PLEASE NOTE this is a sample reading list for the 2015-16 academic year
– precise seminar content may change from year to year.
Session 1
Introduction
The problems of modernity and the nature of “modernism”. The caesura of Nietzsche: The
Birth of Tragedy and On the Genealogy of Morals as founding texts.
Recommended reading: Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP),
chapters 23-25.
Session 2
Against Socratic Culture: Early Nietzsche and the transfiguration of nature
Text: Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, tr. W. Kaufmann, (New York: Vintage).
Essential reading: Sections 1-7, (incl. “Attempt at a Self-Criticism”), pp. 15-60.
Session 3
Later Nietzsche and the attack on ‘slave’ morality
Text: Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, tr. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage).
Essential reading: Essay 1 (pp. 15-56).
Session 4
Freud, psychic economics, and the philosophy of culture
Text: Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, in: The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 12.
Essential reading: sections 6-8 (pp. 308-340).
Session 5
Max Weber: the birth of capitalism from the spirit of this-wordly asceticism
Text: Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Hyman Unwin).
Essential reading: Part I, chapter 2 (pp. 47-78)
Part II, chapter 4.A (pp. 95-127); Part II, chapter 5 (pp. 155-184).
Session 6
Thomas Mann: aestheticism and the antagonism of spirit (Geist) and life (Leben)
Text: Mann, “Death in Venice” and Other Stories (London: Minerva).
Essential reading: “Tonio Kröger” and “Death in Venice”.
Session 7
Max Scheler: phenomenology and the primacy of affective intentionality  the nature
of value
Texts: Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press). Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy (London: Routledge).
Essential Reading: Formalism, First Part, Chapter I.
Formalism, First Part, Chapter II,B,3 & 5.
Formalism, Second Part, Chapter V.8.
Sympathy, Part B (‘Love and Hatred’), Sections I and II.
Session 8
Martin Heidegger on modernity, technology & nihilism
Text: Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. IV (New York: HarperCollins), ed. D.F. Krell..
Essential reading: pp. 123-196. (Note that the new paperback edition of this text contains
the original vols. III and IV together in one volume). Ideally, you should also read Friedrich
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, (New York: Vintage), ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann, fragments
1-20 (‘European Nihilism’).
Session 9
Sartre, alienation and ethics: nihilating the world
Texts: Sartre, Being and Nothingness (London: Routledge, 2003f.) trans. H. Barnes. Sartre,
Existentialism and Humanism (London: Methuen).
Essential reading: Part 1, Ch. 1, section 5 (“The Origin of Nothingness”),
Part 2, Ch 1, section 3 (“The For-Itself and the Being of Value”),
Part 3, Ch 1, section 4 (“The Look”),
Part 3, Ch 3, section 1 (“Concrete Relations with Others.”),
Part 4, Ch1, section 1 (“The First Condition of Action is Freedom”).
Recommended reading: Existentialism and Humanism.
Session 10
Robert Musil and modernist transcendence
Text: Musil, The Man without Qualities (London: Minerva), 3 vols, trans. Eithne Wilkins and
Ernst Kaiser. [This older translation is much better than the new one-volume translation
by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (Picador), but both may be used. The old threevolume edition can still be obtained from Amazon.]
Essential reading: Books 1 & 2, chs. 1-5, 25, 27, 32, 39, 46, 84, 87, 95, 96, 109, 113.
Book 3, chapters 1, 2, 9, 11, 12.(In Wilkins/Pike: 124, 125, 132-134).