Courses

The course will examine the difference between the norms which proclaim, recognize, define and assign human rights, and their application as they pertain to Roma minorities.

The structure, methodology, and some institutions of the Anglo-American legal system differ considerably from the "civil law" of Europe, South America, and parts of Asia. Since the IBL program introduces many substantive law subjects from the perspective of American law, it is important to become familiar early with how a common law legal system works: the central role of the "case law," the analysis of cases to determine their actual "holdings," the reach of "precedent" and of "res judicata", as well the structure of the American court system. This course explores these and other problems, illustrated by cases.

This course will familiarize students not holding a law degree with the fundamental principles and procedures of civil and common law legal systems and introduce them to the international legal regime. Students will be introduced to statutory interpretation, case analysis and legal reasoning. The course aims to develop skills enabling non-lawyers' participation in courses covering legal subjects and requiring background in basic legal education.

In an ongoing criminal case a select few CEU Legal Studies students will work with Adam Bodnar under the supervision of Professor Károly Bard. Students participating in the clinical course are expected to provide comparative legal research as required by the progress of the case. The course is organized around two intensive workshops and requires substantive individual research throughout the academic year.

This course compares basic notions and institutions of the German, French, Canadian and UK constitutional systems.

The course covers the following major topics of international (private) dispute settlement: Approaches to dispute resolution; the legal profession in various countries; the language problem in international dispute resolution; Litigation: Jurisdiction to adjudicate; Simultaneous proceedings in various countries;  International judicial assistance; Recognition and enforcement of foreign judgements; International Commercial Arbitration: The Standing of Arbitration within the Legal System;  The Authority of Arbitration Tribunals; The Arbitrators; Focal Points in the Arbitration Process; The Effects and Confines of Arbitral Awards.

The Open Society Archives (www.osaarchivum.org), one of the most significant Cold War and human rights archives in the world, offers a one-credit course to the students of the Human Rights Program of the Legal Studies Department. The course includes an introduction to the history and philosophy of preserving recorded memory and gives a short overview of the basic archival functions and types of modern human rights archives.

Addressing the special interests of students in the Human Rights Program, the course offers comparative insights into systems of rights protection in Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and South Africa. Mechanisms of rights protection are discussed in their historical context, in light of traditions and experiences of constitution making. The scope of rights protection in these jurisdictions is discussed alongside procedural issues (judicial review, standing, admissibility). The course also provides an opportunity to compare problems discussed in the U.S. context.

The course will enable students to analyze law from a gender perspective. It is to provide them with an introduction to the fundamental ideas and to the greatest thinkers of feminist legal theory that developed on the grounds of challenging traditional legal categories.

Law and Ethnicity will concentrate on the following topics: group-neutral and group-sensitive regulation; the issue of collective rights; legal structuring of equality and balance. Issues relating to law and ethnicity in the former Yugoslavia will serve as a case study. Attention shall also be devoted to the legitimacy of group rights. Language issues including official language and issues pertaining to names will also be considered under the angle of legal responses to the environment of ethnic diversity.

Constitutional privacy protection reaches beyond means shielding the home and private correspondence from uninvited governmental intrusion and surveillance. The course explores matters relegated to this penumbra: the most personal and private human decisions about one's bodily integrity, decisions which are commonly associated with the protection of individual self-determination (private autonomy).

Demonstrations, rallies, strike actions, pickets, ‘flash mobs’, parades, and processions are all forms of public assembly. As a fundamental freedom, the protection of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly entails positive obligations on the part of the State. This course will explore the challenges in fulfilling these obligations, and the parameters established by national and supra-national courts in relation to public assemblies.

Starting from the very few core norms of the Treaty of Rome on social and employment matters, this course will give an introduction to the development of the legal instruments relating to working conditions within the European Union developing from instruments merely conditioning the internal market into instruments of protection of fundamental values common to the member states.

Human dignity has become one of the most influential legal concepts of our time. It is commonly believed that human dignity is at the base of the international human rights culture, sparked by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The course will reconstruct the content of the concept of human dignity in a comparative perspective and assess the merits of its recent fundamental critique.

CEU is one of the participants of the international moot court competition devoted to the Vienna International Sales Convention (CISG, 1980) and international commercial arbitration (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_C._Vis_Moot ) and has been represented by one team on the Vienna finals for the last ten years. Students who actively participate in all the activities: research, drafting of the memoranda for the claimant and respondent, oral hearing rehearsals and finals in Vienna may earn one credit upon the approval of the Program Chair. The department is normally in the position to cover the costs of travel and stay in Vienna for those team members who will be selected to represent CEU in Vienna. For the last two years CEU moot team has travelled to various Pre-Moots and has hosted its own one.

The legal framework for civil society is no longer an esoteric subject. It has become front page news and the subject of high-level diplomacy. Civic space is vigorously debated in international fora, national legislatures, and community meetings. Indeed, we are witnessing a contest of ideas that will influence the future of civil society.

South Africa is now just over fifteen years into its democratic transition. As such, this is an opportune moment to step back and critically consider the manner in which the Constitutional Court has given effect to the transformative aspects of the Bill of Rights.

This course will introduce students to (1) the workings of a tax on income, (2) the difference between an income tax and a consumption tax, such as a VAT, (3) the internationally accepted principles for allocating taxing jurisdiction over income and consumption among nation states, (4) the double taxation problem with respect to international income, (5) methods for alleviating double taxation of international income, (6) the deferral problem, (7) the transfer pricing problem and (8) the effect of bilateral double tax agreements on the preceding topics.

This applied course aims to recognize the protection of rights of people with disabilities as a mainstream human rights issue, and to equip students to become effective human rights advocates.

The course examines the definition and the scope of protection of political rights in a comparative perspective.

The course explores some of the major issues concerning the relationship between law and democracy in two areas of regulation - elections and political parties. The course focuses on the constitutional protection of electoral rights mainly in the following jurisdictions - the US, Germany, the UK, as well as the jurisprudence of the ECtHR.

The course will examine theoretical and practical issues concerning constitutional equality. Subjects covered will include formal vs. substantive equality, discrimination based on race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, and wealth, affirmative action and individual vs. group equality. The countries covered will include: the United States, France, Germany and others selectively.

The aim of this course is to describe the uses and tools for research on crime, criminal justice and policing, and the contribution they could make to a more effective and democratic criminal justice policy.

This course deals with the external relations of the European Union and its commercial policy.

This course will help students understand legal terms in English by introducing and discussing fundamental concepts of the (mostly U.S.) common law system.

The course will include a study of (i) the basic WTO/GATT rules and principles that control national trade policies; (ii) dispute settlement in the WTO/GATT; and (iii) the WTO/GATT as a trade policy negotiating forum.

The course explores the complex relationship between human rights and power from a historic perspective.

The two central problems in international litigation (as distinguished from arbitration) concern a court's judicial jurisdiction over a foreign defendant and, once a judgment has been obtained, the recognition and enforcement of such a judgment in another country where the judgment debtor has assets.

This course organized jointly by the Human RightS Initiative (HRSI) and the Legal Studies Department provides students with the skills required when lodging an application with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

This course covers the theory and practice of fact-finding by arbitral tribunals in international arbitrations that take place under arbitration clauses in transnational commercial contracts and investment treaties.

Drafting contracts, and in particular international contracts, is a skill that is developed through experience and is not something that can easily be acquired through reading textbooks on the matter. Drafting an agreement is often one of the most difficult tasks confronting a young practitioner.
The same is true of negotiating such contracts.

The importance of studying the German legal concepts, with specific emphasis on terminology, at the legal faculty of a European university doesn’t need to be proven especially: the influence of the BGB - the German civil code - on the European legal systems and the extensive use of the German language in economic transactions in Central and Eastern Europe are clear evidences.

This introductory course is intended to familiarize students in the Human Rights Program with the precedent-based approach to the protection of fundamental rights and liberties though the experiences of the U.S. constitutional system.

The course aims to introduce business law students those areas of public law, which closely affect business life and the comprehension of which is the token of understanding of many business law courses. No better examples can be served than those fields of law that are increasingly referred to as ‘regulation’, notably antitrust/competition law, capital markets and securities regulation, consumer or environmental protection as well as labor law and industrial relations. Though some narrower interdisciplinary topics – e.g., the role the ‘commerce clause’ played in bailing out the US banking sector during the recent Credit Crunch or the transplantability of the ideas on the division of powers and checks and balances into the corporate governance context – will be given special attention as well.

‘Transitional justice’ broadly refers to the mechanisms created to expand opportunities for obtaining justice in societies emerging from conflict or authoritarian rule. Such transitions are often plagued by the difficulties and costs of coming to terms with the deeds of unjust political regimes. The two-credit course will overview and illustrate a number of core issues relating to the needs of victims and the role of law in preventing the reoccurrence of mass human rights violations.

This course will introduce you to critical reading as a process of evaluating the context and purpose of written texts, and enable you to apply the insights gained from this process to the production of a written critique as an example of such a text.

The recent global financial crisis has clearly highlighted the fundamental role financing plays in the life of businesses in developed and emerging economies alike. It is also commonly known that the leading economies of our times are the systems with the largest corporate sectors and hence it is justified to conclude that a strong corporate sector is the token of the strength of the economy. Yet strong corporate sectors cannot develop, or even exist, without readily exploitable avenues to capital and a legal environment that is friendly to the needs and expectations of both, the providers and users of capital.

This course is designed to bring closer to the students the European contract law through examining the principles and institutions common to the main European legal systems.

The course aims to introduce students to the characteristic legal techniques and central doctrinal concerns of public international law, the law governing the conduct of states, international organizations and certain other actors on the international plane. Through a focus on the relevant primary materials and by means of interactive class discussion of real and hypothetical situations, students should emerge from the course with both a practical and reflective understanding of the field’s key concepts, principles and rules. Seven broad topics are covered over seven two-hour seminars: the nature, function and efficacy of international law; the sources of international law; international legal personality, statehood and title to territory; jurisdiction and immunities; the law of treaties; state responsibility and diplomatic protection; and the legal regulation of the use of force.

Freedom of speech is a paradigmatic civil liberty, often viewed as a natural extension of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This course interrogates the core theoretical justifications for free speech including arguments based on truth, democracy, tolerance, and recognition. The course will examine contemporary challenges for free speech – especially those arising from the regulation of offensive, extremist and hate speech.

The course will compare the understanding of socio-economic rights in the FRG and the RF and will thus give the students an idea of the constitutional foundations of the economic systems (including social aspects) in both countries seen from the point of view of citizens or legal entities as economic subjects and holders of economic rights. Freedom of profession, property, freedom of association (including the constitutional foundations of the system of trade unions), freedom of contract and free competition will be in the focus of the lecture. The purpose of the course is to help the students understand how the constitution regulates and programs the functioning of the economy and of course the differences in this programming in the two countries.

The course will deal with both procedural and substantive law aspects of criminal justice and focus on the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. First the relation between human rights and criminal law and the models of the criminal process are discussed .The course covers the types of proceedings to which the guarantees of the right to a fair trial apply, i.e. the way the notion of "criminal charge" is interpreted by the European Human Rights Court. Further, case law on the courts' independence and impartiality, the right to silence on the presumption of innocence, the right to defense, issues related to evidentiary law and witness protection are discussed. In addition to the in depth analysis of the case law of the European Human Rights Court the relevant jurisprudence related to Articles 14 and 15 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights shall also be referred to.

Is the idea of the three branches of government an outdated artifact – or is it still viable in times of complex regulation, privatization, and the internationalization of public law? In this course we will develop a contemporary concept of separated powers and apply it to particularly problematic cases like independent regulatory agencies, constitutional courts, the parliamentary control of foreign affairs or the elusive executive branch of the European Union. The course will provide a more general lesson by elaborating criteria for a legitimate organization of public authorities.

This course introduces students to key issues concerning international humanitarian law. The goal of the course is to provide an overview of international humanitarian law and consider the role of humanitarian law in the international realm. Some of the issues to be addressed include the role of human rights, occupied territory, unlawful combatants, torture and IHL, and cultural property. There will be an examination of treaty texts, recent research, and cases before international bodies.

This course will expose students to the African Human Rights system and challenges of implementation and enforcement. It will further engage students to gain indepth understanding of the unique perspectives of women's rights in Africa through the examination of issues such as cultural relativism and conflicts with universal human rights principles; gender discriminatory customs and traditions which infringe on the enjoyment of women's rights and the lack of political will to fulfill commitments to gender equality. The course will also include an overview of the challenges of gender and migration in Africa.

For Justice Initiative Fellowship Program participants, an essential aspect of the year spent at the CEU Legal Studies Department is the opportunity to participate in a three-month internships with human rights NGOs in Europe during the months of January through late March. These internships are intended to offer the fellows new ideas and practical experiences to take back to their NGOs during the second year of the program. It is also expected that fellows, with their enthusiasm, strong work commitment and solid knowledge of human rights, will be of great benefit to host organizations during their internship.

The course will present an overview of the jurisprudence on article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and article 5 of the European Human Rights Convention.

The course examines from the point of view of public international law the so-called „war on terror‟ launched by the United States of America and its allies after the devastating Al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001. It comprises seven classes, each on a different aspect of the subject, namely terrorism and the right to wage war; „targeted killings‟; the apprehension, transfer and interstate surrender of individuals (covering among other things the US programme of „extraordinary rendition‟); detention, prosecution and trial; torture; combating terrorism through international criminal law; and combating terrorism through UN sanctions. The bodies of international law considered include the law on the interstate use of force, the laws of armed conflict (also known as international humanitarian law), international human rights law, international refugee law, international criminal law, the law of the UN Charter and the law of state responsibility. Persistent themes include a concern for the rule of law and the rights of individuals; the perceived tension between the rights of individuals and the security interests of states; whether the struggle against international terrorism is more appropriately viewed as a war or as a law-enforcement challenge; and whether „9/11‟ was a turning point in international law.

What role can documentary film play in promoting human rights? The course introduces ten recent thought-provoking, educational, professionally crafted, and visually engaging documentary films from different parts of the world addressing a variety of human rights issues. Thematic ranges of the documentary films include economic, social, and cultural rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, refugee rights, and international humanitarian law. The course explores the variety of means, from storytelling constructions to camera work and editing, with which concrete cases of human rights violation are presented in advocacy films and in the investigations of political and economic contexts which create conditions for human rights abuses. The students will discuss the elements of compelling visual storytelling, including character and storyline development, variety of styles of documentary filmmaking, distribution channels in relation to social change and impact enhancement, as well as the role of the new media in creating human rights documentaries.

