Ideas in Context introduces students to the study of ideas and concepts as contextually situated, diversely expressed and politically consequential forms of world-making. The course is a core requirement for students majoring in the Comparative Humanities. As such its aims to engage a variety of topical interests, treating ideas that speak to students’ everyday lives as well as global crises and concerns. It also aims to reflect the disciplinary diversity of the program, exploring aesthetic categories and religious precepts, as well as cultural notions and philosophical concepts. Underwriting these aims is an engagement with the contingency of ideas, as revealed in particular by concepts and notions at odds with modern, largely Western commonsense. One of the themes explored over the duration of the course is the manner in which such commonsense delimits ideas about what, in the first place, makes an idea an idea? The course takes the question of context to be central to the study of ideas. Within the historical turn from which Ideas in Context takes its name, contextualization means reading ideas not as expressions of transcendent truth, or contributions to universal knowledge, but as the products of specific, historically situated conditions and debates. As also explored by the course, such debates include debates over the idea of context itself, and its limitations in accounting dynamically for how ideas live and move. Thinking in a broader sense about the conditions of possibility for ideas, the course asks what makes certain ideas thinkable in the first place? Why do some concepts endure while others are revalued, acquiring new and different meanings, or recede into illegibility?
