Goals

The course objective is to motivate students to critically re-appropriate the philosophical tradition that led to contemporary thinking of humanity. The course particularly focuses on the knowledge of human sciences and the way in which they determine great philosophical conceptions of a man. At last, the course tackles the specificity of philosophical anthropology which can be developed today.

Content

After an evocation of the anthropologic question in ancient history (Plato and Aristotle), the course endorses and emphasizes the important anthropologic variation along with the arrival of Modern times and the transit from a self-contained world into the infinitive universe (Descartes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant). It pays a particular attention to great ideas (a subject of body, a report on abnormalities, the nature/culture question) which therefore allows a further study of humans. Furthermore, the course emphasizes evaluating and questioning the anthropologic conceptions through the philosophers of suspicion (Marx and Freud) as well as via more general human science (psychoanalysis in particular). After all, the course proceeds to a selection of anthropological conceptions that were deployed during the twentieth century with emphasis on the relationship between anthropology and phenomenology (Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty). In the end of the course the most contemporary developments of the anthropological question are evaluated: Frank Tinland, Bernard Stiegler, Alain Badiou.

Language of instruction

Français
Training Study programme Block Credits Mandatory
Bachelier en philosophie Standard 0 5
Bachelier en philosophie Standard 1 5