Yale Philosophy of History Reading Group
Spring 2010
January 18: Max Weber, “The rejection of the world and theodicy” (which expands
upon his better know protestant ethic essay) and “Science as a vocation.”
February 1: Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past.
February 15: Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point
of View,” and “An answer to the question: what is enlightenment?”
Herder, “Outlines of a philosophy of the history of man.”
March 1: Buck-Morss, Hegel in Haiti.
March 22: Hayden White, Metahistory, Part Two, 133-264. (on Michelet, Ranke,
Toqueville and Burckhardt).
April 5: Bonnie Smith, The Gender of History: Men, women and Historical
Practice.
April 18: Marx, “18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.” Yale Philosophy of History Reading Group
Fall 2010
September 23: Nietzsche, “Uses and Abuses of History.”
October 14: John Stuart Mill, August Comte and Positivism.
October 21: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, chapter 5 (“On the Development of
the Intellectual and Moral Faculties”).
Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative, volume 1 [ “On
Progress” and “The Social Organism”].
November 4: Sorel v. evolutionary Marxism as represented by the Erfurt program.
November 18: Pragmatism and American historiography.
December 2: Croce and Gramsci.
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Spring 2011
January 19: William Sewell, Logics of History.
February 1: Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences.
February 22: Friedrich Meinecke, The doctrine of raison d'état and its place in modern
history; selections from Ernst Troeltsch.
March 4: Heidegger, “The Struggle for a Historical Worldview.”
March 29: Ortega y Gasset, “History as a System.”
April 12: Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man.
April 26: Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.
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Fall 2011
September 14: Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History; Strauss, “Political Philosophy and
History.”
September 27: Gadamer, Truth and Method.
October 12: Bachelard and Canguilhem and “historical epistemology”
Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit; Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist.
October 26: Althusser, Reading Capital.
November 15: The French critique of dialectical reason and Benjamin/Adorno I
Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (vol. 2).
December 6: The French critique of dialectical reason and Benjamin/Adorno II
Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire;” Adorno, “The Idea of Natural
History;” Benjamin, “Paris: Capital of the 19th century;” Benjamin, The
Origin of German Tragic Drama (“Epistemo-critical Prologue”);
Benjamin, “Trauerspiel and tragedy.”
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Spring 2012
January 25: Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975);
Castoriadis, “Done and To Be Done” (1989).
February 8: Gilles Deleuze, Foucault; Deleuze, Repetition and Difference (1968).
February 29: Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France; Latour, We Have Never Been
Modern; Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”
March 21: Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (1972).
April 4: Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (1983-85).
April 18: Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3; Riceur, “On Reading the Human
Condition;” “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology.”
May 8: Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History.
5 Yale Philosophy of History Reading Group
Fall 2012
September 19: Vico, The First New Science.
October 3: Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(chapter 1 and “General Observations”); Pocock, “Gibbon’s Decline and
Fall and the World View of the Late Enlightenment.”
October 17: Rousseau, Second Discourse.
Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV; An Essay on Universal History.
Wokler, “The Enlightenment Hostilities of Voltaire and Rousseau.”
Rosenthal, “Voltaire’s Philosophy of History.”
October 31: Scottish conjectural history: Hume and Smith.
November 14: Special session with Stefanos Geroulanos: An Atheism that is not
Humanist Emerges in French Thought [on Kojeve and Merleau-Ponty].
November 28: Kant, “Idea for a Universal History” (1784); “Review of Herder's Ideas on
the Philosophy of the History of Mankind” (1785); “Conjectural
Beginning of Human History” (1786); Anthropology from a Pragmatic
Point of View, Part 2, Section E (1798); Allen W. Wood,
“Kant’s Philosophy of History.”
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Spring 2013
January 30: Herder, Kritische Wälder [on history]; Herder, Another Philosophy of
History for the Education of Mankind.
February 13: Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human
Mind;
Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati, “Introduction.” from the Cambridge
edition.
February 28: Young Hegel excerpts;
Yirmiyahu Yovel, “Introduction,” in Hegels Preface to the
Phenomenology of Spirit, translation and running commentary.
April 10: Gareth Stedman Jones, “Introduction to the Communist Manifesto;”
Jacob Stevens, “Review of Stedman Jones’ Introduction,” (NLR).
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Fall 2013
September 16: Marx, The German Ideology (Feuerbach and Stirner selection).
September 30: Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness [Preface; Class
Consciousness; Reification and the Consciousness of the
Proletariat]; Lukacs, Supplementary Readings.
October 14: Gramsci, Prison Notebooks [Excerpts]; Gramsci, “Revolution
against Capital” (1917);
Althusser, Reading Capital [Marx’s Critique; Marx’s Immense
Theoretical Revolution; Marxism is not a Historicism].
October 28: Jameson, The Political Unconscious [Preface; Chapter 1,
Conclusion].
October 28: Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety.
December 2: Nietzsche selections from The Gay Science, Zarathustra, The
Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, and Ecce Homo that
focus on the themes of guilt and eternal recurrence.
8 Yale Philosophy of History Reading Group
Spring 2014
Michel Foucault - Lectures at the Collège de France
January 17: Lectures on the Will to Know (1970-1971).
January 20: Psychiatric Power (1973-1974) and Abnormal (1974-1975).
February 10: Society Must be Defended (1975-1976).
March 6: Security, Territory, Population (1977-1978)
April 8: The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-1979)
April 22: The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1981-1982)
Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013)
January 31: Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, i-178.
February 11: Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 181-294.
February 27: Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 295-486.
March 24: From We Have Never Been Modern to An Inquiry into Modes of
Existence.
9 Yale Philosophy of History Reading Group
Fall 2014
September 11: Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man; Niethammer,
Posthistoire (excerpts); Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-
1965 (lectures 1-2); Postone, “History and Helplessness.”
September 18: Lenin, Korsch, Lukacs: Korsch, “Marxism and Philosophy;” Lenin,
“‘Left-Wing’ Communism.”
October 2: Spengler, The Decline of the West; Adorno on Spengler; Heidegger, “The
Concept of Time in the Historical Sciences.”
October 16: Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology; Heidegger, “Letter on
Humanism;” Heidegger, “Being-Interpreted in Today’s Today” (1923
lecture excerpt on Spengler).
October 30: Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965 (lectures 9-10; 16-18).
Benjamin, “Fire Alarm;” “On the Concept of History;” “Paralipomena to
‘On the Concept of History’.”
November 6: Sartre, Search For a Method; Sartre, Preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of
the Earth; Jameson, “Sartre’s Actuality” (NLR 2014).
November 20: Derrida, Spectres of Marx; Postone, “Deconstruction as Social Critique.”
December 4: Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man;” Taylor, “Comparison,
History, Truth;” Taylor, “Interview: From Philosophical Anthropology to
the Politics of Recognition;” Taylor, Hegel (selections).
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Spring 2015
Feb 5: Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
Feb 13: Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses” Critical Inquiry 35;
“Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change," New
Literary History 43 (2012);
“The Geophysical Agency of Humans and Climate Change,” Global
Energy Affairs (2014);
“Baucom’s Critique: A Brief Response,” Cambridge Journal of
Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1:2 (2014);
“Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Critical Inquiry 41
(2014).
April 3: Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society [excerpts]; Lefort,
Democracy and Political Theory;” Moyn, “Imaginary Intellectual History”
April 23: Lefort, “Marx. From One Vision of History to Another;” Lefort, “Outline
of the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies;” Lefort, “The
Permanence of the Theologico-Political.”
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