Instructor: Austen Hinkley
Meeting: M W 10:30a-11:20a, plus discussion section
Ever since Paul Ricoeur dubbed Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud the “masters of suspicion,” the three authors have taken on a prominent position in the history of philosophy. It is strange that this framing has been taken for granted, given that all three of them took a critical stance against philosophy, aligning themselves instead with disciplines that they attempted to revolutionize or invent – political economy, philology, and psychoanalysis. This course takes up Ricoeur’s configuration just as these authors ask us to: with suspicion. We, on the one hand, ask what the three have in common, how they teach us to doubt even the foundations of our own doubt and to construct systems that remain fundamentally open to revision. On the other hand, we also examine the differences among the three: their contrasting histories, methods, and purposes. Finally, we ask how these texts and authors come to us, how our own assumptions shape our engagement with them, and how we might learn from them today. Readings include excerpts from Marx’s Capital, Nietzsche’s Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Beyond the Pleasure Principle.