The course will deal with the distinction between the scope of rights, their limits and the limits on the limits. We will discuss questions concerning scope of rights, definite or prima facia characters of the rights and the distinction between positive and negative rights.
As to the limitation of rights, we will discuss two main models for limitation of rights: the American model of scrutiny, and the European model of Proportionality. We will analyze the components of Proportionality, and will concentrate on balancing. We will compare both models, and discuss the Pros and Cons of each one of them.

Upon completion of the course students will be able to understand of the vertical and horizontal separation powers in the European Union; to understand and criticize the actual operation of the EU’s legal system; to demonstrate substantial knowledge of the relation between EU institutions and the EU’s law making process; to understand the relation of EU law and domestic law, the importance of the supremacy doctrine and the concept of direct effect; students will be able to make a distinction between remedies in a national court setting and before the ECJ, and will have a good understanding of the substantive law of the EU, more particularly of the four freedoms, competition policy and non-discrimination.

The course will compare the understanding of socio-economic rights in the FRG and the RF and will thus give the students an idea of the constitutional foundations of the economic systems (including social aspects) in both countries seen from the point of view of citizens or legal entities as economic subjects and holders of economic rights. Freedom of profession, property, freedom of association (including the constitutional foundations of the system of trade unions), freedom of contract and free competition will be in the focus of the lecture. The purpose of the course is to help the students understand how the constitution regulates and programs the functioning of the economy and of course the differences in this programming in the two countries.

Freedom of speech is a paradigmatic civil liberty, often viewed as a natural extension of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This course interrogates the core theoretical justifications for free speech including arguments based on truth, democracy, tolerance, and recognition. The course will examine contemporary challenges for free speech – especially those arising from the regulation of offensive, extremist and hate speech.

This course will introduce the judicial function from a separation of powers perspective. It will examine elements of judicial independence, impartiality and accountability.

The course consists of fourteen class hours dedicated to selected issues in criminology and forensic sciences. The course is offered to comparative constitutional law and human rights law students. The objective of the course is to introduce students into criminal politics as a state response to crime and the various concurring methods of postmodern crime control.
Upon completion of the course students will be able to understand the basics of criminal politics in postmodernism and its prerequisites in a state based on the rule of law. Students will be familiar with the main concepts of crime control, the paradigm shift in criminal politics in the 19th century’s reform movements, the criminal political concepts of the welfare state, the clinical or the treatment model and its decline, the development of the the so-called exclusive model and its institution; students will furthermore be able to compare the inclusive and the welfare models of crime control. Students will demonstrate substantial knowledge of the criminal theories and policies as reflected by the main international organisations of the United Nations, the Council of Europe and the European Union.

South Africa is now just over fifteen years into its democratic transition. As such, this is an opportune moment to step back and critically consider the manner in which the Constitutional Court has given effect to the transformative aspects of the Bill of Rights.

The course examines the definition and the scope of protection of political rights in a comparative perspective.

This course examines broadcasting and telecommunications law issues comparatively and in a global perspective. Our discussions on this subject matter will be informed by the ongoing processes of convergence, globalisation, and digitalisation. The first third of the course is dedicated to the constitutional dimension of broadcasting, and constitutional concepts at the national and international levels will be discussed and compared. Free speech issues (including commercial speech) and identity formation in the transnational context will be examined. Issues with cross-border transmission will lead us into discussions of broader problems in telecommunications law. In part two of the course participants will be introduced to global telecommunications law and regulation, with an examination of potential future problems, including the conflict between national security and the confidentiality of communications at the national and international levels. The third part of the course is focused on the competition law assessment of international mergers in media and telecommunications that result in horizontal or vertical integration. This course relies on actual cases and expert legal commentary whenever possible.

‘Transitional justice’ broadly refers to the mechanisms created to expand opportunities for obtaining justice in societies emerging from conflict or authoritarian rule. Such transitions are often plagued by the difficulties and costs of coming to terms with the deeds of unjust political regimes. The two-credit course will overview and illustrate a number of core issues relating to the needs of victims and the role of law in preventing the reoccurrence of mass human rights violations.

The course will deal with the distinction between the scope of rights, their limits and the limits on the limits. We will discuss questions concerning scope of rights, definite or prima facia characters of the rights and the distinction between positive and negative rights.
As to the limitation of rights, we will discuss two main models for limitation of rights: the American model of scrutiny, and the European model of Proportionality. We will analyze the components of Proportionality, and will concentrate on balancing. We will compare both models, and discuss the Pros and Cons of each one of them.

Human dignity has become one of the most influential legal concepts of our time. It is commonly believed that human dignity is at the base of the international human rights culture, sparked by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The course will reconstruct the content of the concept of human dignity in a comparative perspective and assess the merits of its recent fundamental critique.

The Open Society Archives (www.osaarchivum.org), one of the most significant Cold War and human rights archives in the world, offers a one-credit course to the students of the Human Rights Program of the Legal Studies Department. The course includes an introduction to the history and philosophy of preserving recorded memory and gives a short overview of the basic archival functions and types of modern human rights archives.

HR students may participate in internship programs with leading national and international NGOs in Hungary during the Research Module. The internship must last at least three weeks and culminate with a final project report.

This course is a practical opportunity to conduct research on different human rights issues that OSI programs are dealing with and to develop advocacy strategies on how to remedy the situation from an NGO perspective.

This course is a practical opportunity to conduct research on different human rights issues that OSI programs are dealing with and to develop advocacy strategies on how to remedy the situation from an NGO perspective.

This course will examine the exercise and regulation of police power in both stable constitutional states and transitional societies.

This course introduces students to key issues concerning international humanitarian law. The goal of the course is to provide an overview of international humanitarian law and consider the role of humanitarian law in the international realm. Some of the issues to be addressed include the role of human rights, occupied territory, unlawful combatants, torture and IHL, and cultural property. There will be an examination of treaty texts, recent research, and cases before international bodies.

The course consists of fourteen class hours dedicated to providing a thorough and practical introduction into European Union criminal justice. The course is offered to comparative constitutional law and human rights law students. The general framework into which the course is embedded is based on the question how a balance is drawn between human rights and civil liberties on the one hand and public order, public security, crime prevention and prosecution on the other. From another viewpoint the shift away from the intergovernmental method in the EU criminal justice area and the gradual shift in national criminal souvereinty will be shown. Students will be introduced into the initial steps taken under the headings Justice and Home Affairs and later Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters, i.e. under the former third pillar of the European Union. Title IV of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union will be addressed in more detail and how criminal law is addressed under the title of the area of freedom, security and justice by most of the Member States. The important reservations by the United Kingdom and Ireland will be discussed separately. Relevant parts of the multi-annual programs, the Tampere, Hague and Stockholm programs and the Action Plan implementing the last will be singled out. Institutional actors in the area of criminal justice (including Eurojust and OLAF, the European Judicial Network, Europol, Joint Investigation Teams), and the stregthened role of the European Parliament will be presented before discussing the merits of police cooperation, judicial cooperation, external cooperation in criminal justice (with an emphasis on EU-US counter-terrorism co-operation), mutual recognitition (including a discussion on the European Arrest Warrant), the principle of availability (including the Prüm Treaty and implementing legislation) and substantive criminal law. Leading cases of the Court of Justice will highlight the main issues in the development of EU criminal justice.

This course organized jointly by the Human RightS Initiative (HRSI) and the Legal Studies Department provides students with the skills required when lodging an application with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

This course deals with the institutions involved in the process of European integration and the origins of the European Union.

The course covers the following major topics of international (private) dispute settlement: Approaches to dispute resolution; the legal profession in various countries; the language problem in international dispute resolution; Litigation: Jurisdiction to adjudicate; Simultaneous proceedings in various countries;  International judicial assistance; Recognition and enforcement of foreign judgements; International Commercial Arbitration: The Standing of Arbitration within the Legal System;  The Authority of Arbitration Tribunals; The Arbitrators; Focal Points in the Arbitration Process; The Effects and Confines of Arbitral Awards.

The aim of this two-credit course is to provide the students with a solid understanding of the fundamental institutions, problems and solutions connected to the world of capital markets and in particular with the tasks imposed on the regulatory bodies in shaping and enforcing the related regulations in market economies.

This course deals with the external relations of the European Union and its commercial policy.

This course is meant to equip students with a basic knowledge of Latin as a “technical language” still used today in academic environments. To this purpose, the course will provide an overview of several types of source publications and secondary literature from various fields and of the Latin terminology attached to these, starting from common phraseology and abbreviations still present in academic parlance (such as i.e., e.g., viz., alumnus, idem, ibidem, passim et al.), going through practical issues such as identifying and handling relevant bibliographic data of publications issued in Latin (dates, places, names, titles of critical editions or scholarly works composed in Latin), managing technical descriptions in Latin as still used in research instruments such as source inventories (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Orientalis, Clavis Patrum Graecorum, Clavis Patrum Latinorum etc.), manuscript catalogues, or various online bibliographic/textual databases, and ending with an in-depth discussion of various types of critical apparatus to be found in source editions and the specific language they employ.

The Disciplinary Approaches to Environmental Problems (2 credits) course is designed to involve students in a tailored exercise involving a critical engagement of disciplinary approaches and methodological issues currently operative in high-level environmental research. Its main purpose is to build critical thinking skills in which theoretical frameworks, methodological issues and case studies are mutually explored.

The articles and other materials to be discussed are, in principle, proposed by the doctoral students. Faculty may also make such proposals but the ultimate choice remains with the SJD students.
In order to help the preparation of the seminar, the students' proposal is to be submitted accompanied by a short written note indicating the reasons behind the proposal and the name(s) of the professors whom the students would like to invite for the session. The proposal should reach the LEGS Doctoral Program Director at least two months prior to the date of the planned seminar, who will, in turn, make contact with and invite the proposed guest professor.
The materials for discussion may be distributed for reading and analysis at a later date, but no later than two weeks prior to the scheduled seminar date. All proposals are subject to the approval of the SJD Program Director.
One or two SJD students will first summarize the topic and then raise questions for discussion to be moderated by them. The guest professor is expected to contribute to the discussions with comments and questions.

The course will acquaint the students with some of the foundational questions in the philosophy of social sciences; it will offer a brief outline and evaluation of the main methodological approaches. By the end of the course students should be able to write a coherent research outline and justify their methodological choices.

This class will introduce students to recent research in the field of Ottoman history that sheds new light on the perceptions—both contemporary and modern—of the sixteenth century as a “magnificent” apogee of a “classical” or “golden age” of the empire. In particular, the course will explore the construction and re-construction of the institutional and ideological legacies of the two iconic empire builders—Mehmed II (1453-1480) and Süleyman II (1520-1566) by sixteenth-century Ottomans. Among the wide-ranging topics that new research touches upon, the course will focus especially on the strategies of empire-building; the processes of bureaucratization and centralization; the formation and composition of the elites; patronage strategies and the evolving relationship between the dynasty and the elites; cultural and religious politics of the dynasty and political elites. One of the particular aims of the course will be to encourage students to map out political networks in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire and trace the flow and logic of power.

This seminar explores the major sources and key issues of fourteenth-century dynastic policy with a special emphasis on Central Europe. As we follow up the destinies of the Capetian Angevins from Southern Italy to Hungary and Poland, we’ll experience the construction of a ‘national’ policy and ‘national’ identity by a supranational dynasty and the interface of political, religious, and cultural trends in Europe. We will examine the way late medieval people, acutely conscious of the innovative spirit of their time, dealt with inherited tasks and recycled traditional concepts, such as the idea of reform and renovation, the religious and economic expansion on the continent and in the Levant, the ideology and representation of power, the birth of the nation state and the rise of women.

Classical Syriac (Ktobonoyo: the Bookish Language) is an Aramaic dialect that served as the literary language of the Aramaic-speaking Christian communities. The golden age of Syriac literature extended from the third to the seventh century AD and has produced a great amount of important literature, partly as original works and partly as translations from the Greek. After the Arab conquest of the Middle East, besides producing original works, Syriac served as a bridge language and culture between Greek and Arabic; its influence extended as far as India and China, while the Syriac alphabet constituted the basis for the Sogdian and Uygur scripts, thus indirectly influencing Tibetan and Mongolian, too. Diverse Asian Christian communities have used Classical Syriac as a liturgical and literary language up to the present day. The present course, being the first part of a two-semester training, will be an introduction to this language. It will teach Syriac as a living language but will also lay emphasis on reading classical texts.

The course is an interdisciplinary (that is, quite disparate) endeavour, co-taught by an archaeologist working on medieval western monastic sites and by an intellectual historian working on late antique, Byzantine and eastern Christian texts. As such, it can only give spotlights on: I. East - 1. the beginnings of monasticism in Egypt (3rd-4th centuries); 2. the birth of a new form of monasticism in the Holy Land (5th-6th centuries); 3. Constantinopolitan monasticism after the Iconoclast strife (10th-11th centuries); II. West - 4. early medieval Western monasticism (the Benedictines 6th-10th centuries); 5. monastic reforms in the West (Carthusians, the mendicant orders 11th-14th centuries); 6. Monasticism in Central Europe (the Pauline order, from the 13th century). Due to the different trainings of the two instructors, the two segments (early Eastern monasticism versus medieval Western monasticism) will be presented following two different methodologies. The first part will be based on textual evidence with incidental hints on eremitic, semi-eremitic, skiti- and laura-type, as well as coenobitic architecture, corresponding to the organisational structures of these types of the monastic life, while the second part will principally deal with architecture, landscape and archaeological finds, with a secondary use of textual evidence and incidental remarks on the spiritual theories accompanying and founding the new types of building activity.

The aim of this course is to prepare students to choose the most appropriate quantitative (statistical) method and effectively apply it to answer a research question. A framework will be provided for basic descriptive and inferential statistical techniques to show how the choice of data analysis methodology is determined by the question asked and the nature of data available/recorded. The objectives are: to learn about the main types of the basic descriptive and inferential statistical analyses applied in environmental research and their specific tasks; to appreciate assumptions and limitations of the analyses; to be able to run these analyses in Excel and SPSS for Windows, and; to know how to interpret the outputs produced.

Understanding key humaninduced processes affecting the biosphere. Understanding main factors of
population dynamics and related consumption and environmental issues. Ability to work with environmental indicators and knowledge of main indicator frameworks. Identify key environmental issues associated with agriculture.

