Consciousness, Rationality, Identity, and the Human Condition

The first part of the course will focus on the lifeworld, the world of everyday experience. We will read texts by various classical authors (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Schutz, Gurwitsch, Arendt, Sellars) and discuss the relationship between this world, the world of human care and concern, and the world as described by science. Are we dealing with two different worlds that we have to choose between (as suggested by Sellars), or are they compatible? The second part of the course will focus on personal identity. What is the nature of personal identity over time, i.e., how do persons persist over time despite the physical and psychological changes they undergo along the way? And what is the prudential and moral significance of personal identity? We will read texts by, among others, Derek Parfit. The third and last part of the course will examine the role of the notion of “repetition” in different approaches to the structure of subjectivity. After a short historical introduction to Søren Kierkegaard’s Repetition and Friedrich Nietzsche’s fragments on the “Eternal Return,” we will read relevant sections from Gilles Deleuze’s book Difference and Repetition (the introduction “Repetition and Difference”) and from Slavoj Zizek’s book Enjoy your Symptom! (“Why is Every Act a Repetition?”).