Over the past few days we’ve delved into a number of philosophical perspectives on identity. Your current assignment is to research one of the philosophers we’ve discussed, read a selection of his work, write a synopsis of your reading, and present your findings to the class.¹ For your benefit, here’s a list of authors:

• René Descartes (1596-1650)
• Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)
• John Locke (1632-1704)
• George Berkeley (1685-1753)
• David Hume (1711-1776)
• Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832)
• William Blake (1757-1827)
• William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
• John Keats (1795-1821)
• Lord Byron (1788-1824)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
• William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
• Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
• Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
• Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
• Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)
• José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955)
• Albert Camus (1913-1960)
• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
• Erving Goffman (1922-1982)

We’ll sign up for presentation dates tomorrow with the first presentation the following day. If you’ve got your eye on an author, snag a reading (let me know if you have trouble), send me a link, synopsize it, and be ahead of the game for Thursday.

1. We are essentially crowd-sourcing our research for this paper. [↩]

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1. or an explanation of RSS feeds for those unfamiliar [↩]