PHIL 001N. Introduction to Philosophy: Subjects and Selves

In the canon of modern Western philosophy, the subject takes the form of an autonomous, self-determining, rational individual, an actor with agency and conscious experience opposed to an external world comprised of objects to be perceived and known. Amidst the atrocities of the World Wars, waves of anticolonial struggles for national liberation, and the rapid emergence of new forms of control in the 20th century, however, thinkers have increasingly recognized that the "subject" is fundamentally inseparable from power: it is not a fixed and stable entity, but a site of struggle and contestation-an always-shifting terrain of meaning in which the dichotomies between self and other, inclusion and exclusion, and freedom and responsibility come into focus. This course takes up the question of the subject by examining how different philosophical traditions-including but not limited to critical theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, and critical race theory-have put this subject in question.
Humanities
1 credit.
Spring 2023. Ahmed.
Catalog chapter: Philosophy
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/philosophy

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