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Takehome Essay Examination

Due: May 11th @ 2p
Submit via email or by uploading to the Angel dropbox

Thoroughly and specifically answer three of the following questions. A benchmark of 400+ words per answer should be used. For this examination, I will evaluate your use of key terms for expressing the substance of the arguments, your ability and accuracy of navigating between various positions of our authors and your thoroughness in providing explanations of your interpretations. Of course, if you have any questions for clarification, please ask and I will answer them as I am able to.

1. How can unknowability be a legitimate mode of thought and content for consideration?

2. In what philosophically significant ways do individuals become subjects?

3. Does an ontological reorientation towards time fundamentally change conceptions of human experience?

4. Through an internal critique, articulate a sense of what lies beyond philosophical thought.

5, What conception(s) of power is able to describe the myriad forms of social injustice and ways in which that can be overcome?

Essay Instructions & Topics

PL 311 - 20th Century PhilosophyCritical Essay Topics
Essay Due Date: May 5 @ 1p (before class starts)

You are to write a 2000+ word essay (roughly 6-8 pages) where you develop your own critical position on a particular issue, question, conceptualization or arena relevant to any of our course themes, approaches or ontologies. That is, while we have and will cover a number of issues, many outstanding questions, arguments, ideas, and alternatives will go unexplored. You must then engage with something specific by extending, going in-depth or addressing what we are (and/or are not) covering from your own critical position. In short, you must claim something and provide evidence from the text for that claim.

In the essay, be sure to carefully and thoroughly follow the following guidelines (if not in letter, closely in spirit):

1. State your position: Within the beginning paragraph of the essay, briefly state the issue that you are considering and clearly articulate your own intellectual position on that issue. That is, be sure that the reader knows exactly what you think about the issue you are considering. Since this paper is ultimately about your own position – but it is articulated in terms of the issues framed by our authors – you need to explicitly state your position.

2. Explain your approach: Starting in the second paragraph, briefly explain what the issue is that you have just told the reader what you think about. While the reader may get a general sense of the topic and issue from the introductory paragraph, you now need to concisely and specifically explain why this is an issue at all and thereby motivate why your position is one we should take seriously.

3. Provide reasons to support your position: Make it clear, in a direct manner, why the reader should agree with your position. That is, you have stated your position at the outset and explained the issue at hand, but now you need to articulate reasons why one should judge and evaluate the issue as you do.

4. Conclude: Once you have defended your position through providing reasons to defend your position, decisively end the paper. In a brief sentence or two state what you've defended and why, providing a closing to the paper.

Note: You will notice very little in the way of 'don'ts' within the above guidelines. Those are many, and can be more explicitly understood through helpful sites on 'how to write philosophical papers' (see our Angel course homepage for “Useful Links” to such sites). Here we have provided what you should do within your paper, so make that your central focus.

Your paper should be: around 2,000 words typed with full citations. Write your name, date, and title at the top left portion of the paper just before the introductory paragraph (no coversheets please). With regard to sources, you are not required to use outside texts for writing your paper. If you do, be sure to fully cite your sources, either in footnotes, endnotes, or parenthetically (you can use either MLA or APA style). If you choose to cite parenthetically, be sure to provide a full reference list at the end of your essay.


Topic Options

Here are a list of possible questions, issues, conceptualizations or arenas you can write on. You are to choose only one of the options below.

1. Do we have an adequate, if not a robust, account of responsibility emerging within this course? Is there an "ethics of responsibility" emerging within our explorations of how we ought to relate to one another? Fully explain at least two senses of responsibility and why they are (or are not) senses of responsibility we should take seriously.

2. Engage in your own critique of reason: Are there unexplored ways that our capacity to reason fails draw us towards knowledge and understanding? How does a scientific approach to questions evade or elude disclosures of truth? Does a historical approach elide the ability to reason about metaphysics and ontology (i.e. must we remain silent?)?

3. Are there reasons that we ought to retain a traditional orientation towards concepts and truth that one or more of these philosophers is missing, jettisoning or contradicting? One way the notion of a non-historical, universal sense of truth is being rejected is through problematizing the very act of conceptualizing phenomena - e.g. it reduces the ontological to the ontic, it reifies social relations and social complexities where dynamic forms of autonomous thinking and relating exists, it instantiates binary oppositions of relating to the self where dialectical interplay and mutual recognition exists, it negates the possibilities of ceaseless performativities of identities, etc. As such, are these new ways adequately pointing to a fresh understanding of truth beyond what Foucault calls the "will to truth"?

4. What is your sense of the "I" in light of how we've studied conceptions of being, the subject, the infinite Other, the unessential consciousness, or the dissolution of the "I"?

5. We have many competing conceptions of the relationship between power and identity in this course. Choose at least two philosophical positions and provide us a full account of how you would enter into the discourse between these two positions.

6. Choose your own topic and clear that topic with me in writing at least two weeks prior to the paper due date (i.e. by April 21st).

Foucault Readings

We have two upcoming readings by Michel Foucault - What is Enlightenment and his Two Lectures (taken from his 1976 lecture series entitled "Society Must Be Defended"). We will be extending our discussion of discourse, will to truth and will to knowledge this Thursday, but be sure to read at the first piece here by then.

If you look here, you'll find an interesting audio interview (in English) on Foucault's major work "Discipline & Punish".

Difference as a Category of Thought

Watch the first two parts shown here and consider how you see Butler (and the portrayal of Butler via the narrative of the filmmakers) embodying, complicating, subverting or associating with the notion of difference you find in Kristeva's piece. Furthermore, does Butler's conception and approach to philosophy mirror Deleuze's thinking?

