Bachelor 1

Mr Nicolas Wanlin, Humanities & Social Sciences Department

nicolas.wanlin@polytechnique.edu

Visit of 2 cultural places

among

- the Sainte-Chapelle à Paris

OR

- the Château de Versailles

AND
- the Musée National d'Art Moderne (Centre Pompidou)

OR

- the MACVAL (Museum of contemporary art in Vitry-sur-Seine: http://www.macval.fr/Institution)

Assessment

After having visited 2 different cultural places, you are required to write a paper (between 800 and 1200 words) in English about your visit. The paper should be a personal report, through which you will highlight all or some of these points:

* The comparison of cultural heritage and contemporary artistic production;

* The way historic monuments and works of art intertwine various dimensions (historical, scientific, artistic, political, religious, etc.);

* How these 2 places affected your perception of history (recent and distant)

Papers will be assessed on:

* The originality and precision of your point of view;

* Your understanding of the cultural issues explored throughout the visits;

* The clarity and relevance of your argument.

Due date: Monday, November 11th, 8 PM.

Accepted file formats: doc, docx, gdoc, odt, pdf, rtf.

Friday, 8:30/10:30, Amphitheatre Cauchy

Pr Nicolas Roussellier

Major Issues in Today’s World and the Place of France

The course is designed to give a broad and comprehensive view of the political and social place of France in today’s globalized world. Two themes will be addressed this year in order to understand the originality of French Politics. First, we will study the question of the French democracy and its difficulties. French Politics have gone through many different political regimes (Monarchy under different styles, two Bonapartist Empires, five different forms of Republic, Vichy’s Dictatorship) and recurrent upheavals from the Revolution of 1789 to the “Gilets Jaunes” of 2018. It is this “French instability” which is at the core of the First part of the course. Secondly, the course will address the issue of the French Secularism, the “laïcité à la française”. It was in the history and it is still today one of the great challenges of the French society and the French democracy.

Organization of the course

-          Two parts, one on the question of the French Democracy, one on the issue of French Secularism (“laïcité”)

-          8 Lectures on Part One with a Midterm exam

-          3 Lectures on Part Two (French Secularism)

-          Final Written Exam on both parts (Democracy and Secularism)

Sessions on ZOOM

Friday, 8:30 to 10:15

45 mn of Lecture on Zoom

15 mn of break

45 mn of discussion with questions by Zoom

This course is not open to International Exchange program students

This course serves as an introduction to some major concepts and theories in moral and political philosophy, building on the notion of violence. The aim of the course is to define violence and to shed light on its moral status and political use. The central problem concerns the relation between violence and justice: are violence and injustice equal? Is violence necessarily unfair? Can violence be of any good? Is any injustice a form of violence? Violence will be examined under its political aspect in relation to power and domination: contemporary subjects will be addressed, such as state violence and protests, terrorism and war, as well as symbolic and economic violence. The moral aspect of the subject will be studied in relation to suffering, recognition and vulnerability: violence will be understood in the context of race, gender and class and in the light of contemporary issues such as sexual violence, environmental violence and animal exploitation. This course should help students to get familiar with philosophical methods like following a critical approach, elaborating concepts and discussing texts from Plato to the present day, in an effort to understand contemporary problems in the light of philosophy.