| Credits | 1 |
| Restrictions | No 2022 2021 2020 Open to first-years only |
| Pre-Requisites | |
| Co-Requisites | |
| Core Area | |
| Area of Inquiry | Human Thought and Expression |
| Liberal Arts Practices |
Faculty Profile for Professor Dudrick
What is it to be human? How should we live? What is the meaning of life? Students confront these fundamental questions in our investigation of the philosophical movement known as existentialism. Existentialism came of age in 1940s Paris with the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, but its roots extend at least to Pascal, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. While they insist on rigor, these authors are no friends of abstraction: for them, philosophy must illuminate our actual, concrete, everyday lives. Their goal is always to challenge readers to confront these questions for themselves, a challenge that we will seek to meet – individually and collectively – in this course. Students who successfully complete this seminar will receive course credit for PHIL 216 and satisfy one half of the Human Thought and Expression area of inquiry requirement.
David Dudrick is the George Carleton Jr. Professor of Philosophy and co-author of “The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil” (Cambridge, 2012). He’s interested in the relationship between philosophy and the Christian faith, the viability of naturalism as a world view, and the profound ponderings of Jack Handey.