New School course catalogs never disappoint (until they moved online, that is). I've been enjoying dipping into some of the old catalogs which surfaced in that forgotten office closet last week - the real things, not digital copies!!
And oh, the places you'll go! Consider this insanely ambitious Friday night course offered in the early days of the University in Exile, Fall 1934, by a German Jewish pacifist mystic to whom The New School had offered refuge. (He continued to teach there until 1940.) This delirious romp through "great philosophies of life" begins with the Vedas, Taoism and the Hebrew Bible and goes on to touch on just about everything ancient, medieval and modern on its ways to "the possibilities in philosophy for discovering greater realities." Each lecture is like a whole floor of the department store of philosophy. Among contemporaries, Lenin and Gandhi get airtime, as well as "modern non-rational philosophy as the basis of Fascism." Only "The Caballa" gets a whole lecture to itself.
We were more interesting than one can even quite imagine today!
