Fundamental concepts in culture

This course presents an historical and critical introduction to some of the central concepts that were developed in the Western intellectual tradition (such as truth, mimesis, materialism, subject, ideology, etc). It discusses the relevance of these concepts in different cultural contexts and offers the students the basic conceptual tools required in the practical and theoretical courses of the undergraduate’s curriculum. The course diachronically unfolds following three main periods ( in Foucault’s terminology “epistemes”) in the history of Western thought: the classical period, i.e. the Greco-Roman culture, modernity, between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and the contemporary, focusing on the critics of modernity at the turn of 20th century. For each one of these periods a synchronic inquiry of the meaning of the main concepts will unfold around four central fields: the ontological – dealing with the nature of being-, the epistemological – dealing with the questions of truth and of knowledge-, the aesthetic, dealing with the arts and the idea of beauty-, the ethical and political - dealing with liberty, responsibility, justice and rights