Universitat Internacional de Catalunya
Contemporary Thought
Other languages of instruction: Catalan, English
Introduction
The history of the world and of contemporary thought is an exciting and dramatic story, marked by the permanent will to break old bonds and open new paths. This journey of abrupt ruptures and transgressive explorations has illuminated paths of freedom and spaces of greater humanization. At the same time, however, it has produced complex anthropological labyrinths and resounding collective failures. In this course we propose to go through the main currents of sociopolitical and anthropological thought of the last two centuries. In this way we will be able to understand the fundamental notes of the sensibility and experience of contemporary man.
The objective of this course is not to learn a long list of names and dates, but to understand in depth the keys to the schools of thought that have shaped the world today. Mastering the fundamental concepts and categories of the great ideological constellations of our recent history will allow the student - and future journalist - to better situate himself in the background of current political, social and cultural debates. We want to apprehend contemporary thought in a broad sense, analyzing the main political currents, but also the turns in the scientific universe, the philosophical backgrounds or the main currents of social transformation: from liberalism and Marxism to personalism, through feminism, environmentalism or the meaning of the main artistic avant-gardes.
Pre-course requirements
No.
Objectives
- To know the main currents of thought in the contemporary world.
- To understand the key categories of each school of thought.
- To situate current debates in relation to the main ideological discussions that have characterized contemporary history.
- To understand the background of ideas behind the main events of the last two centuries.
- To understand the intertwining of philosophy, culture, politics and society in the contemporary world.
- To have the ability to critically analyze the main lines of thought, putting them in dialogue with each other and highlighting their strengths and weaknesses.
Syllabus
1. The prelude: Ancien Régime and Enlightenment.
2. The foundations: Classical political liberalism.
3. The deployment of freedom: Economic and social liberalism.
4. Romantic passion: Keys to the romantic movement.
5. The meaning and transformation of history: From Hegel to Marx.
6. The conquest of equality: Social democracy and Eurocommunism.
7. The Triumph of Experimental Science: Evolution of Science and Positivism.
8. The philosophers of suspicion: Nietzsche, Freud and the transmutation of values.
9. The crisis of Modernity: War, artistic avant-garde and totalitarian temptation.
10. The existentialist turn: anguish and meaning of human life.
11. The personalist proposal: the notion of the person as a way out of contemporary labyrinths.
12. Contemporary religious thought: twentieth-century Catholic theology and the Second Vatican Council.
13. The City and Utopia: Urbanism, Architecture and Political-Social Models.
14. The feminine revolution: the multiple faces of feminism.
15. Social criticism and postmodern earthquake: the Frankfurt School, the end of grand narratives, decolonization and the woke movement.
16. The New Conservatism: Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century.
17. The ecological perspective: The currents of environmentalism.
18. Thinking about the digital revolution: from Bauman to Byung-Chul Han.
19. A new humanity?: The dilemmas of transhumanism.
20. The paradigm of care: a social and political alternative.