Communism, a grand failure as we now know, was – for a time being – regarded as a viable developmental alternative for capitalism. Even many of those who did not agree with Marxist philoso-phy thought that it was capable to produce economic development and social modernization. And, indeed, vast social change occurred – urbanization, rise of the working class, change in the position of women, growth of the “nomenklatura” and – in the later stages – an emergence of specific sort of the middle class. The aim of this course is to investigate patterns of these social changes, juxtaposing the particular cases of Eastern European societies and the theories of social change.

Modern computer technologies are necessary tools for interdisciplinary cross-sectoral analysis of environmental problems and efficient environmental decision-making. They are essential on each stage of environmental management process starting with monitoring, data collection and storage to decision support, results visualization and presentation.

In the course we examine the origin and development of such pillars of the modern world as the world economy system and the modern society. The roots of the world economy system can be leaded back until the 12th century, when the European economy began to merge. By the late Middle Ages the prototype of the European economic integration took shape around Venice. It was followed by Antwerpen on the European economic world's throne; then came Genova, Amsterdam and London. The European economy world started building up the economic integration according to its own norms in global scale as a result of the great geographical discoveries and the colonisation. The directing city states were replaced by the national states which were able to mobilize much greater resources. Amsterdam and the United Provincies as well London and Great Britain meant border-land.

To acquaint students with techniques for collecting and processing data, interpreting and presenting environmental information which they will need to use in the course of their masters studies. Emphasis is placed on practical knowledge, so students are given opportunities to try out the techniques in question on relevant examples and cases.  At the end of this module a successful student should be able to understand and use standard techniques for written presentation of data, including referencing.

Both rhetoric – quite often in the combination ‘mere rhetoric’ – and ‘modern literary theory’ – usually with a somewhat derogatory emphasis on the ‘modern’ – have not enjoyed a good press in recent years. However, this six-week module will demonstrate that it is quite impossible to read (understand) any text composed in the Latin or Greek – or Arabic, for that matter – Middle Ages without a firm knowledge of the one (rhetoric), while any such reading can much benefit from the other (theory). Concluding with an introduction to cultural poetical and discourse analytical approaches, this module will offer some guidance at how to interpret a text from its smallest unit, the word, via the period (sentence) to the structure, genre, and context of the whole, paying due attention to any text’s position between its author on the one hand, its readers/listeners on the other, and the material conditions of its production and contemporary and subsequent circulation (palaeography, codicology, book history).

A course on Central and East European intellectual history from 1848 until the Great War, with a focus on the changing relations between philosophy, the human sciences, and the natural sciences.

This course is an overview of several major themes and approaches in Western historiography over the past five centuries. It intends to contribute to your training in various, but related ways. Representing history as a branch of cognition that has been found directly relevant to the human condition since antiquity, it highlights a number of influential, and controversial, ways of engaging with it in modern and contemporary times. At the same time it will challenge you to engage both with these approaches, and in some cases with the ways in which they are presented in the assigned literature. Shortly, it will invite you to think historically in dialogue with some of the most outstanding practitioners of the profession, past and present.

This course will focus primarily on the formal properties of statements and sets of statements. It will be shown how to determine which statements are logical truths or tautologies, i.e., true by virtue of their logical form, and how to determine when a statement follows from, or is entailed by, other statements as a matter of logic alone. We will develop the methods for formally deriving conclusion from premises, or logical truths from no premises at all. We will show that our logical system has certain desired features: (1) soundness – any statement that can be derived in the system is a logical truth, and (2) completeness – any logical truth can be derived in the system.

This course will cover 5 major thinkers in continental philosophy: Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Foucault. Depending on students’ interests, we might include one more philosopher from post-Kantian continental philosophy. I also want to include a discussion concerning attempts to delineate the nature of the difference between continental and analytic philosophy as discussed by recent philosophers from both traditions. The course fits into graduate studies in philosophy by providing a background in the problems, concepts, arguments, ideas and methods

There is a prima facie duty not kill people. But, in certain circumstances it seems permissible to do so. The course explores under which conditions killing is morally acceptable and the kinds of constraints that we face when killing someone. We will address some of the following questions: do we have to save the greater number of people? When killing in self-defence is permissible? Are abortion and euthanasia morally acceptable? What constraints do apply when killing in war?

This is the continuation of a course, Forms in ancient philosophy, which explored the status of form in Presocratic philosophy and Plato. Nevertheless, it does not presuppose that participants took also that course: instead we shall discuss Plato’s theory of forms as we proceed in Aristotle. Our main concern will be how Aristotle’s theories of form mesh in with different aspects of his metaphysics, philosophy of nature and ethics, and how and in what sense they criticise and at the same time incorporate Platonic doctrine. After Aristotle we will move on to Hellenistic philosophy and discuss how the function of form is taken up by the special stuff pneuma in the Stoics.
No knowledge of Greek is necessary, preliminary acquaintance with the history of ancient Greek philosophy will be presupposed.

A large portion of political science research published today utilizes statistical analysis. It is crucial for political scientists to be familiar with the most commonly used statistical techniques to be able to read and understand the literature. The focus of this course is to get behind the numbers and provide a basic overview of the most commonly used statistics. The goals of the course are to provide students with the most basic tools to understand quantitative political science literature, build a foundation for those who wish to apply these techniques. ...

The course is designed to start with the essentials of European politics – the understanding of democracy, of parliamentary systems, of elections, of parties and interest groups. Based on these essentials, specific political systems will be approached – major (i.e. larger) as well as smaller countries. The phenomenon of political transition and the analysis of the European Union as a political system will be studied at the end of the term.

The aim of the course is to provide a foundation in political economy theory, concepts and their application in different fields of political science and international relations. The course will discuss historical and current debates about the nature of political economy and the pros and cons of different methodological approaches. Themes include: Nature and scope of political economy; Rational choice theory and its critics; Game theory- theory and practice; Cost benefit analysis and political economy; Constructivism and normative political economy, Institutional approaches to political economy.

The course aims to introduce some of the core theories and key concepts in political economy by focusing on the uneasy relationship between capitalism and democracy. The course will focus on a number of “big questions” about politics and economics, such as: Under which conditions is capitalism compatible with democracy? How does the disproportionate power of business affect democracy? Which are the relative strengths and weaknesses of politics versus markets in bringing about economic growth and socioeconomic equality? How does economic globalization and European integration affect democracy?...

The bulk of this course will be dedicated to the discussion of global distributive justice, or the ground and extent of the duties of individuals and political institutions to attend to the facts of global economic inequality.

This course will focus on political developments in Central Europe in the past decades from dictatorship to multiparty democracy in comparative and historical perspective. Special attention will be paid to the past 20 years. ...

This course focuses on the ways contemporary democracies are scrutinized, analyzed, evaluated, and innovations proposed. We approach this broad themes from five different angles: What is democracy and how to see it when it is there? Where does it come from? What are its qualities? What does it produce? And where should it go? This course aims at providing a broad overview of the literature on democracy, a concept that can be seen as the core of political science. Students will learn about important arguments, theories, and authors. The course does not aim at teaching students knowledge about specific cases beyond what needs to be known to follow particular arguments discussed.

Contemporary human rights encompass increasingly important norms in the fields of biopolitics: policy issues related to reproductive and end-of-life decisions; biodiversity and environmental protection; genetic testing, biobanks, and storage of genetic data, among others. This course deals with the status of, and current challenges to, human rights in this context. By analyzing relevant texts and landmark cases, new generations of human rights will be explored. The main methodology of this course is qualitative analysis of normative texts and cases that contain elements from both the human rights and biopolitical discourses.

The course considers the European Union, as an evolving polity. It aims at exploring the logic of policy-making in the EU and the dynamics of the European integration process the by analyzing the history of EC/EU, by studying theories of integration, by surveying the actors and institutions of integration politics and by discussing crucial issues presently on the European agenda. The acquired knowledge will help students pursue individual research on EU-related topics.

The comparative historical analysis of revolutions and civil wars calls for interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology, political science, and history. Revolutions and civil wars bring radical changes in social structures as well as in states’ functions and political structures that must be studied both internally and internationally. After an introductory overview of the main interpretative frameworks offered by sociology, political science and historiography, the course will turn its focus to a critical review of the most recent socio-historical research and debates concerning revolutions and civil wars in Europe from 1914 to 1945, ...

Professor Sidney Tarrow will teach a two week module on social movement theory and transnational contention in connection with Professor Greskovits’s course on Social Movements and Social Contention, from Monday, November 28 to Friday, December 9. The course will begin with a review and synthesis of social movement theory (Monday, Nov. 28), continue with four sessions on transnational contention (Wednesday, Nov. 30-Wednesday Dec. 7), and conclude with a final session on war, rights and domestic contention. Students will write short position papers connecting transnational contention to theories of social movements.

The course outlines the basic concepts and building blocs of game theoretic analysis. It introduces students to the uses and limitations of this particular analytic approach, which concentrates on the problems of interrelated human decisions. The focus of the course is on the basic elements of non-cooperative game theory applied to various phenomena in the broad realm of politics, but issues of social choice and public choice will also be discussed.

The aim of this course is to help students present and write successful papers for their departmental courses and other research projects. In the fall we will cover presentation skills, critical writing with a special focus on response papers and micro as well as macro-level argumentation for term papers. The spring sessions are tailored to the thesis writing process, in the course of which we will address thesis structure and core elements, such as research question and thesis statement.

This course examines the history of the Russian Orthodox Church since 1900. The history has been a turbulent one, involving reform (1900-1917), repression (1917-1990), and most recently, resurgence as the most powerful non-governmental organization in Russia. An understanding of the recent history of the Russian Orthodox Church is essential for anyone interested not just in Russian history but in the ways in which religion - whether understood as faith or as institution - survived the communist atheist experiment, and has (or has not) adapted to conditions of modernity. For this reason, the course contextualizes the Russian Orthodox experience by also briefly examining the fortunes of other Orthodox Churches in the 20th century, both within and outside the communist bloc.

Mandatory for students in the second year of their MA studies in History and in the MATILDA Program

Time: Monday 19 September, Monday 26 September, and various Mondays, 5.20 – 7.00 pm, during the second half of the autumn and the first half of the winter term.

The purpose of this seminar is to help students to translate research ideas and research into writing in a conscious, controlled, reflective and pragmatic manner. In order to generate a maximum support for your thesis work we will try to unpack some of the typical experiences and uncertainties with which we as historians are confronted at the ‘shop floor-level’ of doing research, writing down facts and dealing with our findings. We will also engage with ways of translating ideas into writing, relate them systematically to the material we are working with, find additional material as necessary, and cope with the process of how original ideas and interest may change during the research and writing process. We hope to gain insight into ways and strategies of establishing an argument and structuring a text. We will deal why and how research problems and questions are constructed and/or arise unwillingly in the research and writing process and with how to develop pragmatic and less pragmatic strategies of coping with these problems. Last not least we shall deal with the means and strategies of situating the text in the multiple universe of scholarship, and with establishing and making explicit or implicit the overall ‘message’ of a study.

This course is designed to provide a review of the skills, standards, and expectations of the History and Medieval Studies Departments as regards the skills of academic writing, the documentation of sources, and oral presentations. During the semester, students will write at least three essays (varying between 1500 and 2000 words) that will prepare them for writing in other classes and ultimately the thesis. Oral presentation skills will also be developed through class participation and formal presentations

The aim of the course is to provide familiarity with the medieval manuscript book, the object that transmitted classical and medieval texts and images and now enables us to arrive at a knowledge concerning the environment, interests and scholarship of those who produced and used each codex. The course discusses the physical production of manuscripts (preparation of parchment and paper, ruling, writing, illuminating, binding), the archaeology of the manuscript folio (the textual and visual elements of the various layers of the main text and glosses), and the context of diverse scholarly communities (monastery, cathedral school, University) within which codices were produced and used. The course includes basic introduction to and practice of textual criticism. Form of course: powerpoint presentations using manuscript images and providing explanatory texts are combined with discussion of literature and questions that arise from them.

An introduction to Latin scripts of the later Middle Ages, with a practical character, concentrating on charter reading. The course includes the examination and reading of examples of Latin texts, the study of abbreviations; the typology and nomenclature of scripts, the dating and localization of scripts; the techniques and principles of historical and diplomatic transcription and editing. Students will be required to make a series of transcriptions. Examples of Latin texts will be studied from photocopies.

This course will call attention to the significance of changes in the historian’s trade over time by providing a survey of historiographical developments in various areas. Assuming that students have been previously trained in different national, confessional or scholarly narratives, it is designed to open up students for a variety of possible approaches to understanding of history, and to make them aware of the need to critically reflect on methodological presuppositions.

In this course we will discuss the research situation in detail by analyzing the different forms of the concepts of historical ethnognesis and nationalism from the Middle Ages until in our times.

The class is a weekly supplement to the "History of Daily Life"-course and will be directed with the assistance of PhD-students of the department. It will be mainly used for the discussion of various selected source examples (the written texts offered in English translation).

The aim of this course is to provide students with indispensable interdisciplinary tools in historical methodology and theory from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance including East and West, Byzantium and the Islamic world. Covering various disciplines, such as archaeology, art history, theology and philosophy in various periods stretching from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, we shall discuss the transformation of the classical heritage and the creation of new cultural expressions, economic developments, and political entities. We use interdisciplinarity as a tool enabling us to cross disciplinary borders while still being rooted in one of them. Focusing on material and/or textual sources with high interdisciplinary impact factor, students will prepare in-class presentations on chosen topics.

Academic Writing for Graduate Students

Due to the different expectations of different disciplines, our courses vary from department to department. However, the general aim of all courses is to help students to develop as writers within the academic community by raising awareness of, practicing and reflecting upon the conventions of written texts in English. During the course, students will:

Improve critical reading skills, enabling students to think and write more clearly and incisively

Identify the structural features of specific academic writing genres, relevant to each discipline

Refine writing processes through generating ideas, drafting, peer evaluation and individual writing consultations

Learn to take into consideration the expectations of one’s readership with regard to academic writing discourse

Effectively use the work of others in writing, including use of sources and citation methods

Expand and improve the students' ability to work independently by exploring new strategies for learning

The Center for Academic Writing’s courses are designed specifically for each discipline, including Economics, Environmental Sciences, Gender Studies, History, International Relations, Legal Studies, Mathematics, Nationalism, Philosophy, Political Science, Public Policy and Sociology

Ancient Greek is one of the most important source languages of both Medieval Studies and Ancient Philosophy. Whether your interest is in reading classical Greek texts in their own right, in studying their reception in the Middle Ages or, ultimately, in moving from classical texts towards late antique and Byzantine literature, a thorough training in ancient Greek will be the conditio sine qua non to pursue any of these goals.

