The Course of Study

This seminar traces the migration of thought as it swells, slips, and shatters across continental divides. Beginning in the reverberations of German Romanticism—Schelling’s generative nature-philosophy, Novalis’s crystalline fragments—we move through Nietzsche’s ecstatic science of becoming and into the fractures of modern metaphysics. These eruptions do not remain enclosed: they spiral outward, linking with voices that speak from other thresholds of experience, ritual, and memory. In the wake of Europe’s exhausted certainties, a wider world returns: David Graeber’s reimagining of human origin; Byung-Chul Han’s elegy for vanished forms of communal rhythm; Vilém Flusser’s meditations from the borderlands of exile and media. These thinkers do not merely critique; they shift the very climate of philosophy, altering its atmospheric pressure. Alongside this, we read Foucault, Irigaray, Lyotard, and Sloterdijk not as static figures but as volatile crossings, each reconstituted in light of trans-continental weather, each a vector in a mesh of planetary and epistemic drift. No longer a lineage, this is a field of entanglements: plural, radiant, and uneven. Students will be invited to track these entanglements not only conceptually, but tonally, to listen for tremors beneath the text, and to map new cartographies of relation between art, subjectivity, and the shifting figure of the human.

The Independent Study seminar provides an opportunity for students to deepen their academic interests while seamlessly integrating them into the broader IDSVA curriculum. A central goal of the Independent Study Seminar is to enhance critical thinking and academic writing skills. Students engage in in-depth analysis that promotes mastery of sophisticated writing techniques essential to the clear and persuasive articulation of complex ideas. Throughout the seminar, students are divided into small groups and have the opportunity to receive personal feedback on their topics from guest lecturers, the professor, and the teaching assistant. In this way, students lay a solid foundation in critical methods and scholarly communication — key to the success of their dissertation and future academic career. By the end of the course, they will be able to refine their research focus and produce well-structured, compelling academic papers that demonstrate critical understanding and intellectual rigor. Ultimately, the course prepares students to become influential scholars and artists who produce impactful, original work and are equipped with the skills necessary to make significant contributions to their field and participate confidently in high-level academic discourse.

During this six-day intensive residency in Madrid, Marrakech, or Mexico City (alternating years) students attend seminars and lectures, and give seminar presentations on their fall Independent Studies (802), conceived as formal conference-style papers meant to prepare students to be effective speakers and presenters in professional academic environments. Museum, gallery, artist studio visits, and guided tours offered by curators and museum educators supplement the weekly activities. Museum visits in Madrid include the Prado, the Reina Sofia, the Caixa Forum, and a day trip to the ancient town of Toledo, a historical example of multi-cultural coexistence through its medieval Arab, Jewish, and Christian monuments. In Marrakech, students visit the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden, the Medersa Ben Yousef, the Museé Yves Saint Laurent and Jardin Majorelle, the Berber Museum, the Palais el Badii, the Montresso Foundation, and Le Jardin Secret. In Mexico City, students visit the Anthropology Museum, the Frida Kahlo House, the ancient site of Teotihuacán, the Templo Mayor, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.

This seminar re-asks the questions stemming from the preceding contexts: “what is art?” and “what is art’s responsibility?” Insofar as ethics and aesthetics are situated as mutually exclusive terms within the formalist construct, the title of the seminar already indicates a theoretical disposition: that is, a movement in the direction of a “new” ethical and aesthetic paradigm. This movement implies both futurity (whereby philosophical thought proposes and announces), as well as multi-directionality (whereby we enter into a multiplicity of time and space). Ultimately, we will try to define that very moment in which ethics and aesthetics hermeneutically merge in the domain of art. The course examines the problematic relation between the ethico-aesthetic paradigm through the work of key figures such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Gianni Vattimo, Jacques Rancière, Michel Foucault, Rosi Braidotti, Achille Mbembe, Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, and others.

Following the Independent Study seminar in the fall, this course further develops each student’s research, consisting of a long paper on a topic of their choice. Students complete their IS by working one-on-one with an Independent Study director — a faculty member whose scholarship may be particularly suitable to a proposed project. Independent Study papers must be of publishable level; students are asked to submit their papers to academic conferences or peer-reviewed journals for publication. Often times Independent Studies provide the groundwork for the dissertation proposal to be developed in the Third Year.

In this intensive residency seminar students reengage Kant & Hegel with a reading of Kant’s Third Critique, a close reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, and texts by Heidegger, Heraclitus, Plato, Benjamin, and Weil. Consistent with the Topological Studies approach, students engage with these texts while immersing themselves in the art and architecture of cities like Athens (East/West Transhistorical), Berlin (Late Neoclassical/Early Industrial paradigm), and/or Venice (Baroque/Global commerce). Other readings reflect the contributions of Visiting Faculty, and change from year to year.

