Paris

SAMPLE TRIP ITINERARY

Day 1
Depart from the U.S. You may choose to leave earlier and meet the group in Paris . Celestial Voyagers will be pleased to help you book your flights.

Day 2
Arrive at Charles de Gaulle airport. Assistance and private transfer can be arranged from the airport to your hotel on the Left Bank , center of university life since the 1200s. Evening cocktail party at the famous Existancialist’ “Café de Flore” to meet Dr. Yunus Tuncel and your other travel companions.

Day 3
Weather permitting, after visiting the Pantheon and seeing the tombs of philosophers Voltaire (18 th century) and Bergson (early 20 th century), today's main activity will take place in the Luxembourg Gardens and will deal with 16th century France , and the works of the Renaissance thinkers Rabelais and Montaigne. The French response to the Protestant Reformation will be discussed. Dinner will be at the restaurant “Le Procope,” first established as a coffee house in the 1600s and the famous meeting place for 18th century Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot and the Encyclopedistes, Voltaire, Rousseau and our own Ben Franklin.

Day 4
Today will be spent at the National Library of France where you'll have an opportunity to consult any of the books. You’ll meet with a librarian and hear about the thinkers of the Enlightenment 1700s, including Voltaire and Rousseau, and various topics popular at the time will be discussed, for example: the place of the individual in society, the social contract, questions of tolerance, liberty, freedom, and authority, and the debates on theism, deism and atheism.

Day 5
In the morning we'll visit the Rodin Museum in the lovely 18th century house that became the sculptor's home a hundred years later. Weather permitting, the day's discussion will take place in the garden, alongside Rodin's famous statue of The Thinker, and the topic covered will concern conflicting intellectual currents in the 19th century. We'll discuss how, as modern capitalism was changing the world, Fourier's socialist utopianism came on the heels of the first modern military dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte and the rise of modern nationalism, how "Bohemian" outsiders began to flock to Paris and the way in which Romantic pessimism finally reached and established itself in France, followed almost immediately by belief in Art-for art's sake/ aesthetic neo-Platonism. When universal education was finally established after mid-century, however, it came under the sway of scientistic Positivism. Conflicting theories managed to flourish simultaneously as, indeed, they continued to do for decades to come during the time of Modernism. Rodin's work will serve as a living illustration of the fin de siècle aestheticism that helped make France the avant-garde artistic center during the first half of the twentieth century. Afternoon drive to Vaux-le-Vicomte, the magnificent chateau built by Louis XIVth’s finance minister, the inspiration for the Sun King’s project of Versailles . Enjoy the gardens in the afternoon and dinner by candlelight. It takes two thousands candles to light the chateau.

Day 6
A fountain display is the highlight of today’s full day excursion to the Chateau at Versailles , built for Louis XIV, the Sun King, in the 1600s when France enjoyed her greatest power. See the chateau, the gardens and the pretty imitation rustic hamlet where Marie Antoinette, Queen to Louis XV, played at being the shepherdess before the French Revolution of 1789. Today's lecture will cover the beginnings of modern continental philosophy, when contemporary scientific discoveries inspired Cartesian rationalism under the great Descartes. The Rationalists were extraordinarily influential, their writings giving rise to "French" gardens and neo-classic architecture imitated throughout Europe , and also in the planning of Washington , D.C. Issues raised by rationalism will be discussed, along with the work of its critics, the Empiricists. As you return to your hotel via Port Royal and the Chevreuse Valley we'll discuss the religio-philosophical movement of Jansenism that flourished there in the 1600s. Although Jansenism was put down by the Jesuits, the writings on faith and reason by the adherent Pascal live on.

Day 7
Morning at leisure. In the afternoon our visit will be to the Musée d'Orsay, an impressive adaptation of a railroad station dating from the beginnings of the Belle Epoque (approximately 1870-1914) when Paris was considered the "capital of the world." The museum houses an exhaustive collection of Impressionist / Post Impressionist paintings and a lecture on the philosophy of the first decades of the twentieth century reveals Bergson's considerable influence during the time of Modernism, now considered by many critics to form the last, glorious gasp of the extended Romantic period that raised art to the position of a redemptive force alongside politics and/or religion. The change in the Zeitgeist after mid-twentieth century is ushered in by the Existentialists, represented in France by Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus, followed by the Structuralists of the 1960s, The Absurd, and by the time of our farewell dinner we will be discussing the Deconstruction of Derrida and other Post-Structuralists.

Day 8
Transfer, on request, to the airport for return flight. Extension to visit other regions of France or other European countries can also be arranged.

Note:
All our programs are customized. Prices are on request and depend on the size of the groups, the time of the year the group will travel, the standard of the hotels and all the services you would like to include.

WHO TO CONTACT:

Travel arrangements by:
Celestial Voyagers, Inc.
79 Watermill Lane
Great Neck, NY 11021
Email: sales@celestialvoyagers.com
Phone: 800 651 6262 - 516 829 1525
Fax: 516 829 0703

Philosophical topics and Academic consultation by:
Philomobile
Yunus Tuncel, Ph. D.
P.O. Box 575
New York, NY 10011-0575
Phone: 201 985 8232
Email: Yunus@philomobile.com
www.philomobile.com