of reason as a definitively human characteristic, and the subject as the grounding for ontological and epistemological positions, but introduces students to a mode of critical philosophy as history of ideas. In doing so, it shall supplement their exposure to the Kantian model of critical philosophy as a defining point in the history of philosophy. Students are encouraged to a detailed reading of a key philosophical texts that comprise this history, and to the consideration of those texts in the light of appropriate secondary criticism, as indicated on the reading list provided.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

The end-of-semester essay allows students the necessary scope to propose their own historical account of the history of idealism/materialism, as it has unfolded subsequent to the onset of the Enlightenment. It also provides students with the opportunity of identifying and discussing some philosophical implications of their historical account, and so of exhibiting their newly-acquired capacity to render historical work as a critical practice. The assessment’s focus on issues that consider ontological and epistemological possibilities allows students the opportunity to avail themselves of one or more of the various perspectives offered to them by secondary commentaries and therefore to hone their skills in research.

General Notes

Original Handbook text: