Course Catalog

As the bridge-course for the major in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, this team-taught course offers a multidisciplinary perspective on key questions of political economy. First presenting the similarities and differences between philosophical, political and economic approaches to political and economic rationality, the course offers varied analyses of representation and government, the commons, security, inequality and debt. The overall purpose of the course is to engage students, at various levels of theoretical abstraction and empirical precision, with the fundamental issues lying between ethics, politics,and economics.

Students attend a selection of philosophy research seminars and conferences held in Paris during the semester including events in English. Students will prepare three episodes of a podcast called "Philosophy in Paris" in which they update listeners on new developments in the philosophy scene in Paris. This course combines experiential learning with digital literacy, requiring the acquisition of basic producing, editing and broadcasting skills for podcasts. The professor will brief students before the events and then debrief them. With advance planning students will complete some reading to prepare them for the events.

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.