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Course Details

Historicism and the Humanities

$1,500.00

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Course Code:

HAM8402

Credit Hours:

3

Course Level:

800

Area of Study:

History and Method

Course Description

HAM8402 - Historicism may be defined minimally as “the belief that an adequate understanding of the nature of anything and an adequate assessment of its value are to be gained by considering it in terms of the place it occupied and the role it played within a process of development.” On this definition, almost every aspect and every discipline in the humanities has succumbed to historicism. Thus, we have the history of ideas, the history of philosophy, art history, etc. The study of Hinduism becomes the study of the history of Hinduism: when did it originate, how did it develop from Vedic religion, did it experience a decline, what sociohistorical conditions explain it, and so on. This course interrogates the dominance of historicist concerns in the humanities, with a view to liberating thought from the burden of history. Guide by Nietzsche’s diagnosis of modern European culture as suffering from a “surfeit of history,” we shall ask what consequences “the historical sickness” has for the humanities. Can their contemporary crisis in fact be traced back to the crisis of historicism itself?
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Program of Study

This course is part of the following programs:

Doctor of Hindu Studies

Ph.D. (advanced MA students may register for this course with the instructor’s permission)

Division

Required / Core / Elective:

Prerequisites:

Admission into a qualifying Program of Study.
There are no prerequisite courses.
The ability to read complex texts and follow sustained arguments is required.

Semester / Quarter System:

Quarter

Number of Weeks:

Semester / Quarter Offered:

TBD

Days of the Week:

Time:

Start Date:

End Date:

Faculty

Dr. Joydeep Bagchee

Dr. Joydeep Bagchee is a core doctoral faculty member at the Hindu University of America and a visiting lecturer based in Berlin, Germany. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from New School for Social Research, New York.
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joydeep.bagchee@hua.edu

Course Learning Objectives

  • Understand the concept of “historicism.”
  • Reconstruct the various factors responsible for the growth of historicist thinking.
  • Analyze the rise of historicism in the context of Protestant theology and its interest in tracing a gradual evolution of religion from primitive to more advanced forms.
  • Identify the problems with historicism such as relativism, the inability to create new values, and ultimately nihilism and evaluate proposals to overcome these problems.
  • Identify how the dominance of historicism in the humanities influences scholars’ views of Hinduism.
Historicism and the Humanities

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Historicism and the Humanities

Course Content

In this course, students will read key texts that document the growth of historical thinking. Readings include selections from Vico, Ranke, Troeltsch, Mannheim, Meinecke, Croce, and Hayden White. We shall trace the rise of historicism in conjunction with the development of the human sciences, the so-called Geisteswissenschaften, and ask what presuppositions and methodological models underlie our faith in the ability of historicism to illuminate ideas and cultures.

The primary textbooks will be Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W. M. L. de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness and Peter H. Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism.

We will also incorporate readings from the volume Doing Humanities in Nineteenth-Century Germany and original sources from The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook. For critical perspectives, we shall turn to Nietzsche’s Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions and On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.

Class Structure

The class will meet for three hours each week. The course is structured as a series of lectures. Students will be asked to complete brief assignments (typically between 3–5 questions) to test their comprehension of the materials presented in class. There will be final exam. This is a take-home exam.

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Doctor of Philosophy in Hindu Studies
Please click on the link below to enroll into the Historicism and the Humanities Program or the appropriate phase.

On the program page, there are multiple payment plan options to choose from.

Doctor of Philosophy in Hindu Studies

Historicism and the Humanities

Courses in the Program