The Trap by Adam Curtis

Arvo Pärt "Für Alina"

Consider the following:



Now consider the explanation of that piece from the composer himself before his students in a masterclass:



How ought we to judge whether this explanation is (or is not) getting at something significant, universal, or true in music and aesthetic experience?

Examination questions

You will have 5 of these 7 options on the examination and will be required to write substantial essays on a subset of those 5. This is a closed book and closed notes examination, so I strongly encourage pre-examination collaboration as well as preparation for a rigorous discussion to occur during this coming Tuesday's review class.

For this examination, I will evaluate your use of key terms for expressing the substance of the arguments, your ability and accuracy of navigating between these positions and your thoroughness in providing explanations of your interpretations. I will allow you the full class time next Thursday to write these essays. Of course, if you have any questions for clarification, please comment below and I will answer them asap.

1. To what extent does Levinas give weight - in his account of the "I" - to the Sartrean notion of authenticity?

2. Give a clear example, and corresponding explanation of, a 'happening' in Heidegger's sense and show how this happening is not possible from a strategic line of questioning.

3. From either Levinas' or de Beauvoir's standpoint, what is a working conception of "us" or "we" as opposed to "I"? That is, are there ways that either philosopher accounts for social solidarity and/or collective identity in contrast to a strict sense of individual identity?

4. Consider Hegel's notion of mutual recognition (as opposed to a struggle for recognition), Levinas' sense of responsibility to the Other and de Beauvoir's sense of identity: are these simply sophisticated conceptions of love (for the self and/or for the other)?

5. Specifically give at least three instances in our readings and discussions thus far of how we've re-considered traditional philosophical approaches and fully explain your sense of how we've moved beyond, in contradiction to, or in spite of, those approaches.

6. What are the possibilities for theoretical approaches to freedom in Sartre's philosophy and are they sufficient to address the needs for oppressed groups to break out of their situations? Does de Beauvoir provide better grounds for realizing emancipatory possibilities for individuals? Be sure to address this question with specific relation to The Respectful Prostitute.

7. Provide a developed sense of how Levinas' approach to philosophy i) distances itself from or ii) connects up with, both of the following: Heidegger's critique of traditional metaphysics and Nietzsche's critique of the Socratic conception of philosophy.

Levinas Notes

A Thousand Words, by Ted Chung

View on ExposureRoom

Background to Sartre's notion of self-consciousness

Hegel's Lordship & Bondage section of his larger work Phenomenology of Spirit is a central way to deal with issues surrounding intersubjectivity, freedom and relations of power. While you will find this writing style more in line with our readings from Heidegger than Sartre, this is a fundamental piece for contemporary social and political theory and it will be well worth the effort to take some time to reflect on this piece. As such, I would strongly suggest focusing on understanding notes 189-193 in particular. Comments below here are quite welcome as we can then work our way towards a complex understanding of racism, sexism and classism as found in The Respectful Prostitute.

Sartre's go-to tune?

Is this what Sartre had in mind....?

An existentiell moment of questioning the possibility of happening with regard to the existential ontology of Dasein

Ontic steps:
1. Sit and put on headphones
2. Plug in headphones and turn up the volume
3. Hit play
4. Repeat

Ontological steps:
1. Why the birds, the tuning, the long introduction?
2. What counts as music?

A Dionysian moment?

Here is the example I mentioned that we went towards at the end of class. If you start at the 20 minute mark, you'll know it when you get there. You will, of course, have more context if you start at the outset, as what Lacan is speaking about is relevant to the situation. But the question stands, is this consistent with Nietzsche's sense of a Dionysian moment/situation?



Also, if you want to post other examples to give us some grounding, do so below in the comment section. That way all of us - including those who the snow took special revenge on - can reflect on these examples and turn them over in our minds in relation to the readings. Great discussion today on Rancière and Nietzsche.

Hypomnemata

Here is the piece I mentioned in relation to our reading-writing practices for this course, entitled Self-Writing. In looking at the practices of these Greek and Roman philosophers (thank you Kyle) that Foucault discusses, I came across an interview on foucault.info where there is a clearly relevant sense to which this notion of Hypomnemata coheres with the collection of assignments you'll be responsible for. Note in particular this excerpt from the excerpt:

In the technical sense, the hypomnemata could be account books, public registers, individual notebooks serving as memoranda. Their use as books of life, guides for conduct, seems to have become a current thing among a whole cultivated public. Into them one entered quotations, fragments of works, examples, and actions to which one had been witness or of which one had read the account, reflections or reasonings which one had heard or which had come to mind. They constituted a material memory of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering these as an accumulated treasure for rereading and later meditation. They also formed a raw material for the writing of more systematic treatises...

So it is in this light I'll point you back to this mode of writing as a way for you to consider for yourself the relationship between your journaling, your critical responses, your examinations and your essay. If you are looking for a free tool for writing that is not word-processing centric, I'd suggest Evernote.

Nietzsche the 21st century Philosopher

Nietzsche died in 1900, so technically there is no truth to the fact that Nietzsche is a 21st century philosopher. But what is time to the pertinence of ideas and why should such a technicality matter for us?

"The person who is responsive to the stimuli of art behaves toward the reality of dream much the way the philosopher behaves toward the reality of existence: he observes exactly and enjoys his observations, for it is by these images that he interprets life, by these processes that he rehearses it." (Birth of Tragedy 21).

So, try watching that show you are currently into with Ornette Coleman's "at the 'Golden Circle': Stockholm" on in the background. This collision of worlds exemplifies Nietzsche's attempt to reveal the Apollonian world we share with the ancient Greeks.

For a somewhat humorous, accessible overview of Nietzsche the person, writer and philosopher, listen to this lecture given by Rick Roderick entitled "Nietzsche: The Myth and the Mythmaker".