è���ƽ�

In this intensive residency seminar students reengage Kant & Hegel with a reading of Kant’s Third Critique, a good close reading of Hegel’s Preface, Introduction, and Chapter IV to the Phenomenology of Mind, readings from Hegel’s Aesthetics, Vol. I, and texts by Heidegger, Heraclitus, Plato, and Nietzsche. Consistent with the Topological Studies approach, students engage with these texts while immersing themselves in the art and architecture of cities like Berlin (Late Neoclassical/Early Industrial paradigm), Paris (Bourgeois/Modernist), Venice (Baroque/Global commerce) and Athens (East/West Transhistorical). Other readings reflect the contributions of Visiting Faculty, such as Howard Caygill (Kafka: In Light of the Accident), Santiago Zabala (Why Only Art can Save Us), and Jean-Luc Nancy (The Sense of the World), among others.

Seminar V, Part 2 traces the Kant/Hegel divide into German Idealism and Romanticism, and then from Marx into Nietzsche and Freud. From here we turn to Heidegger’s ontological critique of Western thought, especially as he intensifies Nietzsche’s phenomenological deconstruction of Platonic truth and proposes art as the clearing in which truth appears. This proposition “slips” into French itineraries, such as Luce Irigaray’s feminist reorientation of psychoanalytic theory and Jacques Derrida’s project of deconstruction. Then, in response to Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that “all the great philosophical ideas of the last century…had their beginnings in Hegel,” we trace Hegel’s ideas through 20th-century French post-humanists, ultimately arriving at Lyotard and Foucault.

The è���ƽ� Independent Study program is designed to help students develop particular scholarly interests and to integrate those interests within the è���ƽ� curriculum. It is also meant to encourage exploration and extended research toward a dissertation topic; and to broaden the scope of the core curriculum by applying the methodologies acquired in the seminars to issues that are germane to each student’s field of interest. Possible independent study topics are explored within the context of seminar readings and in light of guest lectures and museum visits, and discussed with è���ƽ� academic advisors. Examples include a research paper on psychoanalytic critique and Latin American cinema; maternal aesthetics and representation of otherness in art; phenomenology and Afro-Futurism; a comparison between Buddhist philosophy and Twentieth-century continental philosophy; as well as studies in the fields of craft, sexuality, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, identity, etc.

Seminar VI begins with a six-day intensive residency in Madrid, Marrakech, or Mexico City (alternating years). Besides attending seminars and lectures, students give seminar presentations on their fall Independent Studies (802), conceived as formal conference-style papers meant to prepare students to be effective speakers and presenters in professional academic environments. Museum, gallery, artist studio visits, and guided tours offered by curators and museum educators supplement the weekly activities. Museum visits in Madrid include the Prado, the Reina Sofia, the Caixa Forum, and a day trip to the ancient town of Toledo, a historical example of multi-cultural coexistence through its medieval Arab, Jewish, and Christian monuments. In Marrakech, students visit the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden, the Medersa Ben Yousef, the Museé Yves Saint Laurent and Jardin Majorelle, the Berber Museum, the Palais el Badii, the Montresso Foundation, and Le Jardin Secret. In Mexico City, students visit the Anthropology Museum, the Frida Kahlo House, the ancient site of Teotihuacán, the Templo Mayor, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.

Seminar VI, Part 2, will re-ask the questions: “what is art?” and “what is art’s responsibility?” This conceptual move will allow us to consider the philosophical relation of ethics to aesthetics and vice versa as implicit in the term “representation.” This in turn becomes the signal ethico-aesthetic question in the work of Fanon, Arendt, Nietzsche, Nancy, Deleuze, Sloterdijk, Junger, Berardi, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lotringer, Heidegger, and Agamben. The course is divided into four themes of inquiry: “Liberation,” “Metaphors of the End,” “Ends of Man,” and “Art & Politics.” Final outcomes include two exam papers based on the readings.

Following Independent Study I, Independent Study II further develops each student’s research, consisting of a long paper on a topic of their choice. Students complete their IS by working one-on-one with an Independent Study director — a faculty member whose scholarship may be particularly suitable to a proposed project. Independent Study papers must be of publishable level; students are asked to submit their papers to academic conferences or peer-reviewed journals for publication. Often times Independent Studies provide the groundwork for the dissertation proposal to be developed in the Third Year.

The pre-dissertation seminar takes place in the summer as students enter their third year. In the online seminar, core faculty lead discussions about the unfolding tensions and overlaps between formalism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics, in relation to theories of knowledge, subjectivity, form, and the way ‘meaning’ happens in the work of art. The pre-dissertat