Course Offerings

What is Art? What is Beauty? How can I know what is beautiful? And what does it mean to me? These are some of Aesthetics’ main questions as it is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and value of art and the criteria of artistic judgment and experience. Various answers have been given throughout the history of philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and today’s analytical or postmodern philosophy, making of aesthetics a vibrant and dynamic discipline, constantly revitalised by new art forms and critical concepts. Through a thorough historical survey of the notion students learn to discuss art and beauty in a time when these classical notions are undergoing very important changes. Everyone is encouraged to bring in his or her own experience of art. There is no prerequisite for this course.

Digital citizenship is a key concept of our digital age, expressing the hope that a humane use of digital technologies is possible. The course contrasts digital citizenship with political, environmental, and global conceptions citizenship, before studying the political, legal, and educational dimensions of digital citizenship. It also explores selected practices of digital citizenship, including clicktivism, digital commoning, and digital counter surveillance.

In this course students develop further their ability to carry out research and write academically in the field of philosophy, as preparation for the Philosophy Capstone PL4095. Students learn how to plan and execute a research project with the professor’s supervision. This research project may take the form of a thesis, a series of reflection papers or essays on current research being carried out in philosophy at ongoing seminars in Paris, or other forms. To prepare the research project students are given further instruction on how to use various research instruments in the library, how to identify recent and pertinent research carried out in a philosophical field, how to develop and present a literature review of a philosophical problem or question in a given field, how to construct and annotate an up-to-date bibliography on a philosophical issue, and how to present and communicate their project in a brief format (students may choose written, oral or other audiovisual means for such presentation). The philosophical topics and texts examined in the course are determined by the specific directions taken by student research in any given semester.

What is politics - the quest for the common good or who gets what, when, and how? We study what defines politics in the modern age: states and nations in the international system, collective action and representation in mass societies, trajectories of democracy and dictatorship, politics and development in the context of capitalism. The course will introduce the student to the concerns, the language and the methods of Political Science.