This course is designed to train students in the close reading of classical Arabic texts. It will be based on selections of one of the central texts of Arabic thought, the fourteenth-century Muqaddima of Ibn Khaldun. This text allows students with intermediary Arabic reading competence to grasp larger arguments despite certain linguistic difficulties of the text. It is written in a style, which some commentators have described as nearly modern Arabic reportage, and as particularly eloquent. But it is also one which does not shy away from using the entire lexical, figurative and other resources of classical Arabic, including the technical vocabularies of the language.
The course will be based on the close reading of some of the Muqaddima’s passages: his critique of historiography, his ideas discussion of the nature of human kind, the development of the Arabic language, and of the genres of Arabic writings.
Texts will be distributed to students taking this course. There will be continuous assessment, based on text preparation.
Current debates on the secular and the religious call for a rethinking of the historical, analytical and conceptual frames under which common concepts of these two were conceived. Secularization thesis arose from particular developments within (Western) Christianity, and it expanded into religions across the world predicated upon secularist ideas. Much of the academic and public discussions alike draw on contemporary developments in and with Christian and Muslim communities in secular and Muslim contexts. While Christianity at least in its Western versions seems to have reached a certain dynamic in relation to the secular, Islam and to some extent Eastern Christianity are still seen as normative categories, inherently not open to secularism and emblematically embodied in the question of church/state relation and thus dependent on endogenous, religious explanations for secularism. The course will compare new theoretical approaches and debates, and a number of case studies pertaining to Islam and Christianity. In this context, and in order to broaden the traditional Western Christian focus, a comparison will be drawn to similar issues pertaining to the Eastern Christian Churches. The course is organized in two parts: Part I introduces central ideas and concepts of religion and secularism, dealing mainly with theoretical questions and debates in European and Middle Eastern contexts. Part II works with case studies and opens up for in-depth discussion based on respective case studies.
The course introduces the basic concepts of Western esoterism, then it discusses those Classical, Eastern and medieval traditions which amalgamated into the syncretic concepts of the "great Renaissance magi": Ficino, Pico, Trithemius, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Dee, Bruno, Fludd, and others. Beyond the writings of these early modern thinkers texts will be used from Greco-Egyptian mythology, Hellenistic Neoplatonism, Coptic Gnosticism, medieval angelology, Jewish cabala and the sources of ceremonial magic. The conclusion of the course will point toward the modern period (post-17th century to the present), which will be discussed in a second course, next semester. The sequel of the present course will examine the rise of the alternative occult thinking in the time of the Enlightenment, reaching as far as the contemporary pertinence of the esoteric today.
The goal of the course is to make students aware of an intellectual tradition which reached from Antiquity through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and has been one of the stimulating forces behind the so called "Western ideology". This tradition has not died out, it is still active in modern Western esoterism and New Age ideology, except that since the 17th century it has become rather a counterculture than a dominating intellectual and cultural trend.
The learning outcomes will consist of 1/ an accumulation of historical knowledge in a specific and relevant field of intellectual/cultural history; 2/ an awareness of the interconnectedness of pre-modern ideas and recent intellectual/ideological developments; 3/ the enhancement of methodological equipment with which students can handle and interpret intellectual and cultural history with ample expertise. The learning outcomes will be assessed through class participation, the presentation of a book review, and the essay.
Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza (1632-1677) is without doubt one of the most interesting, influential, but also ambiguous philosophical thinkers of early modern Europe. A son of Portuguese Jewish immigrants in the liberal environment of the Dutch republic, he was expulsed from his synagogue at the age of twenty-three and became the first European to live avowedly outside any religious community. Educated in the intellectual universe of the Scriptures and medieval Jewish rationalism, he radically questioned this legacy, but at the same time read it in a new way and brought it to bear upon the central questions of religious authority, political justice, and civil liberty. The "Theological-Political Treatise" (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, henceforth TTP), which Spinoza published anonymously in 1670, is widely considered to be the founding document of modern Biblical criticism and the scientific study of religion. It has been read as a philosophical pamphlet vindicating freedom of thought, but also as the project of a secular state inheriting quasi-religious claims of obedience.
