Contemporary Philosophy

Professor: Nicolas Prignot

This course will be centered on contemporary philosophical texts, with brief incursions in the history of philosophy. Some of the texts will be thoroughly analyzed in order to get to the very material of philosophy. This year, the course will focus on the threefold issue of being as arrangement, characterization and set of effects. We will show how this description is an attempt at avoiding an essentialist outlook on philosophy, and try to outline a perspective on the world it seeks to build. We will dwell on Nietzsche’s critique of the philosophy of his time and on his attempt at developing a new characterization of being as a power rather than a truth. We will continue with the invention of American pragmatic philosophy through works by William James and John Dewey. We will conclude by charting a line of descent of arrangement theory articulated around the work of Deleuze and Guattari, who offered to characterize situations from the way they are assembled, from their components as evolving within ways of being together.