Please note that this is an International Course taught at the IUC Dubrovnik in September 2018. Detailed information will be given at the meeting on April 5th in Oldenburg.
Please contact the International Office or the Dean's office to discuss a possible grant to cover travel expenses.
For further information on the course: www.iuc.hr
Abstract:
The course borrows its title from the widely discussed novel “Brideshead Revisited” published in 1945 by English writer Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead, the ancient seat of an aristocratic family, sets the scene for the novel’s theme: society’s changes and challenges within the context of catholic belief. The question the summer course aims to unfold is whether idealism might be considered a “conjuror’s name of such ancient power, that at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted last years” will begin “to take flight.” Revisiting the philosophical concepts of idealism in contemporary contexts challenges to grasp the power idealism shows within never ceasing transitions and changes of our world. Colloquially speaking, idealism stands for an optimistic, if not naïve worldview, but as a name, idealism also denotes schools within the history of philosophy such as American, British and German Idealism, or Platonism as a kind of prototype for all forms of idealism. In a stricter systematic approach, it is common to distinguish between an epistemological and ontological idealism. However, despite the varied, seemingly pluralistic use of the term “idealism”, idealism has always served in one specific way, i.e. as a catalyser for our understanding of nature, our world and our standing within it. Even though naturalism and scientific realism have been dominating the twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy, there might be more to the concept of idealism than being something that needs to be refuted, or sublated and integrated within naturalism.