Philosophy of culture

Pre-requisites: Knowledge of English

Course objectives: Student will get acquainted with philosophical approach to culture, with different historical cultural formations and ways of their evaluation.

Course description: The course is thematically divided into three parts. In the first part, students will get familiar with the basic philosophical ideas about the culture as a specific man's creation which is the product of his symbolic activity, with idea of culture as a method of shaping personality, and the problems of differentiation of culture and nature, culture and civilization, and different cultures. In the second part, students will deal with the basic features of traditional and modern culture, their weaknesses and their strengths, and their mutual relations. The third part of the course, however, is devoted to the general transformation of culture in the era of globalization and one of their special event - musical exchanges between modern and traditional societies. Instead of imposing a particular theoretical approach, the course will encourage analytical strictness and imagination. Students will be confronted with many different perspectives and will be guided to evaluate their effect in philosophical way - so they will analyze their basic concepts, methodology, arguments and their applicability.

Learning Outcomes: At the end of the course students will be able to analyse, in an abstract way, specific cultural phenomena and to formulate principles for the assessment of their values.

Literature/Reading:

• Stewart Hall and Bram Gieben (prir.), Formations of modernity, Polity Press, Oxford 1992
• David Gross, The Past in Ruins, Tradition and the Critique of Modernity, The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1992.
• Edward Shils, Tradition, Faber and Faber, London 1981
• Entoni Gidens, Posledice modernosti, Filip Visnjić, Beograd 1998.
• Peter Sloterdijk, Kritika ciničkog uma, Globus, Zagreb 1992.
• John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture, Polity Press, Cambridge 2004
• Isaija Berlin, Protiv struje, Pančevo 1994.
• Loran Ober, Muzika drugih, XX vek, Beograd 2007.
• Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts and London 2001