Making of the Modern Self
Fall & Spring
| 3 credits
| Elective
Majors:
Literature
and
Philosophy
Focusing on thinkers from Continental Europe like Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Copenhagen’s own Søren Kierkegaard, this course traces the development of the conception of ‘selfhood’ in the 19th and 20th centuries. We will observe how ethical thinking has moved from the language of duty to that of personal answerability, and how the search for meaningful personal existence has increasingly become the responsibility of the individual. The unique vocabulary of these authors appears not only in works of philosophy and psychology, but also literature and theatre, which illustrates the claim that we understand ourselves via the stories we tell, and shows how these narratives are necessarily told in dialogue with ‘the other’, our fellow human beings.
This is a University of Copenhagen course open to DIS students. Please ensure you read the full details on taking external courses through DIS.
Instructors
-
Brian Söderquist
Ph.D. (Philosophy of Religion, Søren Kierkegaard Research Center, University of Copenhagen, 2005). M.A.R. (Philosophy of Religion, Yale University, 1994). With DIS since 2000.
