This graduate seminar, the first in a two-semester Basic Research Seminar sequence in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, offers a broad introduction to theoretical concepts and paradigms that are foundational for various disciplines in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, and in particular for the intellectual projects typically undertaken in the graduate programs in Comparative Literature and Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society. In tandem with core texts in the Western philosophical tradition from the early modern period through the present, we will engage both Global South thought and critical reappraisals of Western philosophy--with the understanding that we are taking only a first small step toward what should be a more thoroughgoing interrogation of the epistemic bases of the modern U.S. university. Throughout, we will unsettle the assumption that "theory" is a fundamentally Western way of knowing--or that, whereas "premodern" cultures can be studied through a diverse range of local philosophical traditions, modernity (even in its non-Western guises) can only be studied through "modern" (often Eurocentric) theories. We also will ask what "theory," as a particular mode of thought and way of articulating knowledge, might displace. Even as we trace "standard" genealogies of modern thought, then, we will interrupt and disrupt those genealogies at every turn. Finally, we will consider the roots of modern comparative studies in historical method; the roots of historical method, in turn, in scientific method; and the implications of that ground for our research as twenty-first comparatists. Ultimately, our goal in this seminar will be to explore the possibilities, the limits, and the perils of transcultural epistemic comparison. Our readings will span African, Arab-Islamic, Asian, European, and trans-American and Caribbean contexts.