The course of Classical Armenian intends to support the students to start with one of the most important languages of the Oriens Christianus. Exercises for each lesson and translations of mainly biblical passages (the Bible was translated into Armenian at the beginning of the 5th century) and from the ecclesiastical literature of the Golden Age Armenia’s (i. e. the 5th century) will be useful for practising the usage of the grammar. The general knowledge of classical Greek in some cases also of Latin will support the students in learning the language. Grammatical parallels will always be drawn between above mentioned languages. During the course as primary translation source into English will serve the Armenian Bible, because it was the first book translated into Armenian after the invention of the alphabet (ca. 405-406 AD) and grammatically it follows all the rules of classical Armenian. This version of the Bible being translated from the Septuagint contains passages from the Peshitta as well and working with such kind of source will bring its outcome to scholar curriculum of the students who are also interested in translations of the Bible.

Classical Hebrew – or Biblical Hebrew, is the main language of the Hebrew Bible. Knowledge of Biblical Hebrew is vital to anyone pursuing studies on the Bible and its context as well as the development of Rabbinical commentary traditions. Biblical Hebrew is also an important tool for anyone interested in the historical interpretations of the Bible, which e.g. is visible in numerous Bible translations.

This course is open to all students who have no or minimal previous knowledge of Latin. The course, planned to cover two semesters, is intended to equip the students with a basic knowledge of Medieval Latin, especially its morphology, so as to enable them to handle by the end of the year, at lower intermediate level, sources written in that language. By the end of the semester the overview of the nominal morphology will cover the inflection of the a-, o/e-, i-, and consonant stems (i.e., in traditional terminology, the first three declensions); the overview of the verbal morphology will cover the three tenses (praeteritum, praesens, futurum) of the imperfectum stem in all the conjugations and the corresponding passive forms. The adjectives and their degrees of comparison as well as basic pronouns (personal, demonstrative, interrogative, relative) will also be taught. In addition to this, the course will also include a survey of various indeclinable words, such as adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions with their uses with various cases. All throughout the semester special attention will be paid to specific grammatical and lexical features of Medieval Latin.

The course is meant to introduce students to the basics of Classical Persian as a research language. Persian was a veritable lingua franca for men of letters from the Balkans to India from the 13th through the 19th century until it was supplanted by local literary languages. The latter were thus greatly informed by Persian in terms of vocabulary, grammar, literary tropes and genres, terminology, etc. A basic knowledge of Persian thus immensely helps the scholar working on the Islamic world, even if his or her research field is not strictly related to Iran or Central Asia. Through an emphasis given to the essentials of grammar and reading the goal will be to enable students to understand simple Classical Persian texts with the help of a dictionary. Students who are familiar with the Arabic alphabet and have a background in Arabic, Urdu, (Ottoman) Turkish, or other Turkic languages are at an advantage. Students unfamiliar with the Arabic alphabet may join provided they catch up soon enough with the rest of the group. With two sessions per week, 50 minutes each, the course will consist of two parts. The first part will focus on grammar; in the second part, the students will start reading short sections from simple Classical Persian texts.

This is a one-semester intensive course by the end of which students are expected not only to communicate and read in modern Turkish, but to learn the basics for the future ability to read Ottoman texts and Ottoman historical documents in Arabic script, an aim for those wishing to continue their studies in that direction. Thus special emphasis will be put on acquiring a broad knowledge of both the modern and the classical Turkish lexicon.

This course is open to all students who have no or minimal previous knowledge of Latin. The course, planned to cover two semesters (Fall & Winter), is intended to equip the students with a basic knowledge of Medieval Latin, especially its morphology, so as to enable them to handle by the end of the year, at lower intermediate level, sources written in that language.

This course is designed to introduce students to the methodological and theoretical approaches to cultural history and everyday life experience and apply these approaches to the study of Ottoman, Balkan, Islamic/Middle Eastern, as well as other fields of history. Until recently, the study of economic, “hard-data” tabulation-types of history, grand concepts such modernity, progress, and reform vs. break-away nationalisms, traditional political histories of powerful men, or diplomatic/military histories dominated Ottoman history and related fields. The real-life practices of the countless millions were relegated to social science models and paradigms. Macro-studies and theses that explain social relationships and struggles between the state vs. the rest of Ottoman society dominated – and still dominate – the field, yet many of these studies are not based on a careful reading of and creative approach to primary sources that are used to reconstruct the practices, thoughts, speeches, ideas, and world-views of actual historical actors. The “small peoples” of the Ottoman empire are/were often ignored or silenced (especially if they were unruly) by Ottoman elite writers and modern scholars, even though different kinds of Ottoman sources are very useful for mining everyday practice and experience from the past .

For medieval students only; students read important works in their area of interest in consultation with their advisors. The amount of reading will vary with the number of credits students enroll for. PhD students with expertise close to the MA student’s thesis topic can be involved in selecting and discussing the readings.

The metamorphosis of Early Feudal system into the urban reality of high and late medieval culture left its impact on a wide range of political, social and intellectual areas. During the second half of the 12th century the emergence of new complicated European Christian self-identity gave birth to all kind of new “heresies” and to a sharpening image of “the other”. The lepers, the Cathars, the Muslim are dominant figures of this period. Relating the Jews, an ancient minority group well established within Christian society, this process marks a well-documented turning point, one that would lead as its final result to the removal of the Jews from great parts of European society. The impressive rise of the mendicant orders from the beginning of the 13th century onwards is a direct consequence of the same processes and their occupation with the “Jewish problem”, through intellectual encounter, popular preaching, inquisitorial activities, etc. was considered by some scholars as crucial for any analysis of the above described developments. The seminar will deal with these two parable phenomena in different aspects of their mutual relationship.

The course will explore the basic “Preventive Environmental Management” strategies, concepts, systems, tools, methods and technologies. It will also address the effectiveness and efficiency of the preventive approaches in comparison with the more typical, ‘command and control’, pollution control approaches. Illustrative advances in environmentally improved substances, products, processes and technologies will be explored to obtain insight into the potential for the triple bottom line of environmental, economic and social benefits of such approaches.

This course will provide understanding of basic facts and concepts of global hydrological cycle, water needs and water availability; comprehension of main environmental challenges associated with various uses of water; solving the conflicting management goals related to water resources management.

This course is designed to provide students with a basic knowledge of the general fields of Ecological and
Environmental Economics, with a focus on their contribution to design and implementation of environmental policy.
The teaching for this course is divided into three learning steps: (1) Basic Principles of Economic Analysis; (2) Environmental Economics and Decision Making; and (3) Values and Valuation of the Economic Worth of the Environment.

Trying to fill a gap in scholarship, this seminar is a critical overview of the various traditions of intellectual history that emerged in our region after the Second World War. The discussions will provide a comparative insight into the transformation of historiographical cultures in East-Central Europe, and the participants are invited to contribute with case studies on their respective historiographical traditions. Special attention will be paid to the formation of “schools” and “paradigms,” the debates on methodology, and the various attempts at shaping the “national canon.” Putting all this into a broader historical context, the course will help the participants locate their own intellectual traditions in a regional setting and also become familiar with the current East-Central European historiographical developments.

Hermeneutics (or theory of interpretation) can be understood narrowly as a theory about the nature of interpreting certain kinds of things such as texts, artworks and the like. It can also be taken more broadly as a theory about what it is to understand, grasp or know anything at all, especially if one reasons that all such understanding has a perspectival character. We will consider hermeneutics in both senses. We’ll begin with the historical roots of the hermeneutics in German philosophy, then examine closely a bit of Heidegger and a good chunk of his disciple Gadamer’s Truth and Method and then turn to current work on the subject, including parts of my book in progress on the topic.

‘Justice for Hedgehogs’ puts Dworkin’s political and legal philosophy into the context of his wider philosophical views on ethics (understood as the conception of how to live well) and morality (understood as the conception of what we owe to other people who, like us, have a right and responsibility to lead their lives well). Its main thesis is that value is ‘one big thing’: genuine values hang together, they mutually support and illuminate each other, and do not conflict in application. So the putative conflicts between liberty and equality, self-interest and morality etc., correctly understood, are spurious. We will examine the meaning of this highly controversial claim as well as many other unconventional claims made by Hedgehogs on metaethics, interpretation, disagreement and truth in ethics and morality, and so on.
This is going to be a standard reading seminar: We will analyze and interpret the text chapter by chapter, section by section; even paragraph by paragraph where necessary. The discussion of each chapter will be introduced by a student who will also be charged by the task to raise the key questions.
Student performance will be graded on the basis of seminar participation. No separate end-of-term exam will follow, but if a student will not have the opportunity to make a presentation, s/he will be welcome to submit an essay (no longer than 10 pages double-spaced) on some of the controversial claims of the book.

This course will consist in a close reading of Spinoza's masterpiece,
the Ethics. We will look at Spinoza's other works, including his
correspondence to shed light on the doctrines of the Ethics. We will
aim to understand the Ethics as a whole and see how the moral
psychology and theory of human nature, presented in the later books,
is grounded in Spinoza's ontology, modal theory and metaphysics of
mind. Readings will be circulated in the form of handouts or
electronically. (The readings will be drawn from Edwin Curley's A
Spinoza Reader and Samuel Shirley's Spinoza: Complete Works.) Course
requirements include regular attendance and participation and a 2000
word term paper on a topic of your choice. A preliminary draft of the
paper will be due around the tenth week of the term.

This course will cover the basic topics of Experimental Statistics and Research Methods for Behavioral Sciences. In the domain of Experimental Statistics, it will comprise the subjects of Scales, Descriptive statistics, Inferential Statistics including Independent and repeated measure t‑tests, One‑ and two‑way ANOVAs, Effect sizes, Correlational and Regression Analysis, and selected nonparametric methods. In the domain of Research Methods, the course will survey the details of designing, conducting, analyzing, interpreting, and communicating scientific psychological research.

This course intruduces students to contemporary theories and research techniques of cognitive development of human infants below 2 years of age. Topics include perceptual and brain development, object and physical knowledge, categorization, numerical cognition, language acquisition, action understanding, communication, social learning, and mental attribution. The course also involves laboratory practice to familiarize students with research techniques including behavioral, eye‑tracking amd neuroimaging methods.

This course will cover recent theories and empirical research addressing humans’ ability to perform actions together. We will discuss theories highlighting the role of thinking and planning ahead as well as theories highlighting basic perceptual and motor processes that allow people to perform highly coordinated actions such as dancing a tango together. Furthermore, we will read current research articles reporting behavioral and social neuroscience experiments in this rapidly growing field. Last but not least we will design and perform our own small experiment addressing a current issue in joint action research.

The main aim of the class is to show how some of the crucial issues and concepts of cognitive science showed up in modern European intellectual history, and how these concepts and their accompanying debates shape present day cognitive science. After a brief exposé of the overall history of CogSci by the instructor 5 crucial notions shall be discussed, always with a classical paper and present day approach. Some of these issues are: nature versus nurture; modular versus unified cognition; the representation debates: analog and propositional thought; the nature of intentionality and its relation to action and representation; the social nature of the mind.

This class provides an overview of current developments in comparative political economy. Readings cover the developed and developing regions of the world, material written by political scientists, economists, and historians, and a broad swath of topics with robust, contemporary research programs. Instead of a country-by-country approach, the course focuses on key theories, arguments, and issues in the field of political economy. The course is designed less to provide a broad overview of thinking on the relationship between government and economics than to explore the areas of comparative political economy that have seen interesting developments in the last twenty or so years. In that sense, the course is a complement to other comparative and political economy courses the department offers.

The course is centred around some of the theoretical debates in contemporary International Relations theory. It is aimed at enhancing students’ ability to analyse the way various theoretical approaches are constructed and interact with each other, operationalised in research designs and productive of particular perspectives on the world. An additional aim is for students to learn to relate their own research to these modes of doing IR. The scene setter of the course is an engagement with some of the key concepts, themes, arguments and research design issues raised by the two currently dominant Western strands of thinking about world politics: liberalism and constructivism. The course then goes on to chart divergent lines of flight away from orthodoxy to heterodoxy. It discusses structural realism, neoclassical realism, Foucauldian IR and neomarxist IR. Later parts of the seminar adopt a more practice-oriented perspective. To this end, the course discusses and critically evaluates doctoral research projects that are currently conducted by advanced IRES PhD students and the doctoral work carried out by the seminar participants. Beyond this, the course investigates, compares and contrasts how different IR theories account for one and the same empirical event – what happened in Kosovo in 1998 – 1999. Furthermore, it compares and contrasts some of the different ways scholars thinks and research conflict governance.
Again, the aim is to identify the particular styles of reasoning employed by IR scholars, i.e., their assumptions and standards of good research, their horizons of thinkable research questions and their standards of validity.

This is a doctoral seminar building on the comparative politics and political theory MA courses. Basic questions in political sociology mostly focus on the holders of power and the way power is exercised in a society. In this seminar, sociological analysis is applied to the political field, and attention is paid to social determinants and sources of political power, state formation, theories of the state, civil society, and social movements. Beyond these topics the seminar offers an overview in classic and recent theories of elites and classes with emphasis on New Class and edifferent positional and reputational elite groups (politicians, intellectuals, cultural elites). The relationship between political transformation and elite change, between current forms of globalization and the global justice movements will also be discussed, just as the structure vs agency debate.

This course on political psychology offers a survey of the topics prevalent in political psychology today. With a focus on the cutting edge the course consists of discussions of recent articles representative of the field. It covers topics such as leadership and psychoanalysis of political leaders; psychology of survey response; personality and politics; social psychology and in-group, out-group dynamics with regards to prejudice, racism, political identity and ethnic conflict; psychology of war and terrorism; political cooperation, risk and conflict; emotions and politics with a special emphasis on fear; political cognition, neuroscience; and genetics of political behavior.
The objective of the course is to introduce these topics through a representative sample of recent and cutting edge research in political psychology. The goal is to prepare the participants to critically think about existing research and develop the skills to produce equally high quality publishable theoretical and empirical work in political psychology. The place of this course in the curriculum assumes a non-essential place but is strongly recommended to all political scientists interested in political psychological research and especially to those who with to contribute to the field in their future academic work.

