University of Bordeaux

This course presents the political philosophy of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), the most influential British philosopher of the nineteenth century and a central figure in the liberal tradition of political thought. ON LIBERTY (1859), his most widely known work and one which no student of political philosophy can afford to ignore, is a cornerstone of classical liberal theory; and THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN (1869) constitutes a pioneering application of the theory—and of Mill's empiricism—to the question of equality between the sexes. The course proceeds in an orderly fashion through all five chapters of ON LIBERTY before turning to a thorough reading of THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN, making regular pauses to put Mill's thought in broader perspective against the general background of his empiricist philosophy, as well as the historical place of his thought within the liberal tradition.

This course focuses on the major theories of acting developed in the 20th century in the West, a period during which the theater underwent major transformations, particularly in terms of pedagogy. More specifically, it deals with the work carried out by French actors and directors such as Copeau, Decroux, Barrault, Marceau, and lecoq. The course also studies the two pillars of this pedagogical revolution, Constantin Stanislavski and Vsevolod Meyerhold, who, in Russia, were the first to emphasize the importance of systematic training for the actor based on the practice of exercises. It explores how their discoveries have changed the habits of the actor while opening the way to new research initiatives, including those of Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba, whose proposals are analyzed during the course.

This course is a general survey of the discipline of International Relations main theories and concepts, as well as a brief outline of the history of world politics since World War One. It proposes an intellectual history of the academic discipline as situated in the evolution of the world political context. The course provides the tools to form one's own rigorous analyses about how world politics works and why it works the way it works. It incites students to go beyond commonsense discourses and normatively biased or ideologically oriented assessments of world politics typical of politicians’ speeches, experts’ comments, and media coverage.

This course provides an experimental approach to psychology. It introduces the use of probability and common tools to analyze and synthesize data and apply various methods involved in the practice of the discipline.