Short Description:
Knowledge for Humans is a textbook aimed at introducing students to fundamental questions about knowledge and skepticism. Many topics often covered in epistemology textbooks are also covered here, such as radical Cartesian skepticism, phenomenalism, externalism, and naturalism. But the text also covers useful topics that are not usually included, such as the social conditions for knowledge, common fallacies, Bayesianism, the internet, conspiracy theories, and how we should go about arguing with one another. It’s written in an easy-going style with clear examples and funny diagrams.

Long Description:
Knowledge for Humans is a textbook aimed at introducing students to fundamental questions about knowledge and skepticism. Many topics often covered in epistemology textbooks are also covered here, such as radical Cartesian skepticism, phenomenalism, externalism, and naturalism. But the text also covers useful topics that are not usually included, such as the social conditions for knowledge, common fallacies, Bayesianism, the internet, conspiracy theories, and how we should go about arguing with one another. It’s written in an easy-going style with clear examples and funny diagrams.

Word Count: 42952

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This course gives an introduction to the science of linguistic meaning. There are two branches to this discipline: semantics, the study of conventional, “compositional meaning”, and pragmatics, the study of interactional meaning. There are other contributaries: philosophy, logic, syntax, and psychology. We will try to give you an understanding of the concepts of semantics and pragmatics and of some of the technical tools that we use.

This course will acquaint you with some of the important results and ideas of the last half - century of research in syntax. We will explore a large number of issues and a large amount of data so that you can learn something of what this field is all about. From time to time, we will discuss related work in language acquisition and processing. The class will emphasize ideas and arguments for these ideas in addition to the the details of particular analyses. At the same time, you will learn the mechanics of one particular approach (sometimes called Principles and Parameters syntax).
Most of all, the course tries to show why the study of syntax is exciting, and why its results are important to researchers in other language sciences. The class assumes some familiarity with basic concepts of theoretical linguistics, of the sort you could acquire in 24.900.

This video provides a brief history of Latin American Liberation Theology and explains why the Vatican condemned it.

Law is a common and yet distinct aspect of everyday life in modern societies. This course examines the central features of law as a social institution and as a feature of popular culture. We will explore the nature of law as a set of social systems, central actors in the systems, legal reasoning, and the relationship of the legal form and reasoning to social change. The course emphasizes the relationship between the internal logic of legal devices and economic, political and social processes. Emphasis is placed upon developing a perspective which views law as a practical resource, a mechanism for handling the widest range of unspecified social issues, problems, and conflicts, and at the same time, as a set of shared representations and aspirations.
We will explore the range of experiences of law for its ministers (lawyers, judges, law enforcement agents and administrators) as well as for its supplicants (citizens, plaintiffs, defendants). We will examine how law is mobilized and deployed by professionals and ordinary citizens. We cannot cover all aspects of the legal system, nor focus on all the different actors. A set of topics has been selected to develop understanding of the situational and systemic demands within which actors in the legal system operate and perform their roles; at the same time, we will try to discover systematic patterns in the uses and consequences of law. Throughout the course there is concern for understanding what we mean by legality and the rule of law.

As events of the last few years have shown, the Supreme Court has played a crucial role in American political life. There is practically no issue of social significance in the American past that did not at some point end up in the nation’s courtrooms, yet much of the workings of the constitution remain obscure. This subject is designed to introduce students to the main themes and events of American constitutional law since 1787. It introduces terms and concepts of law and legal history, focusing on three recurring themes in American public life: liberty, equality, and property. Readings consist mostly of original court cases, especially from the U.S. Supreme Court, but the focus of the class is on the historical connections between those cases and broader social, political, and cultural trends.

This five-day interactive and experiential workshop focuses on how leaders lead innovations that both promote social responsibility and produce business success. The workshop is organized around three main parts: observation, sense-making, and creating. During the observation phase, students spend a full day inside the Boston office of the design company IDEO and visit some of the most interesting proven innovators in corporate social responsibility such as Ben & Jerry’s, KLD, MBDC, Plug Power (fuel cell technology), PwC, Schlumberger, or core team members of the UN Global Compact. After returning from their company visits, students describe to one another what they saw and learned. In the final part of the Lab, students conceive and implement innovation projects that serve the needs of a local community. Each team presents its practical accomplishments on the final day of the Lab. Starting in 2004 this course will be renumbered as 15.975.