Bayesian statistics has gained considerable popularity recently. Some consider its applications in the social sciences cutting edge, others criticize them strongly. The course will present the fundamental ideas and concepts of Bayesian statistical analysis and will compare them to more
traditional statistical methods. Participants will be encouraged to read published Bayesian analyses in political science and during the second half of the course these analyses will be discussed and an attempt will be made to reproduce them.

This class prepares students for independent and advanced-level research in the field of European integration studies. It targets students who already have a good knowledge of EU policy-making both at an empirical and theoretical level. The course provides access to core debates in European integration studies by critically reviewing existing research in the light of new empirical findings. The course pays particular attention to the challenges of combining the theoretical frameworks and methodological tools of different disciplines in EU studies, and to how concepts and research perspectives developed mainly in the pre-enlargement context can be applied to the politics and policies of the EU-27 and/or require modification. In this the class aims at helping students to advance their own conceptual and empirical research frameworks and to situate themselves and their respective research projects in the wider disciplines of European integration studies.

This is a course at the intersection of constitutional and political theory. Its central question concerns the conditions of legitimacy of constitutional democracy. We will ask the legitimacy question from a particular perspective – that of the (ir)relevance of the source and the original authorship of the legal and political order. Who makes the first rule, on the basis of what authorization, when and how? Does it matter at all, for us who care about democratic legitimacy?
Early modern political theory assumed the relevance of these questions for legitimacy of law and politics. One set of classical guidelines came in the form of the social contract theories. But contractarianism did not address the specific sub-questions of the institutional origin and authorship of the first rule and first author; neither did it ask about the relevance of the original authorship and choice for the established legal and political regime. An important attempt to address these sub-questions assumes the shape of the theory of the constituent power. In its classical 18th century expositions (Abbe Sieyes, Federalists, deep differences between them notwithstanding), the constituent power is presented as the source of the constitution (the constitution-making power). The constitution is the first and highest juridical norm, the rule of recognition for the whole legal and political system. It follows that the constituent power is not ‘merely’ about writing and enacting a constitution. Rather, it is a power that establishes political community, by creating and institutionalizing its members (citizenship), the relationships among members (basic rights), and political authority bound by the requirements of constitutionalism (the ‘constituted power’).
Theories of the constituent power rest on a difficult to comprehend dualism between the original power and the constituted powers: they often assume that the constituent power remains beyond the limits of the established constitutional democracy. While they typically hold that the bearer of this original power is the people (nation) as a pre-legal category, constitutionalism sees the people as the legally established and constrained entity. This leads to the problem of the circular reasoning (‘the paradox of the constituent power’): the ultimate author of the constitution is the constitutional creation. Such and related ambiguities of the concept – combined with the insight that the concept has been mainly a province of the radical revolutionary thinkers (Sieyes, Schmitt, Negri) - pushed the constituent power to the sidelines of the interest of liberal democratic theory. However, the question remains of the practical-political importance, especially after the regime change. As the democratic transitions in the second part of the 20th century have shown, the fall of the old regime leads directly to the puzzle of the founding act and the rule of recognition of the new regime.
We will explore some of the best-known theoretical attempts to conceptualize the constituent power, or – alternatively – to deny its relevance. We will first discuss the questions of identification, authorization, timing, and the ways of acting of the constituent power. Second, by focusing on the ‘paradox of constituent power’ we will analyze different responses to the question what happens to the constituent power once constitutional democracy is established (Sieyes, Schmitt). Third, we will read theories (Arendt, Ackerman, Habermas) that acknowledge dualism between ‘constitutional’ and ‘normal’ politics, but that try in different ways to show that this dualism does not lead to the legitimacy trap of the constituent power. Fourth, we will discuss arguments that the constituent power and legitimacy of constitution-making process are not (at least not primarily) relevant for the proper understanding and legitimacy of constitutional democracy (Kelsen, Michelman, Dworkin).

It is convient, albeit somewhat misleading to talk about “medieval theories of language.” In a sense the pre-modern approach to human speech and writing continued the late antique tradition, but in another sense, it also a new development in the Latin speaking realm between 1050 and 1500 AD. Linguistic science (scientia sermocinalis) was basically nothing else but the trivium (grammar, dialectics, rhetorics), the introductory part, and the resource for the analytic tools of all other more complex fields on science. The rules of a regulated and regimented language, the vehicle of proper human communcation held sway over all manifestation of knowledge, from poetry to philosophy and theology. After its humble origins in the logica vetus (old logic) it developed into the complex tool of the logica nova (new logic), and finally into the sophisticated tool of the logica moderna during the 14th and 15th centuries. Far from being a subject for antiquarian interests, medieval approaches to logic and language, the concerns, and answers by the schoolmen were found congenial by many minds trained in modern theories of meaning and reference. Apart from an overview of the historical developments, a systematic and analytic approach will also be offered in the seminar, which aims at familiarising the students with a superbly sophisticated intellectual realm of the medieval world. The course will cover all major directions in some depth.

The course is meant to show the importance of this field of research for Medieval Studies and the possibilities of contextualized application of Visual Culture-research. It deals with functions, influences and meanings of visual objects as well as with possible approaches to analyze them.

PhD Tutorial I is devoted to developing the structure, topics and faculty committee for the PhD Comprehensive Exam. This involves preparing the bibliography of at least 100 books and articles on topics related to the dissertation and to composing an essay explaining their selection. One group session also addresses the ways in which book reviews and journals can be used and evaluated. At the end of the term these documents are reviewed by the Supervisors and the History Department Doctoral Studies Committee.

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This seminar will examine critically a number of recent articles and books (most of them by myself) that attempt to analyze trends in "real-existing democracy" at both the national and the supra-national level in Europe. One effort will be to project forward for the next twenty years trajectories established from 1970 to 2000; another will trace the development of various "revolutions"in the practice of democracy at the national level. When it comes to the European Union, we will contrast conflicting opinions concerning its so-called "democracy deficit". In both cases, we shall also discuss various proposals for reform that have been advanced to improve the quality of democracy in this part of the world.

Schedule:
Week 1 (30 Jan-2 Feb) 2 sessions: Wed 17:20-19:00 and Thu 15:30-17:10
Week 2 (6-10 Feb) 3 sessions: Tue 17:20-19:00, Wed 17:20-19:00 and Thu 15:30-17:10
Week 3 (13-17 Feb) 3 sessions: Tue 17:20-19:00, Wed 17:20-19:00 and Thu 15:30-17:10
Week 4 (20-24 Feb) 2 sessions: Wed 17:20-19:00 and Thu 15:30-17:10
Week 5 (27 Feb-2 Mar) 2 sessions: Wed 17:20-19:00 and Thu 15:30-17:10

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Students must earn a minimum of 6 credits in Independent Study registrations in the terms before the submission of their theses. In the first term, especially if their thesis topic has not been clarified yet, they can choose an elective course (or two SHS courses) instead, with the approval of their supervisor. Students must fill in the relevant forms during the registration period of each term and get those signed by their supervisors. This is the precondition of being registered for these activities.

Citizenship has long been a key entry in the sociological lexicon. In liberal post-World War II sociology, “citizenship” was the answer to the Marxist scenario of polarizing class conflict, which was losing credibility in the context of rising affluence and maturing welfare states. T.H.Marshall, in his famous lectures on Citizenship and Social Class (1950), canonized the liberal view of citizenship as device of societal integration, whereby equal civil, political, and social rights become successively expanded to previously excluded groups, especially workers.
Hardly had the ink been dry than Marshall’s liberal scenario of internally inclusive citizenship became shattered by the great migrations of the postwar period. Immigration suddenly showed citizenship in a different, less liberal light, as mechanism of closure and external exclusion that sharply demarcates the world’s nation-state societies from one another. Rogers Brubaker, in his now classic comparison Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (1992), was the first to crisply articulate modern citizenship’s paradoxical duality of being “internally inclusive”, providing for only one equal membership status for all members of society, and “externally exclusive”, which blocks inter-state mobility and allows states to exist as relatively closed, self-reproducing units. Brubaker’s groundbreaking study created an entirely new field of genuinely cross-disciplinary scholarship on “citizenship and immigration”.
This course reviews this new academic field and its agenda-setting works. But, more than this, it seeks to bring to light some important changes that the institution of citizenship has undergone in the course of the postwar-II migrations, and which have not always been adequately reflected on. These migrations occurred in a particular historical context, marked by the rise of universal human rights norms and the outlawing of ethnic and racial discrimination. The combination of both factors, that is, of migrations in a liberal human rights context, had important impact on citizenship, making the latter more porous and less discriminatory, but also less nationally distinct than in the past. It is a truism that in the era of globalization nation-state societies are much less sharply bounded, autarchic units than they used to be, and citizenship has been centrally involved in this transformation, both as dependent and independent variable.
By the same token, changes in the institution of citizenship were much more dramatic in Western Europe than in the classic immigration countries, simply because European citizenship regimes were much less geared to the reality of mass immigration than their North American or Australian counterparts. Not by accident, at least two of the two benchmark works on “citizenship and immigration” reviewed in this course covered European countries, though offering sharply divided views on classic nation-state citizenship as either resilient (Brubaker op.cit.) or in decline (Y.Soysal, Limits of Citizenship 1994). As opposite as they appear, the “resilience” and “decline” stances jointly failed to see that citizenship, rather than being static or being rendered obsolete, continued to evolve, converging on a liberal model of inclusive citizenship with diminished rights implications and increasingly universalistic identities. This convergence shall be demonstrated in this course through comparing developments in Western Europe and the classic immigration countries.

Ancient Greek is one of the most important source languages of Medieval Studies and Greek Philosophy. Whether your interest is in reading classical Greek texts in their own right, in studying their reception in the Middle Ages or, ultimately, in moving from classical texts towards late antique and Byzantine literature, a thorough training in ancient Greek will be the conditio sine qua non to pursue any of these goals.

This is an intensive Russian reading course designed for students who already possess basic skills in Russian (the knowledge of alphabet, basics of grammar and vocabulary). The class is designed to help students read Russian texts with the help of a dictionary for their research needs. Since the course is designed only for one semester, students will receive intensive training on the most important aspects of Russian grammar and morphology. At the same time, participants of the class will be introduced in the usage of language programs which can help them in their translations from Russian.

Classes will focus on particular grammatical issues and the practice of grammar within selected reading materials. The texts will present a wide range of different historical and literary sources in Russian.

Learning Outcomes:
-The ability to analyze primary source materials, i.e., to select relevant primary source material and read it in the source language with an awareness of the linguistic and cultural background implied. Assessed through assigned individual translation work and exercises (homework) followed by discussion in class as well as through and end-of-term written examination. -A solid knowledge of the main morphological and syntactical features of Latin including: main patterns of the nominal and pronominal inflection; the systems of the imperfectum and perfectum indicatiui; the subjunctive; the uses of the main conjunctions and prepositions and the syntactic value of the cases as well as that of various verbal moods and tenses. Assessed through assigned individual translation work and exercises (homework) followed by discussion in class as well as through and end-of-term written examination.
Assessment :
Attendance in class is required (min. 80 %). The assessment is both formative and summative. Student performance will be assessed both throughout the semester by means of practical exercises, translation of selected texts (both on-sight, in class, and as independent work as homework), and specially designed grammar drills as well as at the end of the semester by means of a written examination, which will consist of short texts to be translated with the help of the dictionary and the notes provided by the instructor. In the final assessment, the ratio between class participation and final examination will be 10% to 90%. Both written and oral feedback will be provided to students on a regular basis. Note: This course can only be taken for grade either following the supervisor's recommendation or as a personal choice. It is mandatory for the MA students registered at the Department of Medieval Studies and joining the Beginners group at the start of the academic year to attend and pass the end-of-term written examination with a grade of at least B-. Those failing to do so will retake the exam prior to the defense of their MA Thesis; failure to comply with this requirement or to obtain a passing grade (i.e., min. B-) will delay the conferral of the MA degree until this condition is met.

This course focuses on biodiversity loss and the importance of biodiversity conservation. In this course, students will survey the patterns of global diversity within various biomes and learn the most pressing threats leading to declines in biodiversity. Students will be introduced to the theory and principles involved in conservation and learn about governmental and non-governmental efforts to protect natural environments and develop sustainable practices to meet human needs.

In this course students will continue their practical acquaintance with geospatial mapping and analysis using ArcView and some free software packages (to be specified). The course introduces digital analysis of geospatial phenomena and provides foundations in methods and algorithms used in GIS analysis. It builds up on the practical skills in geospatial data mining and practical skills in using GIS tools obtained during “ICT for environmental professionals” course. In addition to our last term activities on geospatial data visualization we will concentrate more on data processing and analysis.

This course is intended to figure out the main parameters of metropolitan life characterizing the 19th and 20th century. In seeking the social and cultural meaning of the modern metropolis, one is confronted with the proliferation of difference that dominates metropolitan realm. Therefore it is unlikely that there is a single „text of the city” that would reveal the deep and hidden substance of the city in the moden era. The course organized in an analytical fashion focuses on the most diverse spatial implications of a distinctive metropolitan life. The empirical evidences are taken both from North America (a case in point is New York), and Western or Central Europe (London, Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Prague). The emphasis is laid not on the individual profile of the cities to be discussed, but the common features on the one hand and the varieties of such a metropolitanism on the other hand. 

Appropriate for all students

The course is intended to give an overview of the main European artistic trends from Art Nouveau /Secession to Post-Modernism by concentrating on the changing role of the arts in society and the changing attitudes of the artists to their vocation, as well as the influence of the art market.

It will focus on painting, viewed in its social, cultural and national contexts, and will analyse the relationship between art and political and /or philosophical ideas. Nevertheless the most important achievements of architecture and urbanism in the 20th century will also be included.

Changing world views, as manifested in works of art, will be analysed from a social, political and philosophical point of view.

The aim of this unit is to introduce to students the idea, methodology and basic tools of environmental modeling. Models are essential in environmental management. In order to better understand environmental systems, to predict their behaviour and to develop effective management strategies it is crucially important to bring together ecological, socio-economic and technological aspects of the specific environmental problem. To secure such an interdisciplinary analysis of the numerous factors, consensus-building among various experts and facilitate results communication to the decision-makers the system dynamics and process-based modelling techniques are often used. Though different alternative approaches to environmental modelling are to be discussed the course will mainly focus on obtaining practical skills in process-based simulation.

