1) Introduction to critical thinking: What is critique? What is its role in philosophy? What reasons does it have? What philosophic tools can it use to reach its goals? What role do these instruments play in philosophic conceptions of relations between man, society and nature? Does critical thinking differ in modern and contemporary era of philosophy? 2) Renaissance critique and its contrasts: utopia and scepsis. De Montaigne's rejection of anthropocentrism. Importance of nature for definition of the "human nature". Hobbes' critique of man's "animal" egoism. 3) Cartesian methodical scepsis. Reliable representation in rationalism. Seeking for certainty, mistrusting passions. Mechanical idea of nature: contrary to man, animal is a machine. 4) Rousseau's ambivalent critique of nature and "human nature". Search for immediate connection through mediation and representation: aporetical metaphor of "noble savage". 5) Hume's agnosticism. Critique of generalized repetition of experience, which is a mere habit in Hume: nature cannot be scientifically understood. Mediating role of imagination in empirism. 6) Kant's transcendental critique as a response to philosophic dogmatism. Search for apriori condition of possibility of human mind's ability to scientifically understand nature. Kant's conception of anthropology prefers man to animal, which has no moral values. 7) Schelling's idealist critique of scientific ideas on nature as a dead object. Contrary to rationalism, he conceives nature as a living pre-force creating human spirit. Comparison with Spinoza's conception of pantheism. 8) Nietzsche's destruction of metaphysics by means of his genealogy of moral concepts. Critique with hammer. Man defined by Christian morals is overcame in Superman, who freed himself both from Christian morals and nature. 9) Heidegger's existential critique of animal insufficiency: animal has no human hand, thus it has no technology, no culture, no being-to-death. Comparison with Descartes and Kant. 10) Foucault's discursive critique of universally valid knowledge of life. Power and discursive regulation of enunciation on nature. Epistemic breaks: historical relativism of knowledge on nature.
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