PHIL 422: Honors Seminar

PHIL 422-001: Nietzsche & Foucault
(Fall 2022)

04:30 PM to 07:10 PM T

Thompson Hall L004

Section Information for Fall 2022

Seminar Topic: Nietzsche and Foucault - towards a postmoral ethics

The focus of the Fall 2022 PHIL421/422/694 seminar will be the work of Nietzsche and Foucault. We will read Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals alongside Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality vol 1 to investigate how these two thinkers develop and deploy a genealogical method to undertake a revaluation of values. Particular attention will be paid to such issues as Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals and active/reactive systems of valuation; the cultural and political power of ressentiment and asceticism; perspectivism, power relations and the will to knowledge; the repressive hypothesis; sexuality, delinquency, and subjectivation; disciplinary power and biopower; bodies, the production of ‘the individual,’ and the invention of ‘the self’. Our core texts will be supplemented by a selection of writings by both thinkers, including some of Nietzsche’s other writings on morality and Foucault’s essays and lectures on ethics and the self.

While reading Nietzsche and Foucault as offering a critical revaluation of western modernity, we will also ask to what extent they remain imbricated in the very modernity they critique. To do so, we will read feminist, Latinx and decolonial responses to and uses of their work, as well as philosophers of race who engage with, critique, and transformatively deploy their ideas. The course will conclude by reading some of Lynne Huffer’s work on Foucault, in which she unfolds an anti-foundational, post-moral and ‘rift-restoring’ ethics of eros that holds thought open to strangeness and the outside. In so doing, Huffer echoes and reanimates the opening line of the Preface to Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals, “we are unknown to ourselves, we knowers … and on good grounds,” and asks how we might withstand our undoing, our ungrounding, in an age of extinction.

Course Information from the University Catalog

Credits: 3

Seminar for students enrolled in the honors program in philosophy. Notes: May be repeated for credit when topic is different. May be repeated within the term for a maximum 18 credits.
Mason Core: Capstone
Specialized Designation: Mason Impact., Topic Varies, Writing Intensive in Major
Recommended Prerequisite: 9 credits in philosophy and acceptance to the honors program in philosophy.
Schedule Type: Lec/Sem #1, Lec/Sem #2, Lec/Sem #3, Lec/Sem #4, Lec/Sem #5, Lec/Sem #6, Lec/Sem #7, Lec/Sem #8, Lec/Sem #9, Sem/Lec #10, Sem/Lec #11, Sem/Lec #12, Sem/Lec #13, Sem/Lec #14, Sem/Lec #15, Sem/Lec #16, Sem/Lec #17, Sem/Lec #18, Seminar
Grading:
This course is graded on the Undergraduate Regular scale.

The University Catalog is the authoritative source for information on courses. The Schedule of Classes is the authoritative source for information on classes scheduled for this semester. See the Schedule for the most up-to-date information and see Patriot web to register for classes.