Kursinformation

PHIL 361 - Early Modern Philosophy II: 18th Century

Winter 2025

 

Instructor: Dr. Olivia Sultanescu

Email: olivia.sultanescu@concordia.ca

Office hours: Monday & Wednesday, 4:15 pm – 5:15 pm (My office is in the Gray Nuns building (GN), accessible through the classroom entrance located at 1175 Rue Saint-Mathieu, near Boulevard René-Lévesque.)

 

Class schedule: Monday & Wednesday 2:45 pm – 4:00 pm

Room: H 431 

Course description

This course is an introduction to eighteenth-century European philosophy.  The first part of the class is devoted to topics and questions pertaining to the distinctive ways in which philosophers of this period conceive of the nature of the mind and the possibility of knowing the world outside of it.  We will examine the so-called theory of ideas, according to which the basic constituents of the mind are simple ideas, each of which is acquired through experience.  On this picture, all mental activity can be accounted for in the light of operations on simple ideas.  We discuss John Locke’s elaboration of this view, and we briefly explore George Berkeley’s response to Locke.  We then move on to David Hume, the central figure of this course, whose project is to construct a fully naturalistic account of human nature.  By scrutinizing the mental operations distinctive of the human mind, Hume tries to show that rational capacities play a lesser role in our engagement with the world than has been traditionally thought.  We examine both the skeptical and the constructive phases of Hume’s philosophy.  The second part of the class is devoted to a brief investigation of the question of the nature and origin of language.  To what extent can the theory of ideas and the broader conception of the mind associated with it account for the possibility of communicating through meaningful utterances?  We examine the views on language put forward by Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Johann Gottfried Herder.  In the third and last part of the course, we turn to issues concerning morality and agency.  Our central question, with which philosophers of the eighteenth century were deeply concerned, is what lies at the heart of morality: emotion, reason, or something else?  We carefully examine Hume’s treatment to this question, and we end with a brief discussion of some responses to Hume.