The Worldview Program.
An independent track running in parallel with Western philosophy, and occupying the same weekly session: the organized isms that translate abstract philosophy into the moral, political, and cultural commitments a scholar actually encounters in public life.
Ideologies read in the words of their most serious proponents.
Where the philosophy component reads Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche as authors, the Worldview Program studies atheism, scientism, secularism, liberalism, Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism as living systems of thought, each through its own primary texts and principal representatives.
No ism is taught as a label or caricature; each is read in the words of its most serious proponents. The isms are organized thematically rather than chronologically, beginning with the challenges to belief a scholar meets most immediately and moving toward the deeper currents of political and late-modern thought.
The isms a scholar meets most immediately in public life: the ideologies that press directly on faith, knowledge, gender, and the place of religion in the modern order.
- Atheism & New AtheismFeuerbach, Russell, Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens.
- ScientismWilson, Rosenberg; Midgley and Husserl as principal critics.
- FeminismWollstonecraft, de Beauvoir, Butler.
- SecularismLocke, Taylor, Asad, Casanova.
- Materialism & PhysicalismHobbes, Dennett, Churchland.
- NaturalismQuine; Plantinga as principal critic.
The political and economic isms that shape the modern state, market, and civic imagination, engaged through their canonical proponents.
- LiberalismLocke, Mill, Rawls, Constant.
- ConservatismBurke, Oakeshott, Kirk.
- Marxism & SocialismMarx, Engels, Gramsci, Lenin.
- CapitalismSmith, Weber, Friedman.
- UtilitarianismBentham, Mill, Singer.
- NationalismHerder, Renan, Anderson, Kedourie.
The deeper currents of late-modern thought: the crisis of meaning, the critique of grand narratives, the politics of identity, and the horizon of the post-human.
- ExistentialismKierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, Heidegger.
- NihilismNietzsche; Turgenev.
- PostmodernismLyotard, Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard.
- Critical Theory & PostcolonialismAdorno, Said, Fanon, Spivak.
- Multiculturalism & IdentitarianismTaylor, Kymlicka, Kendi.
- TranshumanismHuxley, Bostrom, Kurzweil.