Situating Whitehead
Learning from Dr. Marci Shore’s
Modern European Intellectual History
Marci Shore (born 1972) is an American intellectual historian and a professor at the University of Toronto, specializing in the history of literary and political engagement with Marxism and phenomenology. She is the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968, a milieu biography of Polish and Polish-Jewish writers drawn to Marxism in the twentieth century, and The Taste of Ashes, a study of how the communist and Nazi past continues to echo through the emotional and political landscape of contemporary Eastern Europe. She also translated Michał Głowiński’s Holocaust memoir The Black Seasons.
For many years, Shore taught a celebrated course on European Intellectual History at Yale University—a sweeping and accessible introduction to the central ideas, movements, and thinkers that shaped Europe from the Enlightenment to the postmodern era. Delivered in a live classroom setting, the course follows a narrative arc beginning with the late 18th century’s transition to modernity—when reason, science, and humanism began to compete with or replace religious authority—and culminating in the late 20th century, when postmodernity emerges as a recognition that the very project of replacing God has exhausted itself. Across roughly two dozen lectures, each 45–50 minutes long, Shore leads students through Romanticism, Marxism-Leninism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, phenomenology, existentialism, anti-politics, and deconstruction, bringing to life thinkers from Descartes, Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau to Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Lenin, de Beauvoir, Heidegger, Arendt, Adorno, Sartre, Girard, Foucault, Derrida, and Havel. Her teaching is at once rigorous and deeply humane, illuminating the emotional, existential, and political stakes of philosophy across two centuries of European history.
This page consists of podcasts of Shore's lectures. It is for anyone who has heard of the major movements in European intellectual history but would like an accessible, conversational way to learn more—especially in relation to Whitehead’s process-relational philosophy. A reading list from the course is available for anyone who might want it, but no additional reading is required to participate in or benefit from the podcasts. This page is also for those who would enjoy informal conversation with others after listening—reflecting together on how these movements and figures illuminate, challenge, or enrich Whitehead’s vision.