$1,500.00
This course is part of the following programs:
Ph.D. (advanced MA students may register for this course with the instructor’s permission)
Admission into a qualifying Program of Study.
There are no prerequisite courses.
The ability to read complex texts and follow sustained arguments is required.
In this course, students will read key texts that document the growth of historical thinking. Readings include selections from Vico, Ranke, Troeltsch, Mannheim, Meinecke, Croce, and Hayden White. We shall trace the rise of historicism in conjunction with the development of the human sciences, the so-called Geisteswissenschaften, and ask what presuppositions and methodological models underlie our faith in the ability of historicism to illuminate ideas and cultures.
The primary textbooks will be Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W. M. L. de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness and Peter H. Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism.
We will also incorporate readings from the volume Doing Humanities in Nineteenth-Century Germany and original sources from The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook. For critical perspectives, we shall turn to Nietzsche’s Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions and On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.
The class will meet for three hours each week. The course is structured as a series of lectures. Students will be asked to complete brief assignments (typically between 3–5 questions) to test their comprehension of the materials presented in class. There will be final exam. This is a take-home exam.
$1,500.00
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