LITS3303 TERM PAPER 2005-2006

BASED ON MODULE ONE

Answer ONE (1) of the following questions, referring closely to the text(s) of the theorist in question:

1.    Discuss Hegel's philosophy of history.  With what justification might he be described as an 'idealist'?

2.    After explaining Hegel's notion of the 'master / slave dialectic,' discuss its significance for any one subsequent theorist discussed in Module One.

3.    Why does Nietzsche describe truth as nothing more than a "host of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms" (84)?  With what justification might he be described as a 'materialist'?

4.    What do you understand by Nietzsche's concept of 'genealogy'?  How does he use it to rethink conventional notions of morality?

5.    How does Husserl use the term 'phenomenology'?

6.    John D. Caputo argues that some of Heidegger's most important accomplishments in Being and Time include:

a critique of Descartes (and of 17th and 18th century epistemology generally) in the light of his idea of 'being-in-the-world';

a rewriting of the 'pure transcendental' version of phenomenology developed by Husserl into a 'hermeneutical phenomenology';

analyses of mood and anxiety, of truth and death, of authenticity and inauthenticity, of temporality and historicity; and above all

the raising of 'the question of the meaning of Being' and the 'destruction of the history of ontology.'

Explore one of these topics in Heidegger's work.

7.    What, according to Sartre, are the defining features of the human condition?

8.    Discuss Merleau-Ponty's notion of 'embodied perception.'

9.    Gadamer "grounds understanding in the linguistically mediated happening of tradition."  What do you understand by this claim?

10.    Levinas' "notion of the Other is often thought to involve an 'ethical turn' away from the obsession with purely metaphysical issues that characterises the work of earlier thinkers such as Heidegger."  Would you agree?

DEADLINE: 6 pm, Tuesday, November 8, 2005

LENGTH: 7 pages maximum (typewritten, double-spaced)

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