As radically new as much of 20th-century culture seems, it may also be seen as part of a long-running dialogue between the themes of ancient Greek and Hebrew thought—a debate about the true foundations for human understanding that goes to the very heart of European civilization, and that reappears in modern views of science.
More than ever before, universities emerged as the dominant intellectual and cultural institutions of Europe. Why then did so many—though not all—of the creative minds discussed in this course do their work outside the university setting?
Émile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, and Joseph Conrad were unsentimental writers whose naturalistic fiction probed the dilemmas of modern life and rejected any easy confidence in the inevitability of progress.
At the other pole from the naturalists were litterateurs who preferred inner visions and symbolic meanings to the realistic depiction of gritty modern urbanity. The French symbolists Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Villiers de L'Isle-Adam were creative figures in this new literary movement.
Working not in literature but in philosophy and theoretical physics, respectively, Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein questioned Newtonian descriptions of universal laws and stressed the observer's role in the construction of all knowledge about the world.
The rise of modern art overlapped with anti-realist, anti-positivist trends in other spheres. Artists such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Wassily Kandinsky favored personal vision over the depiction of concrete realities.
Sociology and cultural anthropology both arose out of doubts that positivism could explain human affairs. They were the most dynamic of the early 20th-century human sciences, as can be seen in the careers of Émile Durkheim and his nephew, Marcel Mauss.
Weber and other pioneering German scholars such as Georg Simmel focused on the problems of human history and consciousness that emerged in highly rationalized, impersonal, and "disenchanted" modern mass societies.
Already on the defensive in 1914, the belief in Progress suffered a body blow in the trenches. The First World War produced a pervasive sense of crisis and disorientation that would persist long after the Armistice of 1918.
Accounts of human thought and action that probe below the surface of conscious mental life may be the 20th century's most influential contribution to modern culture. Understanding this psychology of the unconscious mind means coming to grips with Freud.
Freud was not only a clinician treating patients but a social theorist and leader of a psychoanalytic organization. His controversial ideas eventually led to a split with his own leading disciple, the Swiss therapist and author Carl Gustav Jung.
British poets such as Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, and T. S. Eliot wrote movingly of sadness, loss, and confusion during and after the war. On the Continent, movements such as Dada and André Breton's surrealism radicalized the literary critique of reason.
How do modernist works of fiction differ from naturalistic narratives? Are the former closer to our lived experience of time and to the way our consciousness "streams" through the routine moments and thoughts of our daily lives?
Writing in French (Proust) and German (Kafka and Mann), these modernist masters told stories that portrayed the emotions and memories of isolated individuals, and yet in doing so commented on the problems and anxieties of modern European civilization.
This talk compares and contrasts two of the most influential movements in modern philosophy—phenomenology and logical positivism. The former was associated with Edmund Husserl, while the latter grew out of the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Spurred by the crises of the 1930s, Marxian revisionists such as Theodor Adorno and Antonio Gramsci no less than revisionist liberals such as J. M. Keynes and Friedrich Hayek critically marshaled the resources of their respective traditions to seek solutions for Europe's problems.
The intellectual and life journeys of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, his student Hannah Arendt, and the Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer provide dramatically different examples of how thinkers responded to the challenges of Nazism.
Writing novels and plays as well as philosophical works, and taking stands on current issues, existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus stressed the need for personal decision and commitment in a world torn by strife and haunted by absurdity.
The Italian Primo Levi, the Englishman George Orwell, and the German Günther Grass each struggled to honor the dead and help posterity understand modern human brutality by writing of his own and his culture's experiences of war, dictatorship, and genocide.
What are the "three waves" of 20th-century feminist thought? Why do Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex mean so much to the second wave? How has de Beauvoir in particular drawn criticism from the third wave of feminists?
Are the grand events that fill the pages of most history books just trivial surface ripples on a much deeper and more powerful stream? What made the pathbreaking researchers of the French "Annales school" of social history and the structural anthropologists think that this might be the case?
Reacting to both existentialism and structuralism, French thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida began in the 1960s to lay out new critical ideas about knowledge and power, language and truth.
What exactly is "postmodernism"? To answer this question and to gain a sense of how this influential but often puzzling "ism" fits into the larger themes of European thought, you turn to the ideas of the French theorists Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, and Julia Kristeva.
Chastened by a century of wars hot and cold, intellectuals such as the German Jürgen Habermas and the Czech Václav Havel offered thoughtful defenses of the role of reason in public life and the Enlightenment heritage of tolerance, human rights, and democratic deliberation.