Course level: Undergraduate
Spring 2024
Johns Hopkins University
Course Description:
This course examines the works, influence, and legacy of often understudied and overlooked women philosophers in the German tradition in the 19th and 20th centuries. Even though largely deprived formal education and academic positions and excluded from academic discourse, women thinkers developed their own ways of philosophizing, engaging in dialogue with their contemporaries, and shaping the philosophical movements of their time. The course focuses in particular on Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) and her engagement with the philosophy of life movement and with psychoanalysis, Edith Stein (1891-1942) and her impact on the phenomenological tradition, and Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) and her lasting contribution to existential questions about human intellectual, social, and political life. The underlying theme of the course, connecting these three thinkers, is the life of the mind: what can we learn from each thinker about the conditions of human life, the dynamics of personal development, and the potential for emancipation?
Syllabus:
Women Philosophers in the German Tradition – Syllabus Jan25_2024 – ONLINE
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