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Listed in: Religion, as RELI-63
Andrew C. Dole (Section 01)
This course traces the rise of what has been termed the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” particularly in connection with the criticism of religion. The discourse of suspicion arose out of the German Idealist tradition of the philosophy of religion, flourished in the later nineteenth century, and lives on in present-day academic and popular treatments of religion and of the study of religion. In this course we will read both the classical suspicious authors (Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud) as well as their latter-day descendants. In discussion of these two authors our primary concern will be to understand the characteristic structure and the appeal of suspicious treatments of religion; but we will also be interested in the question of what makes religion specifically an attractive target of suspicion.
Spring semester. Professor A. Dole.