Course Objectives: The course will help and encourage students understand the way in which major philosophers have construed the phenomenon of tragedy and the experience of the tragic, from Hume and Hegel to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. The students will have the opportunity to reflect on the work of those thinkers by studying both some of the primary sources and secondary bibliography. In this way, they will acquire solid and reliable knowledge with respect to influential interpretations of tragedy by early and late modern philosophical strands such as empiricism, German idealism and existentialism.

Learning Outcomes: After the successful completion of the course, the students:
•    will have an overall picture of the most significant developments in the philosophy of tragedy from early modernity to the end of the 19th century.
•    will be able to understand and to evaluate the arguments of the thinkers studied on the course.
•    will be able to identify other relevant philosophical texts, to analyse them autonomously and to reflect on them.
•    will be in a position to evaluate and compare a series of arguments put forward in current debates on tragedy and the tragic.
•    will be able to have a well-argued position and critically to place themselves vis-à-vis other views concerning the theory and practice of theatre and of tragedy in particular.