Effective: Spring 2002
 

Course Number: * HISTRY 360

Course Title: Comparative Intellectual History: Asian and European Thought
 

15 Character Abbreviation: Comp. Int. Hist.
25 Character Abbreviation: Comparative Int History
 

Sponsor: Prof. James Jaffe		E-mail Address: jaffej@mail.uww.edu
Department: History		College: Letters & Science
Co-sponsor: Prof. Richard Yasko		E-mail Address: yaskor@mail.uww.edu
Department: History		College: Letters & Science

 
Other Programs Affected: None

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_X_ None __ Writing __ Computer __ Diversity __ General Ed: Area
 

Credit/Contact Hours: (per semester)

Total lab hours:			Total lecture hours:	48
Number of credits:	3.0		Total contact hours:	48

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No of times in degree			No of credits in degree

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Course justification:
Currently, the Department does not offer any courses in the field of intellectual history. Over the last decade, this field has seen something of a revival in historical studies and is now quite central to the study of history generally. Therefore, this course will help fill a significant gap in the Department’s offerings to students. In addition, this course has been developed as an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural offering. As such, it offers to students a much needed global perspective that will be necessary for their education.

Relationship to program assessment objectives:
This course meets several of the department’s program assessment objectives:

• it will provide students with an in-depth knowledge of a thematic historical topic in order to develop an awareness of the complexity of historical events (Assessment Goal #3).

• it will provide students with a basic knowledge of a non-western culture (Assessment Goal #4)

• it will provide students with an ability to analyze and evaluate historical sources and historical evidence (Assessment Goal #6)

• it will provide students the opportunity to trace the formation and development of principal cultural and political factors that shaped different historical periods (Assessment Goal #7)

Course description:
This course examines major themes in the history of social and political thought within a comparative, cross-cultural framework. It focuses on the contributions of a variety of intellectual traditions that sought to comprehend and explain the complexity of humanity, including the dichotomies of faith and reason, freedom and authority, the individual and society, and modernity and tradition. The philosophical heritages of the west and east will be situated within their historical contexts through the examination of the major social, political and economic changes that contributed to the intellectual climate of the time.

Course requisites:
Sophomore class standing or permission of the instructor

Course objectives and tentative course syllabus:
Course objectives: By the end of this course students will be able to:

• identify and understand basic themes in the intellectual and cultural history of Europe and Asia
• explain the congruity or non-congruity of Asian and European ethical constructs and their durability
• understand the nature and method of intellectual historical research
• gain a greater understanding of the impact of social and economic forces on intellectual development and vice versa.

Tentative course syllabus:

HISTRY 360

Professors Jaffe & Yasko

General Information:

Office: 218, 214 Baker Hall
Office Hours: W 5-6:00
Contact Numbers: T, Th 9-9:30; 11-12:30
Phone: x1103, x5153

E-mail: jaffej@mail.uww.edu
yaskor@mail.uww.edu

Prerequisites: Sophomore class standing.

Goals: This course examines major themes in the history of social and political thought within a comparative, cross-cultural framework. It focuses on the contributions of a variety of intellectual traditions that sought to comprehend and explain the complexity of humanity, including the dichotomies of faith and reason, freedom and authority, the individual and society, and modernity and tradition. The philosophical heritages of the west and east will be situated within their historical contexts through the examination of the major social, political and economic changes that contributed to the intellectual climate of the time.

