Summer Reading Course - Dr. Charles Ess - Drury University
Resources on Postmodernism and the Habermas/Foucault Debate
Class Discussion notes - May 30, 1997 (including a link to Skye Carroll's recommended readings, on-line resources for postmodernism and architecture)
Class Discussion notes - June 6, 1997
Ess's comments on Catherine Belsey's Critical Practice
Class Discussion notes - June 13, 1997
Nietzsche: reading assignment for June 20, 1997
Nietzsche: overview of central concepts, contexts; hints on reading; the importance of style; biography; excerpts from The Birth of Tragedy; Nietzsche on dance.Nietzsche: introductory comments on The Gay Science, the relationship between Nietzschean "perspectivism," critiques of modernity and the Enlightenment, and developments in the natural sciences pointing to the limits of reason and science as modes of knowing.
Nietzsche: more extensive notes on The Gay Science, beginning with Kaufmann's introduction
Class discussion notes - June 20, 1997, plus reading assignment for June 27, 1997. (Here, Ess focuses on the first four aphorisms of The Gay Science to show their sonata-like structure [against readings of Nietzsche that stress the fragmentary character of the aphoristic style], and thereby to argue that Nietzsche's perspectivism, utilizing a complementary logic, establishes a critique of moral absolutism which at the same time avoids simple relativism. Ess further develops analogies between Kant's Copernican Revolution and Nietzsche's artists' metaphysics.)
Class Discussion Handout - July 11, 1997: "The Symposium: Philosophy as "poetic/erotic/reason"
Final Discussion - August 1, 1997: student comments, suggestions for future versions of the course
(requires Motet ID and password -
guest access coming soon!)