Professor Vernon
jvernon@yorku.ca

Being human is, to put it bluntly, hard. Like everything else in the world, we just happen to exist, contingently kicked out by the collapse of stardust billions of years ago; however, like nothing else within that sea of randomness that we know of, we are nevertheless essentially driven to give our lives a kind of meaningful purpose, with no firmer guide to rely upon other than our own capacity for rigorous self-reflection. Born in the wake of the seeming collapse of the world’s value systems represented by the two World Wars, existentialism names the philosophical project of confronting the brute fact of our conflicted humanity head-on. Above all, it asks what it means to be a free being, confronted with choices for which we alone are responsible, and what it means to live authentically, or to take responsibility for creating ourselves and our world.

Because this is a course that concerns some of the most profound and difficult problems of human existence, the readings we will consider will touch upon topics that can be quite discomforting. This fact should be kept in mind as we all work to ensure respectful dialogue about them throughout the term.

Courseware, edited by the instructor; some online material, as noted.

Mid-Term 25%

Term Paper 35%

Take-home Final Exam 40%

Lecture/Reading Schedule:

Week 1  Intro. to Course; The Cogito, Freedom and the Absurd

Week 2  Albert Camus, “An Absurd Reasoning”

Week 3  Camus, “The Rebel”

Week 4  Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (available from Scott Library as an e-book in Basic Writings, edited by Stephen Priest).

Week 5  Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism (continued); mid-term review

Week 6  Mid-Term Exam  (Essay Topics Posted)

Week 7  Winter Break – No Class

Week 8  Søren Kierkegaard, “The Knight of Faith and the Knight of Infinite Resignation”

Week 9  James Cone, “‘Nobody Knows de Trouble I see’: The Cross and the Lynching Tree in the Black Experience”

Week 10  Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘Shattered Dreams’: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/draft-chapter-x-shattered-dreams; ‘Transformed Nonconformist’: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/draft-chapter-ii-transformed-nonconformist

Week 11  Simone de Beauvoir, “Introduction” to The Second Sex

Week 12  Alain Badiou, “To Be Young Today: Sense and Nonsense”, 1-30  Essays Due

Week 13  Badiou, ‘To Be Young Today: Sense and Nonsense”, 31-49

Tuesday, April 7th  Take-Home Final due.

These texts are often extremely challenging, both in terms of their difficulty and in terms of their thematic content, and thus the schedule may vary slightly in accordance with class discussion, etc. Consider this a more or less accurate guide, not a rigid schedule. As such, class attendance is necessary to keep up with what is happening any given week.

The objective of the course is to familiarize students with some of the main concepts of the existentialist tradition of philosophy, and to critically appraise them in the light of some historical and contemporary rivals.

Term Paper

Term paper topics will be posted on the Moodle webpage on Feb 11th. All topics will require a critical assessment of two theorists we have studied in light of each other. The paper will combine exegesis of the texts with critical assessment. Secondary research is not required. I highly recommend that every student discuss their paper approach with me in office hours or on email. Students can come often as they like, but those who bring to my office a 2-page outline of the argument they will present in their paper to discuss, will automatically have 5% added to the final grade of their paper. This can be done twice, and if the second draft is, in my judgment, a substantial improvement on the first, a second 5% will be added. I also very strongly recommend that all students, esp. non-majors, consult the departmental guide on writing philosophy essays: http://www.yorku.ca/hjackman/Teaching/handbook.pdf

Information on essays and late penalties

Essays are due on the day of the second last class, March 24th. All students, however, can have an automatic extension of up to one week for their term paper.  The penalty, however, will be that you will receive a grade, but no substantive comments. After that week, papers will be accepted for 7 more days, with a penalty of 5% per day, and again, will receive no substantive comments. Students who receive no comments, but do not agree with their grade can then petition to have their work re-graded by someone else, and I will support the petition. After April 7th, term papers will not be accepted, and the take-home final exam cannot be handed in late. Exceptions will only be made for a) illness (with MD’s note) and b) death in the family. I must be given 24 hours notice on email for these exceptions to be made, and they are at my discretion, not automatic. Do NOT slip essays under my door and do NOT email them to me; hard copies are not required, and I will not accept them. Departmental requirements demand that all essays be uploaded to ‘turnitin.com’. Pursuant to the Guidelines of the Yorku Academic Advisory Group, students have the right to opt out of submitting assignments to Turnitin. However, if you elect not to use Turnitin, in order to ensure academic integrity and fairness, I will conduct my own academic integrity review which will require one or more of the following: the submission of multiple drafts, the submission of a detailed annotated bibliography, or the submission of photocopies of source documents. I may also require you to take an oral examination directed at issues of your assignment’s originality, ask you to respond in writing to questions about your assignment’s originality, or provide a written report concerning the process of completing the work. The easiest option, in short, is submitting to Turnitin. I will not assign a grade to any essay that has not been submitted to Turnitin or that has not met my requirements for an alternative academic integrity review.

Information on registering for and using turnitin.com can be found here: http://www.yorku.ca/computng/students/turnitin.html.

The course ID for PHIL 2120 is 23334426 and the password is angst.

Citations

Either MLA or Chicago Manual styles are fine, but they must be used consistently and clearly. In other words, use only one style, and make it an existent style. If you use secondary sources, they must be properly cited in full, lest you fall prey to the perils of…

Academic Dishonesty

It is YOUR responsibility to know what Academic Dishonesty is, what the penalties for it are, and how to avoid it. Know in advance that I will seek, at minimum, a zero on the offending work, and that the penalty can include your being debarred, not only from York, but from all Canadian universities. In short, don’t do it. If you are remotely unsure about what levels of citation, collaboration, etc. constitute A.D., go to the Academic Integrity web site at York University (http://www.yorku.ca/academicintegrity), read the section ‘For Students’, and complete the Academic Integrity Tutorial: (http://www.yorku.ca/tutorial/academic integrity/).