Could policies be ameliorated by taking into account the way people actually take their decisions? According to the neo-classical model, people are systematically trying to maximize their material benefits. However, results from cognitive science and behavioural economics have shown that 1) people are often not able to calculate which decision promises to be the most beneficial for them; they largely rely on automatic mechanisms and rules of thumbs; and 2) people do have prosocial preferences that can lead them to act against their selfish material interests. We will review some of the research evidencing the two above points and we will analyse their implications for policy-makers and managers.

During this course students get familiar with the history and cultural heritage of the region to be visited (in 2012: Lower Austria, South-Eastern Germany and Western Bohemia) and prepare short essays for the field trip booklet, on the basis of critical reading of existing scholarship. This provides them opportunity to review scholarly literature (often on subjects that are not familiar to the students from their earlier studies, and sometimes in unfamiliar languages) and transform information into a reader-friendly format.

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This course is designed to introduce students into some of the central themes in contemporary political philosophy. The discussion and readings will be structured thematically, with very little focus on the history of political thought. Rather than offering a survey of a wide array of subjects, the course is intended to provide a more in-depth analysis of a few selected issues of primary importance about the ground and scope of the authority of the state. ...

The aims of this course are the following: making students familiar with the basic rules of doing comparative research: introducing the most influential approaches salient topics in comparative political science. The course, thus, will help students to evaluate the methodological merits of those political science publications that use a comparative approach, to recognize which intellectual tradition they belong to, and to design their own comparative research strategy. ...

The aim of the course is to provide an introduction to the conceptualization of the modern welfare state from the three distinct perspectives of citizenship, historicity, and institutional structure. Departure will be taken from the founding values of equality, social justice, freedom and solidarity, and the embodiment of these values will be investigated through dilemmas of defining citizenship within the varying arrangements in the core institution of 20th century welfare states: social security. ...

The course examines the path to and main features of post-Soviet statehood. The first part of the course investigates the origins and functioning of the Soviet state. Next the course examines the unraveling of the Soviet Union, paying special attention to the process of nationalist mobilization and the dynamics of conflict and war in some key areas of the post-Soviet space. Here notions of ethnicity, nationalism, clans, regions, and power networks are discussed. The final part of the course looks at the foreign policies of the post-Soviet states and the interplay between the region and some key global actors.

What values should our political institutions promote? One way to address this question looks at how our values were defended and articulated in the past. Thinking about the past can provide important insights of how we should live together. This course reviews some of the major figures in modern political thought from Hobbes to J. S. Mill. The course provides 1) an appreciation of how some political concepts and values such as authority, liberty, and equality were shaped during the XVII-XIX centuries, 2) a critical assessment of the arguments provided by these thinkers, 3) and a discussion about the methodological tools developed during the time. ...

This course explores a key aspect of modern democracy: political representation. It raises questions such as: what does it mean to be represented, and to be a “good representative”? How has the idea of “one man one vote” become central to modern understandings of democracy? What is it exactly that needs to be represented, and how? Through what institutional and non institutional channels and mechanisms can representation be obtained? How legitimate are claims for “better” representation (for instance women or ethnic quotas)?

The course is designed to focus on the analysis of federalism using the cases of three rather different systems. Despite the continental dimension, the EU, the US and India have in common, the three systems differ greatly...

Resistance and collaboration are among the most debated concepts that feature in confrontational political situations. The course will depart from the European experience during the Second World War but will expand the empirical base and investigate how the central problems related to these concepts change in different times and places. The enquiry is organized around three questions: to what extent these concepts are context-dependent, or how well they travel between different historical experiences; what kinds of moral questions they embody; how far they can be explained by institutional analysis and social movement theory. ...

The current global crisis is a powerful reminder that capitalism is a highly unstable order, or, as argued by Wolfgang Streeck, an “institutionalized disorder”. Dominant approaches especially in comparative political economy have in the last decades become too comfortable with the idea that capitalism is successfully domesticated by institutions – be it the regulatory institutions of liberal capitalism, or the more deeply engrained interlocking networks governing coordinated market economies. Change, if it all, was to occur gradually. The aim of this course is to revitalize concepts of capitalism as a highly dynamic system that is reproduced through cycles of destruction and institutional reform. It seeks to provide analytical tools and a long-term perspective on capitalist dynamics which foster an understanding of the destructive forces of capitalism; and the historical conditions under which these forces could be tamed and turned into sources of growth and social progress.

To what extent can policies foster human cooperation? What tools do recent developments in the cognitive and behavioural sciences provide to improve human sociality? Why is social cooperation difficult to secure? We will investigate the ways in which a deeper understanding of the cognitive foundations of social cooperation could inform policy-making.

The course offers an introduction into some classic problems of epistemology which form the subject of lively discussion also in contemporary philosophy. We shall start with the question of necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge, the Gettier problem and its consequences. Next we look into theories of justification, and discuss the merits and shortcomings of foundationalism and reliabilism. Next we will consider various sceptical arguments against the possibility of knowledge, and investigate some responses to the sceptical arguments. In the rest of the course, we study the nature of different forms of knowledge: a priori knowledge, perceptual knowledge and self-knowledge. The aim of the course is to familiarize students with the basic concepts of contemporary epistemological research. The course will offer a suitable basis for taking an advanced graduate class in epistemology.

This course is a survey of 17th and 18th-century philosophy meant to
fulfill a core requirement in the 2-year MA program. However, those
who would like to attain a broad knowledge of this area of philosophy
may enroll, with instructor’s permission. Topics will include
knowledge and skepticism, the mind-body problem, the nature of
substance, necessity and contingency, causation, primary and secondary
qualities and personal identity.

Kant (MA Elective, 2 credits). The focus of this course will be
Kant's epistemology and metaphysics as it presented in the Critique of
Pure Reason and the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. We will
also aim to put Kant's views into context by comparing them with his
influential predecessors, especially Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley and
Hume. Course requirements include regular attendance and
participation and a 2000 word term paper on a topic of your choice. A
preliminary draft of the paper will be due around the tenth week of
the term.

The aim of this course is to develop a foundational understanding of atmospheric science, including the nature of air pollution problems on local, regional, continental, and global scales, and the development of air quality regulation. Emphasis will be placed on the fundamental chemical and physical processes operative in the atmosphere, the influence of human activities, and the processes by which air quality regulations and policies are developed. An introduction to air pollution modelling will be made, with the description of major existing types of models and existing policy frameworks based on modelling. Introduction to paleoclimatology will be made with the emphasis on methods of study of past climates. Students will have group assignment based on real data of air pollution in Budapest and report their findings.

Under the first Komnenoi emperors – Alexios I (1081–1118), John II (1118–1143), Manuel I (1143–1180) — Byzantium’s prestige saw its peak. These valiant and gallant emperors and their kin loved to be celebrated in genres and metaphors evoking the Homeric heroes of old; epic poems flattered Komnenian princes, while pocket versions of the Iliad and Odyssee entertained imperial brides from abroad. In spite of all this valour on display, a mere twenty years after Manuel I’s death, this richest empire of medieval Christendom lay in shatters …

The main goals of course are a thorough understanding and critical evaluation of key concepts and theoretical approaches that have developed and are developing in the environmental history; a comprehensive understanding of fundamental themes in the environmental history of the region, subjected to critical and comparative analysis; the placing of Central, South-eastern and Eastern Europe in European and global perspectives.

This course aims to elaborate a range of comparative approaches to crucial topics in history of Eastern Europe. East /West, Asia/ Europe comparison will stand in center of our attention.
The course discusses major trends in political, cultural and social evolution of territories which make the present day Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and, in part, Poland in the XVI – XIX centuries, in comparison to structures of western and “oriental” history. The main focus is placed on pre-modern and modern structures which emerged here in a result of 1) geopolitical contexts 2) encounter of various civilizational traditions (local, European and “Asian”) 3) modernization process. The course sees these three aspects of Russian and Eurasian history as deeply interconnected. It challenges conventional (national, imperial, modernization) paradigms of historical writings on Eastern Europe.
How strong were Byzantine, Asian and European influences on Russia? What was peculiar in the Russian autocracy in comparison to Polish-Lithuanian “noble republic”, French absolutism, and “oriental despoties”? Why did the Russian Empire emerge and Poland-Lithuania decline in the XVIIth – XVIIIth centuries? What did make a difference between nobility, clergy, town people, rising bourgeoisie, intelligentsia and peasants in Russia, Asian and European societies (Poland and France, for example)? and Ukraine? What were distinctive features of modernization processes in Russia, Poland, and, for example, France? How did nationalisms emerge and national identities take shape in these societies, in the XVIth – XIXth centuries? What was different and common in genesis and evolution of revolutionary and socialist movements? These issues will be placed in center of seminar discussions and subjected to comparative analysis. The course aims to develop a comprehensive and critical understanding of problems which stand behind these questions.

This course wants to explore the (lost) world of the multicultural cities of the Habsburg Empire. On the contrary to the countryside, cities were often mixed, especially on the margins of the Empire: Banat, Transylvania, Upper Hungary, Bucovina, but also at his very center as the example of Vienna shows.

Around the year 1000 the historical landscape of Central Europe changes significantly. New political entities emerge and start to establish forms of domination over people and territories. Other already existing entities start to adopt and implement Christianity and certain models of Christian rulership. Within the structure of these units new social strata start to emerge. Increasing trade activities result in significant changes concerning the infrastructure of the region. Within a still rural society new urban islands start to emerge creating new social groups.
The course tries to take over these ideas and to persue the main lines that created and shaped around the year 1000 a new historical situation leading finally to the European nation states of modern times.

The course gives an introduction to the notion and scope of medieval science and to each discipline, presenting its chief issues and sources. It looks in turn at cosmology, astronomy, astrology, mathematics, natural science, biology, alchemy, magic and medicine. The course discusses texts, images, instruments, and models as complementary sources. The aim is to become familiar with the central themes, textual and visual rhetoric, modes of representation and argumentation techniques of late antique and medieval science and to understand the various ways in which scholars wrote and read scientific texts and produced scientific knowledge. Sources will be read in English translation.

Our words, sentences are about—refer to—things in the world: objects, people, events. Plausibly, the meanings of expressions play a central role in explaining this referential feature: for example, it is in virtue of the meaning of the word ’horse’ that it refers to horses. But what exactly does this role played by meaning consist in? The answer is not at all straightforward. Consider these two sentences:

Mark Twain was a famous novelist.
Samuel Clemens was a famous novelist.

How does the meaning of the first sentence differ from the meaning of the second? After all, both are about the same individual: who was called Samuel Clemens but became famous under the pseudonym ‘Mark Twain’. Yet—according to Gottlob Frege—the two sentences cannot have the same meaning because someone may rationally believe one (the first, say), without believing the other. This is what Frege’s “puzzle” consists in, providing the starting point for 20th-century philosophy of language. In the seminar, our aim is to gain a greater understanding of the nature of meaning, and its relation to reference, truth, communication.

The course combines an introduction into the major methodological developments in the history of political ideas with a thematic overview of political thought in our region roughly between 1900 and 1945. It uses the excerpts, previously unavailable in English, provided by the collective project Regional Identity Discourses in Central and Southeast Europe (1775-1945). The collection of these texts makes it possible to analyze and compare ‘in depth’ various ideological traditions that were formative of the national discourses of Central and Southeast Europe.

H.A. Wolfson once characterised the period between Philo of Alexandria and Spinoza as the age of the philosophy of religion. Indeed, with the simultaneous emergence of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, and their ideas of revelation brought about a new impetus in the context of the sophisticated philosophical culture of Hellenism. They were joined in later by Islam, and revelation became not only an accepted, but an all-important source of knowledge, rivalling philosophy (that is, science). Their antagonistic, or at least uneasy relationship had had a long and chequered history addressed by the best minds, like the Cappadocian Fathers, Averroes, Maimonides, or Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. The course will look at some of their (widely divergent) solutions from the analytic point of view, which allows the students to understand the development of the idea of science, and scientific method in the long period between the first century AD to the sixteenth. In the end the course will look at the problem of the role of theological imagination in the emergence of modern science (Duhem, Funkenstein).

This course aims to offer a critical overview of the political issues and debates that shape and influence contemporary higher education policies. More specifically, it aims to approach relevant issues in the field of education in relation to broader public policies, and discuss their implications in/for the students’ own experience and research. It asks the following key questions about policies, debates and conflicts in higher education – (1) What is higher education about? (2) Who should it be for? (3) How should it be governed? (4) Who should decide? –– and uses them to understand issues such as access, (in)equalities, (de)regulation, transnationalization, commodification, values, roles and purposes of education, etc. The course aims to move beyond the technical-rational descriptions that sometimes dominate the research on higher education, and focus on the deeply contested, and thus political, nature of the field.

This course addresses some aspects of the wide problem of political legitimacy. We will try to examine how the European states in the 19th century tried to present themselves as "just" and "legitimate". We will look at specimens of 19th century political theory and at pieces of propaganda; we will try to analyze the state ceremonies and symbols, looking both at written sources and at iconography. Without omitting Britain, France or Prussia, the course will put special stress on the Habsburg Monarchy, trying to explain how a multinational empire tried to establish its legitimate character in the era of growing nationalisms.

This course will prepare the first-year, 2YMA students for presenting their MA thesis prospectus in June 2012. Therefore it will familiarize the students with the main requirements of the prospectus as well as with how to prepare, structure, and finalize the following thesis.

This course is designed to train students in the close reading of classical Arabic texts. It will be based on selections of one of the central texts of Arabic thought, the fourteenth-century Muqaddima of Ibn Khaldun. This text allows students with intermediary Arabic reading competence to grasp larger arguments despite certain linguistic difficulties of the text. It is written in a style, which some commentators have described as nearly modern Arabic reportage, and as particularly eloquent. But it is also one which does not shy away from using the entire lexical, figurative and other resources of classical Arabic, including the technical vocabularies of the language.
The course will be based on the close reading of some of the Muqaddima’s passages: his critique of historiography, his ideas discussion of the nature of human kind, the development of the Arabic language, and of the genres of Arabic writings.

Texts will be distributed to students taking this course. There will be continuous assessment, based on text preparation.

The courses “The Emergence of Zionism” and “Israel: Nation-Building and Society” form a contiguous pair, but students may take either of them separately. While the former presents the diaspora origins of the Zionist idea and organization, the latter will study Jewish nation-building strategies under the British Mandate of Palestine and their subsequent realization and transformation in the state of Israel.