This course explores how we use story to articulate ethical norms. The syllabus consists of short fiction, novels, plays, feature films and some non-fiction. Major topics include leadership and authority, professionalism, the nature of ethical standards, social enterprise, and questions of gender, cultural and individual identity, and work / life balance. Materials vary from year to year, but past readings have included work by Robert Bolt, Michael Frayn, Timothy Mo, Wole Soyinka, H. D. Thoreau, and others; films have included Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hotel Rwanda, The Descendants, Motorcycle Diaries, Three Kings, and others. Draws on various professions and national cultures, and is run as a series of moderated discussions, with students centrally engaged in the teaching process.

Short Description:
Innovation today considers the economic, environmental, and/or social sustainability of an innovative initiative from its inception or idea generation through to its commercialization or implementation. This concept applies to many types of innovation such as products, processes, services, technologies, and business models. Companies use innovation as a means to gain a competitive advantage and bring value to business stakeholders. This book introduces business innovation, from incremental innovation such as enhancing the performance of an existing product, service, or process, to radical or disruptive innovation such as one that has a significant impact on a market. The content examines how leaders foster a culture of innovation, how companies turn creativity into innovation, and how innovation transforms not only organizations but economies as well.

Word Count: 46438

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Word Count: 138613

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Learning from Arguments offers a novel approach to teaching Introduction to Philosophy. It advances accessible versions of key philosophical arguments, in a form that students can emulate in their own writing, and with the primary aim of cultivating an understanding of the dynamics of philosophical argumentation.

The book contains ten core chapters, covering the problem of evil, Pascal’s wager, personal identity, the irrationality of fearing death, free will and determinism, Cartesian skepticism, the problem of induction, the problem of political authority, the violinist argument, the future-like-ours argument, the ethics of eating meat, utilitarianism (both act and rule), and the trolley problem. Additionally, there is an introductory chapter explaining what arguments are and surveying some common argumentative strategies, an appendix on logic explaining the mechanics and varieties of valid arguments, and an appendix providing detailed advice for writing philosophy papers.

Each of the ten core chapters offers a sustained argument for some controversial thesis, specifically written for an audience of beginners. The aim is to introduce newcomers to the dynamics of philosophical argumentation, using some of the arguments standardly covered in an introductory philosophy course, but without the additional hurdles one encounters when reading the primary sources of the arguments: challenging writing, specialized jargon, and references to unfamiliar books, philosophers, or schools of thought.

This course is designed to offer an advanced introduction to key legal issues that arise in the area of property and land-use in American law, with a comparative focus on the laws of India and South Africa. The focus of the course is not on law itself, but on the policy implications of various rules, doctrines and practices which are covered in great detail. Legal rules regulating property are among the most fundamental to American, and most other, economies and societies. The main focus is on American property and land use law due to its prominence in international development policy and practice as a model, though substantial comparative legal materials are also introduced from selected non-western countries such as India and South Africa.

Pratiques biographiques en formation, intervention et recherche

Short Description:
Les récits de vie sont bien connus en recherche. Ils permettent de construire une vision fine et subtile du monde vécu, de la société vue de l’intérieur. Mais ils sont utilisés dans bien d’autres milieux, notamment en formation professionnelle, dans des interventions visant la transformation sociale ou dans le champ de l’éducation. Les seize chapitres de cet ouvrage proposent d’explorer de tels usages des pratiques biographiques et autobiographiques dans des contextes variés. Les auteurs et les autrices, venant des deux côtés de l’Atlantique (Suisse, Pologne, France, Allemagne, Portugal, Cameroun, Gabon, Brésil et Canada), témoignent ainsi de la diversité et de la fécondité de ces pratiques. Cet ouvrage est le fruit d’un partenariat de trois années entre l’Université de Basse-Silésie (Pologne), l’Université de Tours (France) et l’Université Laval (Québec, Canada).

