Dr M.S.J.M. Kardaun

I teach with great pleasure and was nominated for the FASoS Education Award 2010 as well as for the FASoS Education Award 2011. Several papers by students of mine that were written under my supervision have been accepted for publication by official magazines, such as a paper about Halldór Laxness by Anna Wolters, which appeared in the Dutch literary magazine De Gids.

Courses where I am either instructor or tutor or both:

Course 1A ‘Apollo and Dionysus’ of Bachelor Arts & Culture at FASoS

‘Apollo and Dionysus’ provides an overview of the development of thinking about norms and values in the history of Western civilization. It focuses upon a number of influential world views and their moral implications – from the tenets of Socrates and Plato to those of Nietzsche and Foucault. Starting point is the continuous tension between very rational, ‘Apollonian’, philosophical-ethical schools of thought on the one hand, and some alternative, ‘Dionysian’, more comprehensive approaches to morality on the other. For example, in Greek tragedy the inadequacy of an exclusively rational approach – and indeed of any form of one-sidedness – is a major theme. This interdisciplinary course, then, not only introduces the main Western philosophical ethical traditions in their historical context, but also deals with more implicit images of ‘the good life’ as expressed in works of literature and art.

Course MGT3002 ‘Great Books and Debates’ of UM-wide Minor Great Thinkers

‘Great Books and Debates’ comprises a series of sessions in which key readings of Western culture will be read, thoroughly contextualized and discussed in depth. We will read (excerpts from) highly influential books, such as Karl Marx’s Capital, Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and Franz Boas’s The Primitive Mind of Man.

Course HUM2057 ‘Religion, Myth and Secularization’ at  University College Maastricht

This course provides a broad approach to religion as a cultural phenomenon. It focuses on the following groups of questions and topics:

1. On defining religion

What is religion about? How does religion differ from mythology, the sciences, and the arts? What do secularization processes involve? In this part of the course we will look into some significant philosophical perspectives on the nature of myth, religion, and secularism.

2. On the contents of religion

First, we will briefly consider the most important characteristics of the major world religions. Against this background we will discuss a number of key narratives and themes from the Judaeo-Christian heritage, taken from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (such as the creation story, book of Job, death and resurrection of Christ, epistles by Paul).

3. On the politics of religion

In the last part of the course we will look at the role of religion and religious institutions within political power structures, ranging from the Vatican to the Middle-East.

Course HUM8000 ‘Ancient Philosophy’ at  University College Maastricht

It is impossible to understand our culture, including science, ethics, politics, and religion, without having at the very least some knowledge of Ancient Philosophy. Western civilization is shaped by its ongoing dialogue with ancient thinkers, such as Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and many others. Although we may not always agree with their answers, we have to give these intellectual predecessors of ours credit for having introduced to us – and for sometimes having already thoroughly dealt with – many of the questions that still occupy us today. What is the nature of reality? What is true knowledge? What does a just society look like? How to understand the relation between the soul and the body? Is there such a thing as 'divine powers' and if so, how should they be understood?

In this course, we will return to the sources and study the texts that helped us become who we are today. We will analyze a range of canonical philosophical texts from Antiquity, ranging from the Ionian Philosophers of Nature to Aristotle, and beyond. Although we will attempt to position these treatises in their historical and cultural contexts, our main concern will be: what do these ancient thinkers still have to say to us today?

One warning: even if you have some prior knowledge of ancient philosophy, that doesn’t make this an easy course. Only choose this course if you are genuinely interested in reading complex philosophical texts that do not always yield their secrets easily.

Course HUM3029 ‘Literature, Art and Psychology’ at  University College Maastricht

In the first part of the course students will become familiar with the basic elements of psychoanalysis (Freud) and analytical psychology (Jung). Special attention will be paid to depth psychological theories on literature and the arts.

In the second part we shall read a number of widely diverging depth psychological interpretations of literary texts, such as Sophocles’s Oedipus rex, Saint-Exupéry’s Le petit prince, Michelangelo's famous Moses statue, Goncharov’s Oblomov, Hoffmann's The Sandman, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, several fairy tales, myths, paintings, poems, and short stories.

The last part of the course is devoted to some epistemological aspects of depth psychological art criticism. We will go into three main questions: What types of rules are to be observed when interpreting works of literature and art? To what extent does depth psychological art criticism qualify as an academic discipline? And, finally, to what extent do depth psychological theories like psychoanalysis and analytical psychology qualify as academic disciplines?