Environmental Politics: This course focuses on environmental communication and is designed to provide students with understanding, skills, and concrete engagement in environmental activism and communications with due consideration for the political and social implications. Students actively engage the concepts of power, environmental discourse, and framing as an experiment in bridging theory and practice culminating in the design and implementation (and evaluation) of a specific environmental media project.

What do we know about women in the early Church and how do we know it? Poststructuralist questions concerning the role, function, representation and construction of women in late ancient Christianity created an important field on its own while offering a significant contribution to religious and church history, (feminist) theology, cultural anthropology and gender studies. This course aims to introduce students into the sources and methodology of this research. How did Christianity transform (the representation of) women’s lives in late antiquity? The female (virgin and/or martyr) body, the making of the self and the function of asceticism will be in the focus of our attention. Christian views of the body, of women’s position in society and in the church differed radically from traditional conceptions. We will read key sources that report about the spiritual and intellectual leadership of women in the early Church, about women’s function in the family, their role in the Christianization of Roman society, their patronage of church building and of clerical ambitions, their participation in charitable and monastic foundations and in social work. Scholarship informed by gender studies and by social anthropology will help us deconstruct late ancient texts to discover the extent to which female ideals and references to women functioned as social critique, as thinly veiled attacks on male opponents, or helped destabilize binary conceptions of gender identity.

Oral history is both a genre of historical inquiry and a technique for collecting oral testimonies about historical events and social practices. In this course we will read and discuss theoretical readings on key issues in doing and interpreting oral history. Oral history is understood broadly to include materials that were recorded or obtained through oral interaction which are or can be subsequently used to construct or reconstruct history. Therefore, in addition to the important debates about the nature of oral discourse, we will examine rationales and structures of narratives as used in life histories and personal reports on political events that “become history” when interpreted within a historical context. The centerpiece of the course will explore oral history technique for preparing, executing and evaluating an oral history interview. Understanding these techniques will also allow them to be compared to other forms of interviewing and their published and archived forms. The latter part of the course will address biography as a close relative of oral history through a look at biography and history, ego documents like diaries, memoirs and autobiographies, borderlines of fact and fiction, and media forms that use oral history and biography like documentary and biographical films, along with new directions in digital biography and online oral history.

This course will focus on the multiple and sometimes conflicting ways feminist theory produced scholarship since 1980 which sought to deploy the concept of difference in order to release some political and epistemological potential in undermining a homogenous, universal(izing) concept of gender. The curriculum includes a selection of key texts and texts representing key arguments in order to trace this development of difference in feminist scholarship. The course is designed to provide an opportunity to read and discuss in detail these texts and the turns they inaugurated or represent. Themes will include essentialism, postcolonial feminist theory, intersectionality, deconstructive feminist theory, French Feminism and psychoanalysis, sexuality, embodiment and the posthuman body.

The course is designed to advance a dialogue about the implications of the various theorizations of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality in the past three decades, assuming as its basic premise that these categories come to mean different things in different disciplines. Based on the critical readings of both classic and recent texts, we shall explore the insights and subversive potential we can gain from ‘gender’, the key concept of Feminism/s (as of the 1970s) and that of ‘sexuality’ developed by (the 1990s generation of) Queer Theory. Our ultimate aim is to destabilize the non-productive dichotomy between feminist vs. queer theorizations of women’s everyday life. Instead, the course is hoped to seek a more integrative account of the complex hegemonic relations between gender and sexuality, destabilizing the (theoretically) assumed reductive continuities between anatomical sex, social gender, gender identity, sexual practice, sexual desire, and sexual identity. In other words, queer theorists’ knowledge production will be a helpful criticism of most feminist theories’ separation of biological/anatomical sex and social gender but without arguing for the queer non-foundationalist celebrations of sexualities as playful, de-centered performative acts, postulating woman as dematerialized and disembodied signification of fun only.

This course will take students through theories of biopolitics, beginning with the impact of Michel Foucault in the 1970s when he coined this term in order to describe a particular kind of modern state formation motivated solely by the need to preserve certain kinds of life (over others). The course then examines theories that have been developed in the wake of Foucault’s intervention (such as Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy on sovereign power and bare life). It traces a genealogy of ideas and concepts informing the contemporary field of biopolitics that goes back to earlier thinkers (pre-Foucault), whose work is being continually revitalized today through a biopolitical lens (e.g. the work of Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt). The course also looks at Achille Mbembe’s argument for analyzing modern governance through the lens of necropolitics rather than biopolitics, and students are encouraged to think about the ways in which discourses of (human) rights and political ethics are structured by the rhetoric of ‘necessary killing’, alongside rhetorics of reproducing, saving, preserving, and improving life.
Sex, gender, race, and class are treated as key analytical categories for looking at contemporary biopolitical issues in an era of so-called ‘neoliberal’ capitalism: e.g. issues such as global security, the management of health, biotechnology and reproductive rights.

This interdisciplinary course is to help students with the methodology section of their thesis. It will familiarise students with some of the main methods of qualitative social science research and equip them with the skills they will need to formulate research questions, carry out the qualitative research and analyse their data. The course finishes with a discussion of the ethical dimensions of research and writing. Given that oral history is a technique and a way of constructing histories the course tries to offer an overview of different ways of how to construct the information and how to analyse it in a wider theoretical context. The course consists of two parts: lectures are followed by seminars where participants will have the chance to practice making and analyzing interviews.

The human body, its organs, tissues and cells are increasingly used in various new contexts. In biomedical research, in stem cell research and in assisted reproduction the human body is to fulfill various scientific and commercial purposes ranging from essential life-saving treatments to aesthetic enhancement. Reflecting on this complex phenomenon, this course will analyze complex issues, such as the commodification and commercialization of the human body by applying both the human rights and the gender approach. Analysis of academic texts and judicial cases about biobanks, tissue- and organ donation, biotechnological inventions, organ and egg trade, organ trafficking, tourism, and trafficking of women will provide a rich repertoire of social and legal questions for lectures, seminars and film sessions.

This course comes as a continuation of the similar one offered in the Fall Semester and is intended to enlarge the students’ basic knowledge of Medieval Latin so as to enable them, by the end of the semester, to handle simple sources written in that language beyond beginner’s level. In an effort to provide students with access to “living Latin” as a testimony and expression of everyday life in the Roman Empire, a selection of wall inscriptions and graffiti, with a special focus on epigraphic material surviving from Pompeii and Herculaneum, will be included progressively in the translation practice material.

The main aim of the present course is to provide a systematic overview of Latin syntax (in the Winter Semester, mainly of case syntax as well as a basic overview of various types of subordinate clauses). In addition to this, it will also offer the students a chance to get acquainted with and explore poetry composed in Classical and Medieval Latin. The selected texts will cover a representative variety of poetic discourses, genres, and styles, ranging from epic and didactic poetry to epigrams and sepulchral lyrics.

The class will discuss multivariate statistical methods that are often applied in political science. These methods seek to understand the nature of the relationships between variables. We will start with a review of multivariate regression analysis and then discuss variants of it that are able to handle categorical responses. Then we shall discuss factor analysis and variants of it and methods that can handle mixed discrete and continuous data. Coverage will be completed by considering methods for the analysis of categorical data.

This course is intended to assist first year PhD students in preparing for the comprehensive exam by surveying a major regional field. It deals with the vast space of Eastern and East-Central Europe that became the borderland of the Romanov, Habsburg and Hohenzollern empires after the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The contiguity of these empires and their relationships to each other will be the focus of discussion more often than the domestic politics of Russia. In chronological terms the seminar ranges from the eighteenth century into the twentieth century, depending on the needs of the students. Each seminar discusses selected texts on topics such as mental mapping of the region, modernization, history of ideas, and empires and nationalism, and other topics of current interest in the profession.

The course treats major problems of the history of South-Eastern Europe in the modern epoch with an emphasis on the transformation of society, polity, and culture in the course of development/modernization. The theoretical background is comprised of theories of development, the public-private divide (and concepts of citizenship), the concept of “social state”, theories of totalitarianism and post-colonial theory (“Balkanism”, symbolic geographies). The course has a strong comparative dimension.

What are the psychological bases of the rich social interactions and cultural life that characterise human societies? This course will review some of the answers provided by recent studies in cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology and cognitive anthropology. It will cover a wide range of topics related to social cognition, including: mind reading; Communication; social learning, imitation; the cognitive bases of cultural phenomena; joint action and co operation; naive sociology; the biological evolution of social cognitive capacities; how other aspects of the psychological make up of humans might have significant impacts on culture and society.

Contrary to the commonly held view, linguistic utterances do not
encode the speaker’s meaning, they merely provide evidence of it. How
is speaker’s meaning reconstructed on the basis of this evidence? What
is linguistically encoded? What are the relationships between the
linguistically encoded meanings studied by semanticists and the
representational contents that humans are capable of entertaining and
communicating? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations,
metaphors, and ironies? What is the relationship between the ability
to comprehend others’ meanings and the general ability to comprehend
others? How do these abilities interact in development? How does
communication both enable and constrain the flow of information among
humans and thereby contribute to the evolution of culture? These are
the main issues to be discussed in the course.

This course focuses on the cognitive underpinnings of language. Why
does understanding the way language works matter for Cognitive
Science? Are there primitives that are present in all languages? How
are the categories in a language formed, and what is the role of
communication in the acquisition of language? What are the cognitive
origins of language? What makes human language special compared to
other forms of communication?

States claim to have a right to issue binding directives to those within their jurisdiction. This claim entails that the addressees have a moral obligation to obey those directives provided certain conditions obtain. The obligation to obey is said to be defeasible but general: it is said to hold with regard to (almost) all directives, (almost) all subjects, on (almost) all occasions. This is the claim of political obligation. It needs to be justified. Can a justification be given to it? Anarchists and classical Marxists answer the question in the negative. Liberals, traditionally, defend a positive answer for a subclass of states (constitutionally limited democracies). The traditional justifications are, typically, voluntaristic in the following sense: they assume that for a person to be politically obligated, s/he must perform an act that counts as undertaking an obligation (consent, acceptance of benefits from a cooperative scheme, etc.), and that act must be performed voluntarily (acts performed under coercion, manipulation, duress, or hypnosis, for example, are not obligation-generating). However, in the last couple of decades, an increasing number of liberal philosophers came to adopt a skeptical view on the possibility of justifying political obligation. In an attempt to meet the skeptical objection, a number of contemporary authors try build the justification of political obligation on some moral duty that applies to the subjects independently of whether any voluntary act of undertaking an obligation is performed by them (associative duties, natural duties of justice, etc.). This course will examine the direction in which the justification was traditionally sought and the reasons why this direction has been taken, the skeptical arguments against the traditional strategies, and the more recent attempts at meeting those arguments.

advanced topics (methods)

This is an advanced methodological course on set-theoretic methods in the social sciences. While the spectrum of a set-theoretic methods is broad, includeing techniques such as Mill's methods or typological theory, this course primarily focusses on the crisp-set and fuzzy-set versions of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). Invented by Charles Ragin (1987), this technique has undergone various modifications, improvements, and ramifications (Ragin 2000, 2008). It currently receives increasing interest (and scepticism) in the broader social scientific community, both from its more qualitative and its more quantitative side. This course aims at enabling students to produce a publishable QCA of their own. In order to achieve this, this course provides both the mathematical and set theoretical underpinnings of QCA and the technical and research practical skills necessary for performing a QCA.

The course is structured as follows. We start with some basics of formal logic and set theory. Then we introduce the concepts of causal complexity and of necessity and sufficiency, show how the latter denote subset relations, and then learn how such subset relations can be analyzed with so-called truth tables. All concpets and analytic steps are first introduced based on crisp sets and then it is shown how they apply to fuzzy sets. Once students master the current standard analysis practice, we move on and discuss several extensions and possible improvements of QCA. We discuss the issue of skewed set membership scores; an enhanced strategy of treating so-called logical remainders; principles of post-QCA case selection strategies for within-case analyses; the integration of time into QCA; theory-testing in set-theoretic methods; and multi-value QCA.

Throughout the course, we frequently use the computer and enhance our practical QCA skills by performing hands-on analyses. We will learn how to handle the fsQCA software package and will also introduce other programs that can be used for set-theoretic analyses, such as STATA, R, and TOSMANA. A desired (and very likely) side effect of this course will be that we engage into discussions on more general methodological issues of good comparative research, such as principles and practices of case selection, concept formation, measurement validity, and forms of causal relations.

advanced topics (methods)

Experimental methodologies have been the foundation of empirical research in the past century but within the social sciences (hold psychology) they received little attention until the past decade. In 2002 Daniel Kahneman, Vernon L. Smith received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for their experimental work elevating a fringe approach to mainstream status. Since then, extensive attention has been devoted to experimental research within the social sciences, including political science, which lead to numerous prestigious political science publications of experimental work and the recent (2010) establishment of Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association. The purpose of this class is to build a solid foundation for anyone who wishes to design experiments and utilize experimental methods in their own research.

The course will focus on political interest mobilization in postindustrial democracies, broadly conceived. That should also include the EU integrated parts of the postcommunist world. Each day is configured around an analytical subject of general interest to students of comparative politics, but with data primarily, but not exclusively, from advanced industrial democracies.

This is a practice-oriented seminar, with the focus on the study of politics ‘from below’ and ‘from within’. It addresses research questions that require an investigation into the meanings of particular political practices, concepts or processes to situational actors in order to illuminate a wider-ranging or more theoretical issues of political concern.

Political ethnography is an interdisciplinary research strategy, based on the immersion of the researcher in the subject matter and geared towards the study of power. While the course does not elaborate on the philosophical underpinnings of interdisciplinary research, it operates at a conceptual level, which presupposes some familiarity with research practice. Because it is interdisciplinary above all else, the participants should be ready to engage with texts from across social sciences.

The seminar is open to all researchers interested in the study of politics, but it is particularly suitable for those that intend to conduct fieldwork that requires some degree of ‘ethnographic sensibility’, including different modes of in-situ interviewing, participant observation, and the reconstruction of policy meanings through documentary evidence.

