University of Bordeaux

This course focuses on the problems and methods of philosophy through a survey of philosophical responses to the following questions: What exist and what is its nature? What is it to have a mind and knowledge, and how much knowledge do we really have? Can we freely determine our actions, what actions are moral or immoral, and what is the good life for a human being? What is justice and is it possible to design a just government for human societies? The selection of readings is taken from the following four areas of philosophical thinking: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. The course provides a preliminary orientation to the notion of philosophical argument, its various forms, and the ways they can be analyzed. The course analyzes and comments on philosophical arguments, develops knowledge of the canonical position held by philosophers, and encourages students to develop and defend their own positions through careful argumentation.

This course represents additional work for the AGENDA SETTING AND ISSUE DEFINITION course. This course is concerned with how public problems are formed and framed. It considers how public problems become, or do not become, items on the public agenda in order to lead to policy development. After introducing the notion of agenda setting, the course develops the social problem approach, and then exposes leading concepts to explain the character of the agenda in modern times.

This course provides rehearsal of a wide range of choral pieces. Using the basic principles of song (solfege), students sing a Capella and to piano accompaniment. The repertoire includes works by classical composers as well as modern composers. Additional topics include learning polyphony, musical autonomy from tutti to quartet, and discovery of the choral repertoire.

This course covers mechanisms of DNA repair during replication and transcription, as well as the process of transcription as performed through RNA polymerases I, II, and III, including all cofactors and molecules involved. Various epigenetic modification processes are covered as well. All concepts are also evaluated in their role in cancer and other various pathologies.

This course traces the development of films in the “young cinema” of the 1960s in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Films by Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard are studied as well as Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, Milos Forman, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Roman Polanski. The course uses various examples to examine how movies can undermine conventions and break with classical cinema. The course considers the notion of modernity with relation to the following: what does modernity count for; what does it mean; can it be categorized as an aesthetic category; is it representative a historical period; and why did it have its renewal in the 1960s.

This intensive language course focuses on oral and written French, review of grammar, language, and written expression. Oral French focuses on difficult cases of spelling, vocabulary of selected fields, and sentence structure. Written work includes advanced grammar, syntax, and spelling, with a focus on academic writing for French universities. Texts on contemporary French society are used as a base for discussion topics.