Course Offerings

Grapple in a highly collaborative environment with Franz Rosenzweig’s Hegel und der Staat, building German and interpretive skills. As a capstone experience, you will compete in the final week for the most persuasive monologue, designed for the ears of non-specialists, as to whether and in what sense Rosenzweig is, as a philosopher in pursuit knowledge and understanding, in the Tradition of Hermann Cohen. Did Rosenzweig have reason to see himself as the natural successor to Geheimrat Hermann Cohen, as Western European Jewry’s leading philosophical theologian? How does the evidence of the recently translated and much admired book, Hegel and the State, contribute to our judgment in this respect?

Alasdair MacIntyre has insisted, echoing the Gorgias, that if you want to engage “in rational enquiry through the method of dialectic” you will need to “possess and recognize certain moral virtues without which the cooperative progress of dialectic will be impossible.” Chief among these are dispositions to listen, to befriend and to love dialectic, understood as a process by which one expands one’s knowledge and understanding, and improves one’s practices. We will definitely aim to cultivate these dispositions in the course of our time together and draw on our shared commitment to them as we seek to benefit all participants’ projects, and ultimately perfect our collaborative inquiry.