(Successor site to CoPhilosophy, 2011-2020)
A collaborative search for wisdom, at Middle Tennessee State University and beyond... "The pluralistic form takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of, being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of 'co'"-William James
SSHM ch1 Determinism and Despair, & WJ, The Dilemma of Determinism (1897) - in BNA, on reserve - #H1 Ally Brumfield, #H2 Sawyer Crain, #H3 Bobby Goodroe
Kieran Setiya, Life is Hard Intro-1 Infirmity (on reserve), #H2 Samwaeil Bowles
SSHM ch1
1. Calvinism set out, for Henry James Sr., what impossible task?
2. Kaag thinks the Civil War gave WJ his first intimation that what?
3. WJ's entire life had been premised on what expectation?
4. What did WJ say (in 1906, to H.G. Wells) about "SUCCESS"?
5. What Stoic hope did young WJ share with his friend Tom Ward?
6. What thought seeded "the dilemma of determinism" for WJ?
7. As WJ explicated determinism in 1884, the future has no what?
8. WJ found what in Huxley's evolutionary materialism alarming?
9. Determinism has antipathy to the idea of what?
10. To the "sick soul," what seems blind and shallow?
==
Setiya Intro, ch1
1. What reminder does Kieran Setiya say he needed when he was younger? What kind of philosophy did his teachers say he needed? (pref) What has he experienced since age 27?
2. What is moral philosophy about?
3. Does Setiya think "everything happens for a reason"? What were Job's friends wrong about?
4. What did Nietzsche say about happiness and the English?
5. Who is Susan Gubar?
6. To whom should disability matter?
7. What's the difference between disease and illness?
8. What does Setiya think Aristotle gets wrong?
9. Who are Setiya's heroes?
10. What does Setiya say about Marx's vision of communist society?
11. What was Harriet Johnson's reply to Peter Singer?
12. What did Setiya appreciate about his fifth urologist?
13. What, contrary to Descartes, does pain teach us about our bodies?
FL 41-42 1. What became of the 1998 study that promoted the false belief that vaccines cause autism?
2. How many people refusing vaccines can lead to the collapse of herd immunity?
3. What do experts say about most mass killers?
4. Who wrote a "demented" letter on behalf of gun rights in 1995?
Dozens of times over the past four years, I’ve made the drive from my home in Boston to a long-forgotten library in the middle of New Hampshire, accessible only by dirt road and hidden behind White Mountain pines. It once belonged to William Ernest Hocking, the last great idealist philosopher at Harvard, and though it contains irreplaceable volumes, it was known until recently only to a few of Hocking’s relatives and one very fastidious thief. And me.
I had come to Chocorua, New Hampshire, in 2009, to help plan a conference on William James. But I’m not a particularly dedicated philosopher and in general bore easily, so I soon found myself elsewhere: specifically, considering the virtues of the Schnecken at a German pastry shop. And this is where I found, browsing the scones, a man of ninety, wiry and sharp, who introduced himself as Bun Nickerson. Nickerson moved slowly, like most old philosophers do, but unlike most old philosophers his hobble wasn’t a function of longstanding inactivity. Instead, he explained, it was from farming and professional skiing...
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY A Love Story By John Kaag 259 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
In 2008, a young University of Massachusetts Lowell philosophy professor named John Kaag set out on a fateful road trip. He was driving to Chocorua, N.H., to help organize a conference on William James, who had owned a home in the nearby White Mountains. Stopping for coffee in town, he admitted to a 93-year-old local what he did for a living.
This old man had grown up on the estate of another philosophy professor, William Ernest Hocking, a once powerful and wealthy pillar of Harvard in the early 20th century. On Hocking’s property still stood his private library, a custom-built free-standing pile. Kaag, invited to look in, instantly recognized the early publications of the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, on whom Kaag had written his doctoral dissertation — books inscribed by Peirce himself. He found William James’s reading in preparation for “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” with James’s marginalia and annotations. He found signed gift copies from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, which had ended up in Hocking’s hands. Then there were the masterpieces of European philosophy since the 17th century: Descartes’s “Discourse on Method” in a first edition; the first English translation of Hobbes’s “De Cive”; and first editions of significant works by Kant. The books were moldering under inches of dust in an unheated, uncooled limbo.
All this would be a wonderful event in the life of any professor, especially one as gifted and skilled as Kaag in the history of 19th-century philosophy. (One of his previous works concerns Ella Lyman Cabot, “one of the few women of classical American philosophy.”) It would not seem to make for a popular book. But Kaag used the discovery of the library as an excuse to transform his own life. The son of an alcoholic father who had abandoned his family and recently died — and now stuck in a too-early marriage to his freshman-year college girlfriend, even though “I, at least, didn’t have a clue how to be in erotic love” — Kaag had sought a guiding light. He had followed an “ancestor cult” for years, digging through Emerson’s and William James’s and Thoreau’s papers at Harvard, visiting the tourist traps of Concord and Cambridge, to no profound effect. But West Wind, the familiar name for Hocking’s estate, swept all before it. It pushed Kaag finally into rebellion. “In the following months I started cheating on my wife with a roomful of books.”