This Ph.D course is devoted to major issues of economic theory, development and policy failure. The focus is on the global perspective, not transition, in order to put the emerging market experience, elaborated in a separate course, in a global perspective. It addresses, on the base of a broad survey of competing theories and the newest literature, major factors explaining catching up and falling behind, furthermore if and to what degree policy convergence is a testable suggestion. The major question is not if institutions matter for growth, but which ones matter and how. Lessons from the financial crises and accounting scandals are being drawn. The main purpose of the course is to provide a broad overview of theories and approaches that exist in the international literature. We also try to specify what good governance may mean in practice and what is the potential of policy in bringing about change in the long run.
The course is composed of lectures and interactive seminars. Lectures introduce the topic, which is usually quite broad, and seminars are devoted to presentation, of recommended readings, by one or two of the participants, followed by a discussion of both the lecture material and of the seminar presentation. Required readings are supposed to be processed individually, though any major points of disagreement may be raised during the seminar. Points of clarification should be addressed by consulting the reference volumes and the lecturer during the office hours or before/after the classes. The three constitutive elements do not necessarily overlap in time and subject. Some background in macroeconomics, international finance and trade is though a positive advantage, however it is not a formal precondition for taking this course.

States claim to have a right to issue binding directives to those within their jurisdiction. This claim entails that the addressees have a moral obligation to obey those directives provided certain conditions obtain. The obligation to obey is said to be defeasible but general: it is said to hold with regard to (almost) all directives, (almost) all subjects, on (almost) all occasions. This is the claim of political obligation. It needs to be justified. Can a justification be given to it? Anarchists and classical Marxists answer the question in the negative. Liberals, traditionally, defend a positive answer for a subclass of states (constitutionally limited democracies). The traditional justifications are, typically, voluntaristic in the following sense: they assume that for a person to be politically obligated, s/he must perform an act that counts as undertaking an obligation (consent, acceptance of benefits from a cooperative scheme, etc.), and that act must be performed voluntarily (acts performed under coercion, manipulation, duress, or hypnosis, for example, are not obligation-generating). However, in the last couple of decades, an increasing number of liberal philosophers came to adopt a skeptical view on the possibility of justifying political obligation. In an attempt to meet the skeptical objection, a number of contemporary authors try build the justification of political obligation on some moral duty that applies to the subjects independently of whether any voluntary act of undertaking an obligation is performed by them (associative duties, natural duties of justice, etc.).
This course will examine the direction in which the justification was traditionally sought and the reasons why this direction has been taken, the skeptical arguments against the traditional strategies, and the more recent attempts at meeting those arguments.

second part of a 4-credit core course

The course is designed to introduce students to the study of public administration. It follows and complements the course 'Public Policy: Theories, Traditions and Transitions', by focusing on the more organizational and institutional dimensions of public policy. The course adopts mainly a comparative perspective; yet, it addresses the implications of the Europeanization and globalization of public administration and administrative law. Academic discussions will address specific questions set out in advance, and cover core themes: bureaucracies as organizations; intergovernmental relations and federalism; public budgeting and taxation; provision of public goods and social security; implementation models; policy evaluation and performance measurement; public service personnel; administrative law; ethics; administrative reform and development; politics, society and administration (including the role of NGOs).

The course attempts to introduce students into some philosophical issues related to the understanding of human action. Topics to be discussed include, first, the causal versus non-causal theories of action; second, the nature of intention and intentional actions; and finally, the nature of practical reasoning and reasons explanations of action.

The Philosophy of mind, and especially the ‘mind-body problem’ have been at the centre of philosophical discussion at least since Descartes, and, arguably, ever since Plato. The main purpose of this course is to get to grips with the most contemporary attempts to solve the ‘problem’. Most of the course will concern contemporary attempts to form an adequate materialist theory of the mind. We will then look at attempts to provide alternatives to such theories provided by those who are not satisfied with mainstream forms of physicalism, including ‘naturalist non-physicalism’ and dualism.

The course concerns ancient and contemporary approaches to mathematical
knowledge and to intuitive insight, taking Aristotle as its focus. For this we
will discuss in detail parts of the last two books of the Metaphysics, where
Aristotle criticises at great length the philosophy of mathematics of his
predecessors and contemporaries, and sets out in detail his alternative
approach. A fundamental feature of this is to give an account of the
ontological status of the objects of mathematical cognition, and to integrate
this with articulation of mathematical knowledge in a deductive system,
starting out from principles which are beyond proof. In order to cover this
latter feature of mathematics we will also discuss Aristotle's philosophy of
science as presented in the Posterior Analytics, with special emphasis on the
concluding chapter of Book II, where Aristotle grapples with the problem of the
grasp of first principles.

The course will be providing a high-level introduction into current-day philosophically inspired cognitive developmental theory and evolutionary perspectives of the nature of human concepts and their origins. It will cover the current theorizing and empirical research on the central issues of the phylogenetic and ontogenetic origins of concepts and the nature of the human mind’s ability for conceptual change. The core reading for the course will be the just published book by Susan Carey entitled “The origin of concepts” (OUP, 2009). The in-depth reading and discussion of this representative book and a set of additional papers will cover the comparative analysis of the nature of processes of conceptual change, reorganization, and theory construction in cognitive development on the one hand, and in history of science, on the other.
One of the foundational domains that is central to both philosophy of mind and cognitive science is the nature of concepts. This includes questions of their semantic and inferential properties, their content and representational format(s), their phylogenetic and ontogenetic origins, the issue of nature vs. nurture in their ontogenetic development, the question of kind concepts and essentialism, the language of thought, concepts and language, concepts as naïve theories, conceptual change and reorganization, conceptual domains, processes driving theory formation in science and in naïve theory building in childhood, modularity vs. central processes, categorization, prototypes, and naïve theories, etc. The goal of the course is to provide an overview of current theories and research on these issues from the point of view of philosophically informed cognitive science of the mind.

The revival of metaphysics that has taken place in the last thirty years or so has been, for the most part, solidly realist. This gives rise to a variety of problems, including ones concerning how to handle reduction, vagueness, mereological constitution, and the reality of composites. We will be considering several of these issues and then looking at reasons for adopting a less realist approach to these questions. We will then pass on to considering reasons for an idealist account of the physical world.

This course is open for all PhD and MA students from all CEU departments. The course is neither co-requisite nor pre-requisite of any other course.
Course will deal with some key controversial and debatable topics of the East European history (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus’).
It aims to develop innovative and scholarly relevant perspectives on our subjects, attacking them from a non-ideological, comparative and preferably multidisciplinary angle, combining tools of historical, sociological and anthropological studies
It goes without saying that we will foster a consistently critical approach to the present day theories and representations of the East European past and present.
All topics are dealing with crucial aspects of specifically comparative history of European societies, Russia included. Societies of Central, East-Central and Eastern Europe stand in focus of our attention, and it means that problems treated in our course are closely related to major axes of studies offered by CEU History department.
Special attention will be given to (a) religious traditions; (b) problems of (proto-) national discourses, nationalisms and national identities; (c) genesis of revolutionary movements and socialism in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus’.
Readings are selected to provide representative case studies for comparative purposes.
The selection of readings may be changed to meet expectations of PhD and MA students, in function of their own research projects.
Topics of this PhD course are correlated with topics of the MA course taught by the same instructor.

This course is designed to introduce students to an overview of thinking about literature and culture by providing a historical perspective from the antiquity to the late-Renaissance. The objective of the course is to offer a survey of the major movements, figures, and texts of literary theory as well as to supply the cultural, historical and philosophical background to the literary theory of each era (Antiquity, Hellenism, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Mannerism). The course also reflects on modern and postmodern theories, pointing out how these concepts of old have been often recycled in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.
Since even today literary theory relies on the ancient theories of Plato and Aristotle and also the traditions of ancient rhetoric, the first third of this course is devoted to the study of this classical heritage. The rest of the course follows the chronological survey through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

PhD Tutorial II is devoted to writing the PhD dissertation proposal. The first seminar will discuss the essentials of a PhD dissertation proposal, and proposal writing in general. The next part of the tutorial consists of individual hour-long meetings to develop the 20-25 page text of the dissertation proposal. In the latter part of the term, each student presents his or her proposal to the group in a seminar format, with another student serving as a formal critic. At the end of the second term, dissertation proposals are reviewed by the History Department Doctoral Program Committee.

The religious situation of late antiquity gave rise to new mixtures of philosophic quest embedded with religious inspirations. The growing need of shaping group identities within global and pluralistic society pave the way for the rise of new forms of religious group identities.The spiritual and individual experience of religious conversion was followed in the case of intellectual with complex mechanisms of absorption and transformation of knowledge. Such mechanism continued to be relevant throughout medieval and early modern period, especially around the Mediterranean. The seminar will examine mechanism of self-transformation in its intellectual dimension emphasizing its function within the more general migration-of-knowledgemechanism, from late antiquity to the late Middle Ages.

Scientists approach the empirical world in many different ways. Qualitative research, like quantitative research, has its own set of assumptions, techniques, and analytical tools that are used to describe and interpret social reality and social problems and their solutions. This doctoral level course is designed to critically explore the qualitative research tradition and ways for conducting this kind of research with an emphasis on case study research and discourse analysis.

The main aim of the course is to offer the students a chance to get acquainted with and explore in some depth the earliest Vita of St. Adalbert of Prague (ca. 956-997), composed by Iohannes Canaparius (d. 1004) in Rome ca. 999. This hagiographic text, not extant in its original form, but whose tenor can be reconstructed on the basis of three surviving versions that reworked it soon after its composition, was written presumably as part of a 'canonization' campaign instigated by Emperor Otto III. It was then reworked on three different occasions in the eleventh century, in different historical and intellectual contexts, so as to address different concerns as well as legitimize and promote divergent auctorial agendas. The profile of St. Adalbert, as it emerges from the three surviving versions has undergone constant change and was used as a tool of defining sometimes mutually conflicting identities by authors belonging to various local or professional groups. It is the aim of this seminar to survey the processes by such conflicting identities were created by exploiting the text in the context of competing hagiographies.

Generating ‘traveling concepts’ is an inherent feature of all theories. And in feminist theory, with its intentional, self-reflexive eclecticism, the question of traveling concepts is of particular importance. Producing an interdisciplinary frame of thinking, where traditional modes of knowledge production are put in question, feminist theory is continually re-thinking its key concepts, thus creating changes in conceptual framework that have significant theoretical and methodological implications.
In this course students are invited to participate in a critical debate over several key concepts in contemporary feminist thinking, exploring the ways these concepts have been used in more recent theoretical debates. The emphasis is on feminist perspective, but in some cases, for the sake of clarity and better understanding of specific conceptual histories, other perspectives are also included.

A generally accepted tenet of the history of courtliness and its literature: the literature of courtliness preceded the adoption of its social forms by the lay nobility. Earlier warrior values merged with courtly ideals to create the chivalric knight. The earliest and most visible instrument of this reshaping of social values is the courtly romance.

So where did this narrative form come from, what social and political interests does it represent, and how did it serve as an instrument of enculturation?

This seminar will investigate the self-conception of the earliest authors of romance:

First the romances of antiquity: Roman d’Eneas, Roman de Thebes, Roman de Troie. Then Arthurian: Wace, Chrétien de Troyes. We will also look into Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, the immediate written source of the Arthurian material for the twelfth century authors.

The course is intended as a research seminar during which students will have an opportunity to present/develop/design their ongoing/possible scholarly projects by discussing their work in progress or preliminary ideas of intended research with other enrolled participants during two rounds of presentations. The course will be held on May 2,4, 7, 9, 10, 14.

Climate change, UNFCC, Kyoto Protocol and IPCC reports have promoted carbon cycling in ecosystems from a phenomenon interesting only to biogeochemistry scholars to a headline of global agendas and a core item of financial mechanisms and policy proposals. In this course we are looking at:
- carbon turnover in terrestrial ecosystems;
- human footprint on carbon storages; and
- policy, regulatory and institutional mechanisms established under the UNFCCC to promote carbon storage, protect carbon sinks, and account for carbon sinks and stocks.

Introduces network science and the set of tools used to understand complex networks emerging in social and economic systems. Focuses on the empirical study of real networks, with examples from computer science (World Wide Web, Internet), social systems (e-mail, friendship networks), political systems (voting patterns, social networks). Shows the organizing principles that govern the emergence of networks and the set of tools necessary to characterize, model and visualize them.

The course focuses first and foremost on the Orthodox Slavs in South-East Europe, but takes account of the wider geographical and cultural context, running from the beginnings of literacy to the beginnings of printing. The content is decidedly interdisciplinary, extending from the physical manufacture of the book to its theological implications.

In recent years, the situation with regard to cultural heritage issues in Budapest has become exceedingly complex due to a host of factors: there are the continuing historical and political aspects, the increasing economic possibilities, particularly with regard to tourism and the heritage “business,” and ongoing monument protection concerns. The development of a hierarchy of heritage sites (world heritage, national heritage, local heritage, etc.) has also produced very contradictionary practices concerning the ownership, institutional control, public control and scholarly research opportunities. The future of this city depends to a large extent on the ways in which its unique cultures and cultural heritages are preserved, stimulated and developed in a long-term perspective.
Therefore, the course offers an introduction to the most important medieval monuments and sites in Budapest by doing a „walking seminar” in the area of Pest, Buda, and Óbuda. Each seminar will focus on case studies in different parts of the city and after a short introduction of the given sites we will interpret the given archaeological features, buildings, and heritage sites with the students. Participants will also be confronted with heritage policy issues such as conservation, reconstruction, presentation of heritage sites, and the dissemination of related materials for scholars and the wider public.

The special short fieldtrips aims to provide professional experiences in a variety of minority research issues, and give unique opportunities to see relevant research institutes and archives in Budapest. During the individual visits, we get an insight into the current work there, meet professionals and experts, and will learn about the institutions and the ongoing work there. The main focuses of the talks are policy issues, best practices, methodological questions, research experiences, data management, and data archiving. During the semester we are planning to visit six different institutions.

The course examines the development of the literate and book-producing culture that emerged in South-East Europe in between two older literate cultures, the Greek and the Latin. It looks at the importance of that culture for the self-perception of the peoples who participated in it, and its manifestation in the physical and intellectual artefacts that they produced. Beginning with the genesis of Slavonic literacy in the ninth century as a result of the mission of Cyril and Methodius to Magna Moravia, it examines the assimilation of that heritage in the Balkans and the various polities that occupied the region, tracing the development and function of the book up to and including the emergence of Cyrillic and glagolitic printing in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The actual delivery of the course will depend in part on the eventual make-up of the class, but will be organised around the following themes.

This course focuses on the issues of responding to climate change, including science, policy and management aspects. It introduces students to the glossary of vulnerability and adaptation studies, including (but not limited to) concepts of vulnerability, adaptation and resilience etc., and to management approaches developed with advances in adaptation science in mind