This course engages with the deepest roots and fundamental trajectory of the contemporary European life-world as identified by three major thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. Taking up and problematising the Levinasian claim that 'Europe is the Bible and the Greeks', the course explores the idea that Europe is a cultural and political movement in deconstruction, a movement which might be summarized by Nietzsche's madman's pronouncement that "God is dead".

When they are required, registration "statements" for this course are a merely formal requirement. Please feel free simply to state: "I have read the Course Outline and would like to take this course". No background in philosophy is required or expected.