Kaag sneaks back and forth to New Hampshire. His wife catches him with out-of-state gas station charges on their credit card bill. As she offers to come along on future trips, he resists. He works up the nerve to sell his wedding ring for $278 at “a pawnshop outside of Derry,” and separates from his wife on the eve of his 30th birthday. (She remarried and moved to North Dakota.) Kaag is left alone with his hopeless plan to archive and catalog the books and find a university to rescue them. He is also left, he slowly realizes, in unrequited love with a married colleague, Carol, who will ultimately be competing with him for tenure. He invites her to visit him up at the library...
"...I am a contemporary philosopher, which means that I spent most of my career shying away from philosophy’s personal touch. But then, in 2008, my estranged father died, and my marriage disintegrated, and I slowly fell in love again, and I wrote American Philosophy: A Love Story.
It is a story of a lost philosophical tradition, deeply intimate, a story of a lost library, high in the New Hampshire Whites, and the story of a lost person, namely, me. It is the story, I guess, of this tri-partite recovery.
The book begins and ends at what looks like a small stone house, with three French doors, on four-hundred unsullied acres outside of Chocorua, New Hampshire. But it’s not a house. It’s the nearly abandoned personal library of William Ernest Hocking.
Like the personal approach to philosophy, contemporary thinkers have forgotten this cache of nearly 10,000 books, hidden in the woods, despite the fact that Hocking was the principal figure in Harvard’s esteemed department for the first half of the twentieth century.
When I first came across the building in 2008, it was deserted, unlocked, and filled with first editions from the 17th and 18th century — Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Mill..." --John Kaag (continues)
In low moments, I sincerely doubt that anyone ever changes their mind, and I especially doubt that anyone ever changes their mind in response to an op-ed. But our planet, our home, is in mortal danger, and words are all I've got. So I'm taking my very best shot here...
Indicate your preference(s) in the comments space below ASAP, I'll fill out the remaining un-selected dates Monday.
We'll do two or three presentations per class.
Presentation to be complemented with a final report blog post due Dec.6. Everyone will need to sign up as an AUTHOR on this site, in order to post, before then. Post an early draft for constructive feedback or to use in your presentation.
NOV 5 [Don't forget to vote!]
Something from Why Grow Up (WGU) thru p.165. #H1 Karim
John Kaag, Sick Souls Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life (SSHM), Prologue.
Fantasyland (FL) 40 When the GOP Went Off the Rails
William James (WJ), Is Life Worth Living? (1897) - in Be Not Afraid: in the Words of William James (BNA, on reserve)
SSHM ch1 Determinism and Despair, & WJ, The Dilemma of Determinism (1897) - in BNA, on reserve - #H1 Ally Brumfield, #H2 Sawyer Crain, #H3 Bobby Goodroe
Kieran Setiya, Life is Hard Intro-1 Infirmity (on reserve), #H2 Samwaeil Bowles
It is essential to carve out space for other things
...The truth we could do with relearning is that struggling to transcend our fundamental limits — by trying to feel certain about the future, wanting to take in all the world’s suffering or willing the election to go our way — gets in the way of our doing the most that we actually can. In the limit-embracing mode of being, we can do our part as citizens of a world in crisis yet still stake out attentional space for the other things that count: family, contemplation, noticing how the leaves change color on the trees.
Uncertainty is never over; meaning and joy have to be found right in the middle of it, if they’re ever to be found at all. This aspect of the human condition is undoubtedly an uncomfortable one. But as the American Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck reportedly liked to say, what makes it unbearable is our mistaken belief that it can be cured.
I believe that most of us, in our own humble ways, try to make the world better. Maybe that means giving what we can to charity or helping out in our community. Maybe it means eating less meat or driving less often. It's enough for each of us to do our own little part.
Not so, says Peter Singer. Singer, who is 78 and recently retired from a long teaching career at Princeton, is perhaps the world's most influential living philosopher. His unstinting work grows out of utilitarianism, which is the view that we should do as much as possible to bring about the greatest circumstance for every individual being — and "being" does not necessarily mean "human." His 1975 book, "Animal Liberation," a broadside against factory farming and a defense of animal rights, helped galvanize a movement toward vegan and vegetarian eating. (Singer's new book, "Consider the Turkey," is a polemic against the enormous animal suffering that goes into the traditional Thanksgiving turkey feast.) And his writing on what the relatively affluent owe to the poor — short version: a lot more — was an important building block for the data-driven philanthropic movement known as effective altruism, which became popular with high-profile Silicon Valley figures including the disgraced cryptocurrency magnate Sam Bankman-Fried. (As well as plenty of regular people looking to do more good, more efficiently.)
"If we're completely honest, not sentimental or nostalgic, we have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is one unending thread, not a life chopped up into sections out of touch with one another." —P. L. Travers
https://buff.ly/3VwiXO7
4. "Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead" to what?
5. Human history is "one long commentary on" what?
6. A "wider world... unseen by us" may exist, just as our world does for ___.
7. The "deepest thing in our nature," which deals with possibilities rather than finished facts, is a "dumb region of the heart" called (in German) ___.
