The following is a tentative course outline. It will be modified to respond to students’ interests and to accommodate our rate of progress.
Weekly video lectures will be about an hour long, followed by one-hour online discussion groups. Suggested readings will vary in length, but I aim to keep them under 20 pages.
Week 1: What we are is up to us.
Reading: Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism
Week 2: Facts depend on our interpretation
Reading: Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism (continued); Sartre, “Intentionality” (selections); Edmund Husserl (selections); Hans Georg Gadamer (selections)
Week 3: Seeing is “seeing as…”
Reading: Sartre, Being and Nothingness (selections); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (selections)
Week 4: The responsibility of choosing what is good.
Reading: Friedrich Nietzsche, selections from The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil; Anthony Steinbock, Home and Beyond (selections)
Week 5: You’re nobody ‘till somebody sees you: embodiment, other people, and objectification
Reading: Sartre, Being and Nothingness (selections [The keyhole]); Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (selections)
Week 6: Knowing, science and objectivity
Sartre, Being and Nothingness (selections [The pond]); Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences (selections); Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges” (selections)
Week 7: Emancipation
de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (selections); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (selections); Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera (selections)
Week 8: Being towards death
Heidegger, Being and Time (selections)