FIRST TAKE-HOME EXAM

Concise, well-developed essays are required. Maximum writing time is three hours. You may do the exam at any tempo you wish--taking one question at a time or doing it all at once. You may use any resource material you want during your preparations and the writing of the exam itself. The typing time is outside of the actual writing time.

Each question will be worth 25 pts.  The exam is due at 3:30 on March 4.  No late exams will be accepted.

1. Compare and contrast Kierkegaard's Three Stages of Existence and Nietzsche's Three Metamorphoses.  Please include a discussion of the Knight of Faith and Overman in your essay.

2. Is there anyway to salvage an existentialist intepretation of Nietzsche?  If not, what are the principal reasons why he is not an existentailist.  Why does the thesis that he is a dialogical existentialist have its problems?

3. Identify premodern, modern, and postmodern themes in our 19th Century writers and their heroes or antiheroes.

4. Summarize in two paragraphs (and no more) the types of dialectic necessary to understand existentialist dialectic. How does Solomon's (on CD-ROM) understanding of SK's existentialist dialectic compare to Gier's understanding of existentialist dialectic?