POL 409 - “Being and Time” and Politics

An exploration of the political implications of Heidegger’s ontology, understood primarily as a phenomenology of mind. We will begin by considering some of the contexts of Heideggerian thought through an examination of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, and we will end by tracing certain aspects of its moral and political influence both in the writings of Levinas and Arendt and in the more recent critical literature on the question of Heidegger and National Socialism. Our principal task, however, will be to pursue a close and systematic study of Being and Time, focusing on central elements of its conceptual apparatus, including, for example, notions of entity and world, care and concern, anxiety and resoluteness, temporality and death, history and the state.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): HUM 110 or equivalent
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other;
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.