In this short intensive summer course, we systematically approach the starting point for a successful dissertation, learning how to choose a topic and formulate the core question. This will serve as a foundation for the Dissertation Preparation Courses in the Fall and Spring, during which students write the introduction of their dissertations. In the first part, students present their Independent Study, while their peers improve their analytical and critical skills by providing feedback, together with the professors. In the second part, we start by introducing the Dissertation Handbook and Template, which will be valuable companions in the following years. In the following sessions, each student share their initial thoughts about the topic and research question of their dissertation. The feedback of the faculty and the students provides a solid basis for the research each student carries on during the summer in preparation for the fall semester.

Dissertation Seminar 902 takes off from where the summer course ended, in which we learned how to choose the topic and to formulate the question at the core of a successful dissertation. In this seminar, students start writing the introduction to their dissertations, which will be completed, together with all other parts of the Written Exam, during the Spring semester. Logistically, we proceed along two interconnected tracks: 1) Exercise close reading techniques and methodologies, applied in two exemplary texts for artist-philosophers: Martin Heidegger’s "Being and Time" and Hannah Arendt’s "The Human Condition." 2) Students develop independent research on their dissertation topics, working on the bibliography and selecting a number of key texts, from which they extract and comment on relevant quotes and passages to support their arguments. While discussing these developments during individual calls with the faculty and interactive forums with their peers, students also start working on parts 1, 2, and 4 (Thesis, Concept, Methodologies) of the dissertation template, which will lay the ground for the Dissertation Seminar: Written Exam, in the Spring.

This Seminar situates the artist-philosopher as a figure who transgresses the boundaries between art and philosophy that Western Metaphysics established initially. Sometimes this figure finds itself at the heart of the central philosophical issues; at other times it rises in the poetic and artistic gestures that swirl around these central issues. In this course, then, we examine the main concepts in Western philosophy through the lens of the artist-philosopher, aiming to renew or even undo their trajectory. As we travel through the chronology of philosophical thought, from Aeschylus to Kristeva, we ask, what might constitute New Philosophy? And what tools do artist-philosophers have at their disposal, and which ones do they have to envision themselves?

During this online intensive workshop, students have the opportunity to discuss their Dissertation ideas, questions, and plans with their peers and professors, preparing for the Spring Dissertation Course.

This Dissertation Seminar addresses how to plan for a long-term research project (the 80k-100K word dissertation), helping students to create reasonable deadlines, conduct efficient research, and balance the simultaneous advancement of writing and scholarship. Over this semester, students complete an introduction of their dissertation projects started in the Fall semester. An annotated bibliography is also completed in this semester, in preparation for the Qualifying Oral Examination (scheduled in the summer). During one-on-one calls and conference calls, faculty and students discuss techniques for efficient and sustainable research, and offer feedback on each student’s paper-in-progress, focusing in particular on the development of an argument supported by evidence grounded in original interpretation of existing scholarship, and articulation of new concepts.

After addressing the figure of the artist-philosopher and its particular ways of doing “contemporary” philosophy in the Fall, seminar 906 expands this philosophical journey into a wider realm of thought, where a philosophical figure turns into a philosophical climate, where art turns into poetics and essences into ecosystems. Texts that provided us with foundations for thinking now connect us to an entire ecosystem of being where conceptual, environmental, decolonial, and futural concerns are envisioned. The artist-philosopher stands on a geo-ontological ground where trans-continental glissement encompasses all continents that exert their visible and invisible influence on thought yet to come, including the ‘archipelago’ as a new spatial paradigm.

This residency focuses on on-site visits to prominent New York City institutions and significant contemporary exhibitions. Site visits include the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum, Museo del Barrio, MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), Neue Galerie, Chelsea art galleries, and artist studios, among others. Our goal is to bring together the 3rd-year cohort to experience and exchange views on the interconnections and reverberations between philosophy and the visual arts. As arguably the capital of 20th-century art and still one of the liveliest centers for producing and displaying art and culture in the world, New York City is an ideal place to immerse students in the post-industrial urban experience while critically reflecting on its unparalleled offerings of modern and contemporary art. The New York residency is attached to the yearly Commencement at the Morgan Library and Museum’s Auditorium, and ends with the annual celebration of IDSVA's growing community.

The Qualifying Examination includes two components, a Written and an Oral. The Written Exam must be completed prior to sitting for the Oral examination, and it consists of the paper and attending documents written in the Dissertation Preparation seminars I and II. Students take their Oral Exams in the summer at the end of their third year. A one-month seminar will help students prepare the materials and focus on the content and methodologies to use during the exam. After passing the Qualifying Exams, they obtain Permission to Proceed with the dissertation.

PhD candidates enroll in Dissertation Preparation at the start of their dissertation project, after passing the Qualifying Exams, and for each subsequent fall and spring semester until the dissertation is completed. The main goal of the Dissertation Preparation course is to guide the process of writing the dissertation, and to help the PhD candidate produce a document that fulfills the following criteria: 1) To form a distinct contribution to the knowledge of the subject and afford evidence of originality by the discovery of new facts and/or by the exercise of independent critical power, interpretation, and argumentation; 2) To give a critical assessment of the relevant literature, and in so doing, 3) To demonstrate a deep and synoptic understanding of the field of study, objectivity, and the capacity for judgment in complex situations and autonomous work in that field.