PHIL207

Why do we often talk about “deeper meanings” or “profound thoughts?” Paul Ricoeur famously
referred to Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx as “masters of suspicion” because of
their skeptical attitudes toward culture. All three thinkers argued that cultural texts imply, suggest,
record and signify more than is immediately apparent. Each philosopher developed a mode of
reading, a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” allowing them to read the conscious, material, phenomenal
world and our culture—and cultural texts like novels, films, paintings, dramas, advertisements, etc.—
as symptoms of underlying anxieties, fears, neuroses, repressions, or desires. In this course, students
will study primary works by each philosopher alongside secondary sources in which these
hermeneutics are put to work to figure out what social, psychic, political, and economic forces are at
work in even the most seemingly benign cultural objects.