Texts:

• Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, Philip J. Ivanhoe (Editor), Bryan W. Van Norden (Editor) (2000)
• Main Currents of Western Thought : Readings in Western European Intellectual History from the Middle Ages to the Present, 4^th ed., Franklin Le Van Bauner, ed. (1986)

I.  War, Honor and Society in the Classical Period (Weeks 1-2)

1. Lectures on the Classical period in Europe and Asia
2. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, selections
3. Selections from Ssu Ma-chien

1. Lectures on the cultural  world of ancient Greece and China
2. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, selections
3. Selections from Confucius

1. Lectures on late medieval and early modern politics in Europe and Asia
2. Machiavelli, The Prince, all.
3. Shinto, Indigenous Cults and the State

1. Lecture on Enlightenment thought and the Age of Reason
2. Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding (selections)
3. Kant, What is Enlightenment?
4. Neo-confucianism

1. Lecture on 17th and 18th century religious thought
2. Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, selections
3. Motoori Norinaga

1. Lectures on evolutionary theory in the 19th century
2. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, selections
3. Writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi, selections

1. Lectures on 19th and 20th century popular movements
2. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto and selections from Capital.
3. Mao and the Peasantry as Proletariat

 

1. Lectures on the transition to modernity and the social crises of the modern era.
2. Nietzche, Beyond Good and Evil, selections.
3. K’ang Yu-Wei, The Last Stand of Confucianism

• All students are required to attend class and will be subject to several short exams on the reading material over the course of the semester. Preparation of the reading assignment is especially important since approximately 10 per cent of your final grade is based upon class participation, comprehension of the reading material, and acuity of observation of the reading material.

• All students must complete four (4) assignments. Two of them, both 10 pages, will be on a topics assigned in class and related to the reading material. A third will be a book review. The fourth assignment will be a research paper on a topic selected by the individual student but approved by the instructor. This paper will be approximately 10-15 pages. Further writing requirements for the papers will be discussed in class and distributed beforehand.

• Additional or revised assignments may be assigned at the discretion of the instructor.

• There are no make-ups for quizzes. All papers will be due in class on the date assigned. Unexcused late papers or other assignments will be reduced by one full grade for each class period missed.

• All work submitted must be that of the individual student. All other work, unless properly annotated or referenced, constitutes plagiarism and will be referred to the proper university officials for appropriate action.

• This course is designed to be conducted in the ‘seminar style.’ That is, the class is based upon a discussion format in which the seminar leader offers questions or topics to be discussed and analyzed by the seminar participants. Therefore, all students must be ready, willing and prepared to participate in our daily discussions of the assigned reading materials. All students will also have to take a turn as a seminar leader. For those of you interested in the bottom line, your regular and active participation in class discussions is required to pass the course.

 

*Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968)

*Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)

*Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Intellectual Life (New York: Harpercollins, 2000)

John Boardman, Jasper Griffin. And Oswyn Murray, eds., Greece and the Hellenistic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)

W. J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)

John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London: Routledge, 1996)

*Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition from Leonardo to Hegel (New York: Harpercollins, 1986)

Jacques Brunschwig, G. E. R. Lloyd, Pierre Pellegrin, eds., Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)

J. W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)

*G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)

*Marcia Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)

*Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)

*J. Dower, Embracing Defeat (Norton, 1999)

*P. Duus, Feudalism in Japan (McGraw Hill, 1993)

Jon Elster, An Introduction to Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)

*N. Field, In the Realm of the Dying Emperor (Vintage, 1993)

*S. Garon, Molding Japanese Minds (Princeton, 1997)

*A. Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (University of California, 1991)

Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001)

Knud Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)

*M. Hane, Reflections on the way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan (University of California, 1988)

H. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity (Princeton, 2000)

*Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977)

*Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)

*Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)

Esther Kingston-Mann, Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)

V. Koschman, Revolution and the Subjectivity in Modern Japan (Chicago, 1996)

*Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983)

*Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982)

*Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

*J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)

Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The British Enlightenment (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000)

*K. Pyle, The New Generation in Meji, Japan (Stanford, 1969)

Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, A. Goldhammer, trans. (1993; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)

*John Edward Toews, Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805-1841 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)

Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20^th Century (New York: Harpercollins, 2001)

Zhu Weizheng, Coming Out of the Middle Ages: Comparative Reflections on China and the West, Ruth Hayhoe, trans. (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1990)