The seminar will be based on a complete and cautious reading of the TTP, accompanied by secondary literature and short extracts from Spinoza's sources in medieval and contemporary philosophy, mainly Moses Maimonides and Thomas Hobbes. Each weekly session will be dedicated simultaneously to a section from the text and to one of the various interrelated themes of the book: Biblical and Jewish history, the political deconstruction of religion, the project of a universal natural faith, the foundations of political power, and the philosophical apology of democratic pluralism. Spinoza's pantheist metaphysics, that are alluded to in the TTP, shall be reviewed in its impact on later idealistic philosophies. Spinoza's analysis of the Biblical and medieval ideas of divine rule will be read as a classical conceptualization of the "theological-political problem": the antagonistic and yet inseparable historic conjunction of politics and religion.
A course on Central and East European intellectual history from 1848 until the Great War, with a focus on the changing relations between philosophy, the human sciences, and the natural sciences.
The goal of the course is to examine the mediality of culture and the modern and
postmodern concepts theorizing about it. Since in the focus of the course there are tradition-based cultural representations, the main emphasis falls on the early modern period and the so called emblematic way of seeing. Nevertheless, attention will also be paid to more recent cultural representations, even up to the present. While this topic is strongly related to cultural and intellectual history as well as historical anthropology, this course offers not simply a chronological survey, rather a theoreticalhistoriographical perspective. The topics of the course are arranged according to the views of late 19 and 20 century modern and postmodern art- and cultural historians th th and we are going to observe how they tried to understand the cultural representations of past ages, how they tried to bring together efforts to "recover" history and "discover" the meaning of cultural expressions. After defining the concept of "cultural representations" we shall study various aspects of verbalvisual combinations (heraldry, emblems, bestiaries, illustrated books, high art and household design, theatrical performances and public spectacles, etc.) and thus mapping the "emblematic way of seeing and expression" as studied by outstanding scholars of iconology (Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Gombrich) and semioticians (Ernst Cassirer, Umberto Eco). The course will conclude with the introduction of postmodern theoretical challenges against traditional cultural historical scholarship and will discuss the perspectives of contemporary approaches (e.g. the recent emphasis on the "body" and on the "other").
This is a PhD course open to MA students as well. This course addresses aspects of the hegemony of a part of Europe over the rest of the continent and the world during much of modern history. Among the criteria for conceptualizing and representing this hegemony, preoccupation will be with variables in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge.
This course will explore the ancient messianic idea, its spatial expansion, and its ideational development up to the present. The topic will be approached from a wide variety of disciplines (Political Science, History, Philosophy, Anthropology), sharing a common focus on the messiah as a central and enduring symbol of Jewish and Christian societies and their interconnected eschatological expectations.
The course is divided into two parts. The first part covers the ancient oriental origins of the messianic idea and its articulation in Judaism and Christianity up to the Late Middle Ages. The second part focuses on the messianic symbolisms in modern Christian and Jewish societies but also in the political visions of liberalism and socialism, in Romantic literature, as well as in idealist and existential philosophy.
It is one of the ironies of the modern age that the advent of modernity reinforced the status and the authority of the Book in scripturalist religions, and facilitated the rigours of its literal reading, a reading generally and almost automatically – but not knowledgeably – ascribed to Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This course introduces students to the great transformations that overcame notions of the book in general, and of Scripture in particular, brought about by the advent and spread of the print medium, by Humanism, the Reformation and the scientific revolution.
This course explores the relation of religion and politics in comparative and intercivilizational perspective. The focus is on the constitutive role of religion in the emergence of empires. Yet, the course will not only look at the religious shape of empires but, vice versa, explore the effects of the imperial situation on the development of religion. It will become apparent that the role of religion can by no means be reduced to the provision of political legitimacy; religion can just as much provide existential alternatives in conscious opposition to the imperial order and cult.
