2023-24 Academic Catalog

Stoic philosophers saw themselves as citizens of the world (cosmopolitans), a position that Kant enthusiastically revived in the eighteenth century. After the end of the Cold War cosmopolitanism was back in fashion. Even the favorite drink of the girls on TV's Sex and the City was called Cosmopolitan. However, today it seems that nationalism and xenophobia are making a powerful comeback. Is cosmopolitanism dead? This course explores the promises and dangers of globalization, as well as the inexhaustible attraction of nationalism. The attempt is to show that the escape from the unsettling complexity of globalization is not within tribalistic nationalism, but rather in the cosmopolitan transformation of identity, as well as of the sense of being at home and of belonging.