PHIL 408 Nineteenth Century Philosophy

The course traces how post-Kantian thinkers grappled with what reason can actually do once Kant had drawn its limits, Fichte and Hegel pushing idealism toward a system, Schopenhauer turning it inward toward will and suffering, and Kierkegaard breaking with the whole project to insist that truth is something you live, not something you prove. You'll work through primary texts directly (Hegel's *Philosophy of Right*, Schopenhauer's *World as Will*, Kierkegaard's *Postscript* and *Fear and Trembling*) and write three essays plus weekly responses, so the workload is reading-heavy and argument-driven rather than survey-style. It sits downstream of the Kant and modern philosophy sequence and feeds directly into twentieth-century existentialism, phenomenology, and critical theory, basically the bridge between Enlightenment rationalism and everything that followed.