Long Description:
Les récits de vie sont bien connus en recherche. Ils permettent de construire une vision fine et subtile du monde vécu, de la société vue de l’intérieur. Mais ils sont utilisés dans bien d’autres milieux, notamment en formation professionnelle, dans des interventions visant la transformation sociale ou dans le champ de l’éducation. Les seize chapitres de cet ouvrage proposent d’explorer de tels usages des pratiques biographiques et autobiographiques dans des contextes variés. Les auteurs et les autrices, venant des deux côtés de l’Atlantique (Suisse, Pologne, France, Allemagne, Portugal, Cameroun, Gabon, Brésil et Canada), témoignent ainsi de la diversité et de la fécondité de ces pratiques. Cet ouvrage est le fruit d’un partenariat de trois années entre l’Université de Basse-Silésie (Pologne), l’Université de Tours (France) et l’Université Laval (Québec, Canada).

Publications associées : Slowik, A., Rywalski, P. et de Souza E.C. (coord.) (2019). Approches (auto)biographiques et nouvelles épreuves de transitions. Construire du sens avec des parcours de vie. Paris : L’Harmattan. Slowik, A., Breton, H. et Pineau, G. (coord.) (2019). Récits de vie et approches biographiques. Histoire et vitalité d’un paradigme en sciences sociales. Paris : L’Harmattan.

Word Count: 97156

ISBN: 978-2-924661-90-1

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Short Description:
Leviathan (1651)—full title Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil—is a book written by English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The book offers a criticisms regarding the structure of society and legitimate government. It is considered one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory.

Long Description:
Leviathan (1651)—full title Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil—is a book written by English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The book offers a criticisms regarding the structure of society and legitimate government. It is considered one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory.

Word Count: 208799

Included H5P activities: 1

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This seminar offers a course of readings in lyric poetry. It aims to enhance the student’s capacity to understand the nature of poetic language and the enjoyment of poetic texts by treating poems as messages to be deciphered.
The seminar will briefly touch upon the history of theories of figurative language since Aristotle and it will attend to the development of those theories during the last thirty years, noting the manner in which they tended to consider figures of speech distinct from normative or literal expression, and it will devote particular attention to the rise of theories that quarrel with this distinction.
The seminar also aims to communicate a rough sense of the history of English-speaking poetry since the early modern period. Some attention will be paid as well to the use of metaphor in science.

This course introduces the practice and theory of literary criticism. The seminar focuses on topics such as the history of critical methods and techniques, and the continuity of certain subjects in literary history. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication is a major component of the course. Other components include theory and use of figurative language and reading poetry.

Alienation, overcrowding, sensory overload, homelessness, criminality, violence, loneliness, sprawl, blight. How have the realities of city living influenced literature’s formal and thematic techniques? How useful is it to think of literature as its own kind of “map” of urban space? Are cities too grand, heterogeneous, and shifting to be captured by writers? In this seminar we will seek answers to these questions in key city literature, and in theoretical works that endeavor to understand the culture of cities.

Our subject is the ethics of leadership, an examination of the principles appealed to by executive authority when questions arise about its sources and its legitimacy. Most treatments of this subject resort to case-studies in order to illustrate the application of ethical principles to business situations, but our primary emphasis will be upon classic works of imaginative literature, which convey more directly than case-studies the ethical pressures of decision-making. Readings will include works by Shakespeare, Sophocles, Shaw, E.M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Henrik Ibsen, among others. Topics to be discussed include the sources of authority, the management of consensus, the ideal of vocation, the ethics of deception, the morality of expediency, the requirements of hierarchy, the virtues and vices of loyalty, the relevance of ethical principles in extreme situations.

The aim of this subject is to acquaint the student with some important works of systematic ethical philosophy and to bring to bear the viewpoint of those works on the study of classic works of literature. This subject will trace the history of ethical speculation in systematic philosophy by identifying four major positions: two from the ancient world and the two most important traditions of ethical philosophy since the renaissance. The two ancient positions will be represented by Plato and Aristotle, the two modern positions by Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. We will try to understand these four positions as engaged in a rivalry with one another, and we will also engage with the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, which offers a bridge between ancient and modern conceptions and provides a source for the rivalry between the viewpoints of Kant and Mill. Further, we will be mindful that the modern positions are subject to criticism today by new currents of philosophical speculation, some of which argue for a return to the positions of Plato and Aristotle.