The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, established in 2011, offers liberal arts education and research opportunities to local communities while supporting young scholars. With a mission to engage various intellectual traditions, the institute aims to provide accessible education and foster active, engaged citizens.
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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 247 West 37th St, New York, NY
The transition from empire to nation-state was among the most consequential developments to shape the Middle East over the last hundred years. Beginning with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire at the close of WWI, the post-war international order invalidated heterogeneous forms of political organization in favor of the nation-state. It was a shift that rendered customary patterns of political and social life in the Middle East newly untenable,...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 15 W 16th St, New York, NY
Al-Andalus: Tolerance, Culture, and Violence in Medieval Spain Between 711 and 1492, Islamic governments ruled over varying swaths of the Iberian Peninsula. Muslim Spain, or al-Andalus, still holds a powerful grip on the modern imagination as a time and place of religious tolerance—a “golden age” in which Muslims, Jews, and Christians peacefully coexisted and culturally thrived. In this course we will explore this common perception of al-Andalus...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 178 Stanton St, New York, NY
In this class, we will read several of Schmitt’s key works in their entirety, including The Concept of the Political, Political Theology, and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, as well as key selections from later thinkers influenced by Schmitt. We will examine questions such as: what is “the political”? What is sovereignty? What is enmity and what is war? Why do we have a state? What are the boundaries between politics and reason? Students...
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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 247 West 37th St, New York, NY
From zero-sum games and the “prisoner’s dilemma” to rational actors and the Nash equilibrium, game theory has grown from a bold conjecture into a deeply influential mode of analysis in political science, economics, psychology, business, mathematics, and even military strategy. Based on a theory of simple card games developed by John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, game theory seeks to use these game situations to model human, computer, and...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 275 Madison Ave, New York, NY
This course is intended as a critical introduction to political economy. Students will evaluate these questions by reading selected writings from major figures in the field. We begin with extracts from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, introducing such complex notions as the labor theory of value, the benefits of free trade, productivity, and the division of labor. Although Smith grounded his claims in self-interest and market...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 275 Madison Ave, New York, NY
This class is the study of a seemingly new financial and monetary age—one in which lending and borrowing, performed on an immense scale, play a central and driving role in national and international economic and political affairs. We’ll attempt to understand the workings of debt in its multiple dimensions–as a substitute for rising wages; as capital and a means of production; as a requirement for government spending; as a means of social and...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 247 West 37th St, New York, NY
Long before the development of modern academic and scientific disciplines, the early modern scientific revolution was exemplified by “natural philosophers”—polymaths like Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes who saw no clear distinction between philosophical, scientific, social, and other forms of inquiry. The scientific revolution, born partly from the insights they provided, was also a philosophical revolution,...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 247 West 37th St, New York, NY
While for many in the United States liberalism is understood as a loose category of political identification – whose definition has shifted significantly and not always transparently over the past century – fewer people are familiar with liberal political philosophy despite its overwhelming influence on political discourse both left and right. Our public language and discussions are often littered with the ideas, ideals, phrases, and thoughts...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 30 Irving Pl, New York, NY
Kant’s “Critical philosophy,” which begins with the appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, is an attempt to understand the total scope and limits of human reason, science, and morality. Moreover, he argues that the purpose of philosophy is to answer the fundamental questions that emerge from such an attempt: “What can we know? What should we do? What can we hope for?” In other words: Can we really know what reality...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 612 W 116th St, New York, NY
The Bible is a wonderfully comprehensive collection of stories: a parade of heroes and villains, royals and peasants, dysfunctional families and the truest of filial loyalties. Its texts span genres from poetry to novella, short story to historical epic, legalistic writing to satire, and instructional manual to the confessional. However, this simple fact of the Bible’s literary quality and variety often gets lost in discussions of authorship...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 247 West 37th St, New York, NY
Aristotle’s Poetics offers an account of imitative art and its pleasures that stands at the origins of Western aesthetic theory. In response to Plato’s critique of poetry as twice-removed from reality, Aristotle defends—and theorizes—imitation as an essential component of human education and of the “discovery of form in things.” Fiction is false in its particulars, but somehow true in its universality. What does drama teach us that history...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 275 Madison Ave, New York, NY
Students of economics are often puzzled to learn that markets are normally treated as self-standing, self-contained systems. But as people experience the increasing effects of global climate change, this form of thinking moves from dubious to deadly. All those unaccounted “inputs” and “externalities” turn out to have a frighteningly high cost. This is a challenge not only for common mainstream economic analyses, but also for many alternative...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 1216 5th Ave, New York, NY
At first glance, the work of science seems to provide empirically-grounded, universal explanations of natural and cultural phenomena. Yet as historians, anthropologists, and philosophers of science contend, such an understanding is at odds with the actual history of science, a history littered with racialized others serving as foils for the development of white, Euro-American subjects and societies. Moreover the “science” of racialized thinking–from...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 275 Madison Ave, New York, NY
Money seems like a straightforward aspect of our daily lives. But underlying its everyday functionality in facilitating transactions, measuring the market value of goods and services, and serving as a store of wealth over time is a stubborn question about what money actually is. As the economist Perry Mehrling observes, “Money is always difficult, and it is more difficult than ever today.” We often conceive of money as a “neutral” medium...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 75 Broad St, New York, NY
What is phenomenology? Drawing on lived, first-person experience, phenomenology is the attempt to analyze and understand the very structures of human experience and consciousness. What are the elements of perception, and why do different people, different subjects, perceive things differently? What’s universal about consciousness? In what ways do individual identity, circumstance, history, language, and memory condition lived experience—and thus...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 30 Irving Pl, New York, NY
The word “fascism” is used frequently to describe intensely militaristic, racist, xenophobic, or repressive politics. Almost as often, fascism is used as a shorthand for a form of “totalitarian” government—where “jack-booted thugs” from “the state” control social, economic, and political life. With the rise of a dizzying array of far-right figures worldwide—politicians like Narendra Modi, Viktor Orban, Recep Teyyip Erdogan, ...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 275 Madison Ave, New York, NY
Do capitalist societies have an inherent tendency toward economic, social, and political crises? Political economists have, over the course of the past 250 years, offered different frameworks to understand the existence of crises within capitalism: from Adam Smith’s “general glut” (when production exceeds demand) to Marx’s belief that the contradictions inherent in capitalism will lead to its eventual demise and the Keynesian attempt...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 30 Irving Pl, New York, NY
Within a decade of his death, the pianist Glenn Gould had assumed an almost mythic status, fêted by Edward Said, lionized in experimental films, and fictionalized by the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard. While other musicians might rival him in album sales, Gould came to symbolize his art form as a whole: classical music was a traditional field in an age of modern technology and mass media, and in Gould—recluse and celebrity, ascetic and showman,...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Wyoming Building, 5 East 3rd St, New York, NY
Uncover the essence of humanity in modernity as we explore the meaning of being, the impact of scientific and technological revolutions, and the diminishing power of art and poetry to reveal truth. Join us as we delve into Heidegger's later works and grapple with the questions that arise in an era dominated by scientific truth.
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 200 East 38th Street, New York, NY
Delve into the mind of philosopher Emil Cioran, as he explores themes of despair, doubt, and skepticism in a world without God. Join this thought-provoking course and discover Cioran's aphoristic style and its connection to his unconventional philosophy. Explore his life, influences, and the meaning of existence in this engaging exploration of a philosopher of unremitting despair.
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