==
As we commence reading John Kaag's Sick Souls, Healthy Minds (SSHM), here's a new venture he's recently launched:
Rebind: a new interactive way to read, a novel application of AI to learning. "Turn books into conversations"-
For the past year, two philosophy professors have been calling around to prominent authors and public intellectuals with an unusual, perhaps heretical, proposal. They have been asking these thinkers if, for a handsome fee, they wouldn’t mind turning themselves into A.I. chatbots.
John Kaag, one of the academics, is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is known for writing books, such as “Hiking With Nietzsche” and “American Philosophy: A Love Story,” that blend philosophy and memoir... (nyt, continues)
== Discussion questions:
Have you ever felt "pulled in too many directions"? 2 How did you respond?
Do you approach philosophy as a "detached intellectual exercise," an "existential life preserver," or something else?
Where would you place yourself on the spectrum between "sick soul" and "healthy-minded"? Does that change, over time?
Can belief that life is worth living become self-fulfilling?
Do you know any "sick souls"? 3 Or "healthy minds"? 4 Are they the same person?
Do you agree that believing life to be worth living "will help create the fact"? 5
Do you like WJ's answer to the question "Is life worth living?" 9
Is suicide always "the wrong way to exit life"? 10
Have you ever visited the Harvard campus? What were your impressions?
Is "maybe" a good answer to the eponymous question of James's essay below?
Do you like Whitman's poetic expression of "the joy of living"?
Have you ever been as happy as Rousseau at Annecy?
Do you agree that nature cannot embody the ultimate "divine" spirit of the universe? What if you remove (or re-define) "divine"? 489
Do you agree that "sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life..."? 491
Does the "purely naturalistic basis" suffice to make life worth living? 494
When Mr. Mallock's book with this title appeared some fifteen years ago, the jocose answer that "it depends on the liver" had great currency in the newspapers. The answer which I propose to give to-night cannot be jocose. In the words of one of Shakespeare's prologues,— "I come no more to make you laugh; things now,
That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,"—
must be my theme. In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly; and I know not what such an association as yours intends, nor what you ask of those whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from the surface-glamour of existence, and for an hour at least to make you heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests and excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness. Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder bass-note of life. Let us search the lonely depths for an hour together, and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things our question may find... (continues)
FL 39-40
1. Who's the (former-fringe) freak and Sandy Hook "truther" who nonetheless draws the line at shape-shifting reptilian humanoids?
2. Where did the reptilian conspiracy idea begin?
3. What started to happen with "unhinged" people in the 90s?
4. What fictional work and author influenced libertarian/conservative politicians like Paul Ryan?
5. What has the GOP become, besides a distinctly Christian political party?
6. What two states "require officeholders to believe in Heaven and Hell"?
7. What did H.L. Mencken say about "civilized Tennesseans"?
DQ
Why does anyone give Alex Jones any credibility at all?
Why do people like Ayn Rand's message that selfishness is a virtue?
"It must be recognized that staying alive though suicidal is an act of radiant generosity, a way in which we can save each other.
...
None of us can truly know what we mean to other people, and none of us can know what our future self will experience. History and philosophy ask us to remember these mysteries, to look around at friends, family, humanity, at the surprises life brings — the endless possibilities that living offers — and to persevere. There is love and insight to live for, bright moments to cherish, and even the possibility of happiness, and the chance of helping someone else through his or her own troubles. Know that people, through history and today, understand how much courage it takes to stay. Bear witness to the night side of being human and the bravery it entails, and wait for the sun. If we meditate on the record of human wisdom we may find there reason enough to persist and find our way back to happiness. The first step is to consider the arguments and evidence and choose to stay. After that, anything may happen. First, choose to stay.” --Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It
==
Stay: The Social Contagion of Suicide and How to Preempt It By Maria Popova
"If you’ve ever known someone who committed suicide, or have contemplated it yourself, or have admired a personal hero who died by his or her own hand, please oh please read this. Because, as Jennifer Michael Hecht so stirringly argues in Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It (public library), numerous social science studies indicate that one of the best predictors of committing suicide is knowing suicide — a fact especially chilling given more people die of suicide than murder every year, and have been for centuries. Suicide kills more people than AIDS, cancer, heart disease, or liver disease, more men and women between the ages of 15 and 44 than war, more young people than anything but accident. And beneath all these impersonal statistics lie exponential human tragedies — of those who died, and of those who were left to live with their haunting void.
To be sure, Hecht’s interest in the subject is far from the detached preachiness such narratives tend to exude — after two of her dear friends, both fellow writers, committed suicide in close succession, she was left devastated and desperate to make sense of this deceptively personal act, which cuts so deep into surrounding souls and scars the heart of a community. So she immersed herself in the science, philosophy, and history of suicide searching for answers, emerging with an eye-opening sense of everything we’ve gotten wrong about suicide and its prevention..." (continues) ==
My morning mantra: When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love." -Elbert Hubbard, probably... and not Marcus Aurelius
==
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
