“Constructing Our World, Constructing Ourselves” is the third semester in a four-semester sequence covering the history of philosophy from Thales to Zizek. The focus of this course is 19thC German philosophy (including Kierkegaard, who was educated in Berlin and responds to Hegel). It is my favorite course in the sequence, partly because it includes my primary research interest, Nietzsche, and partly because it provides opportunities to support the teaching of philosophy via literature (Calvino’s Mr Palomar, illustrating application of Hegelian dialectic to everyday situations) and music (Rossini, Wagner, Bizet, et al, illustrating the centrality of music in the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche).
I also think I have a useful way of conceptualizing this period, via the question, “How many players in the game of knowledge?” Hume formulates the problem of knowledge in terms of the traditional two “players,” Mind and World. Kant addresses Hume’s skeptical challenge by splitting World into phenomenal and noumenal, thus winding up with three “players.” Hegel ignores the noumenal and elides the distinction between subject and object, resulting in just one “player,” Mind. For Schopenhauer the answer is two, then three, then one: He begins by addressing knowledge at the level of representation, where there are only two “players,” Mind and World-as-Representation, but then introduces a third, World-as-Will, but then says everything ultimately IS Will, thus winding up with just one “player.” And Nietzsche begins his career as a Schopenhauerian, but then rejects metaphysics and so returns to the Humean situation, only now winding up as a perspectivist rather than a skeptic.
This conceptual organization helps students keep track of things, and it also underlies the “gradually growing paper,” my final reason for being proud of this syllabus. I have long been frustrated that students hardly ever proofread their work, and hardly ever return to it after it’s been graded. The gradually growing paper requires both while students work through the course’s defining question. Students begin by writing a summary in their own words of Kant’s view. I grade and return it. The second assignment is to summarize Kant’s and Hegel’s views. I grade and return it. The third is to summarize Kant’s and Hegel’s and Schopenhauer’s views. And so on. Each iteration requires students to revise what they have done so far before adding new material. This assignment has been successful both in helping students understand course material and in getting them to return to and clarify their writing.
Another thing that works in this syllabus is the Hegel/Marx/Kierkegaard paper: Students compare the three concerning what I call the three keys to Hegel: idealism, dialectic, and history. And I do a class session called “God’s Funeral,” for which students write obituaries/eulogies that are often quite clever and hilarious.
One thing on this syllabus that I now do in all my courses is base a part of the course grade on “points”. Students get a point for attending class and a point for participating in discussion; they get a point for uploading a homework assignment to a shared platform and another point for uploading it on time. At the end of the semester I calculate their points as a percentage of the possible total, and this constitutes some percentage of their final course grade. This system rewards them for doing the things that contribute to academic success while also allowing them to miss class and/or a homework assignment from time to time and still do well. Students come to class better prepared than they used to; if anything, they sometimes focus too much on the homework “points” vs the graded papers.
This has been one of my most successful courses, both for majors and for one-off philosophy students.
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Jonathan R Cohen
Jonathan R Cohen holds degrees from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Penn. He began teaching at the University of Maine Farmington in 1992 after a year at Swarthmore. His research focuses on Nietzsche, Ancient Philosophy, and Jewish Philosophy. He is the author of a study of Nietzsche’s Human, All-too-Human entitled Science, Culture and Free Spirits (Humanity Books, 2010); his second book, In Nietzsche’s Footsteps, is a philosophical travel memoir recounting his family’s trip to three of Nietzsche’s favorite residences and his concomitant encounter with the livability of Nietzsche’s philosophy (8thHouse Publishing, 2018). His published articles include “Some Jewish Reflections on Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration,” “Philosophy is Education is Politics: A Reading of the Dramatic Interlude in the Protagoras,” “Nietzsche’s Musical Conception of Time,” and "What's Bad About Death Is What's Good About Life." As part of an ongoing project on Nietzsche’s philosophy of music, he has made two multi-media presentations: “’Wouldn’t It Be Nice’: Why You Need to Take the Beach Boys Seriously” and “Disciples of Dionysus” (about the Ramones). He is currently on sabbatical, writing a book entitled Plato on Love, Death, and the Soul.
