No class Tuesday 25th

I'm sorry to report I'm still sick (but improving). Do continue to stay on track with the assigned readings and your posts. And sign up for Final Report Presentations (which will now probably begin late).

In case our missed class dates put us too far behind schedule, we'll use our designated final exam dates to catch up:

• Section #5 (TTh 9:40) Thursday, May 8, 10-Noon 6
• Section #6 (TTh 1 pm) Thursday, May 8, 1-3 pm
• Section #7 (TTh 2:40 pm) Tuesday, May 6, 3:30-5:30 pm

Lyceum Friday

 

 

Lyceum events past... 

Final report presentations - April '25

Indicate your preference(s) in the comments space below ASAP.

We'll do three or four presentations per class.

Presentation to be complemented with a final report blog post,* discussing and elaborating the main points of your presentation, due May 2. Everyone will need to sign up as an AUTHOR on this site. Post an early draft for constructive feedback or to use in your presentation.

* 1,000 words minimum, plus bloggish content: embedded links, relevant images/video etc.

APRIL

1

• Something from Why Grow Up (WGU) thru p.165. 
• 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)

3

• WGU -p.166-192.
• SSHM ch1 Determinism and Despair, & WJ, The Dilemma of Determinism (1897) - in BNA, on reserve
• Kieran Setiya, Life is Hard Intro-1 Infirmity (on reserve)

8

WGU -thru p. 193-234 

SSHM ch2 Freedom and Life

WJ, The Moral Equivalent of War (1903) - in BNA, on reserve

Setiya 2 Loneliness 

10

• SSHM ch3 Psychology and the Healthy Mind 
• Setiya 3 Grief. 
• Question Everything (QE) IX What is it like to be a woman? (on reserve in lib'y) 

15

• SSHM ch4 Consciousness and Transcendence 
• Setiya 4 Failure 
• QE X Why does art matter? 
• QE XI Is this the end of the world as we know it?

17

• SSHM ch5 Truth and Consequences 
• Setiya 5 Injustice 
• QE XII Do we need God? 
• WJ, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings (1899) 

22

• SSHM ch6 Wonder and Hope 
• Setiya 6-7 Absurdity, Hope 
• QE XIII Now what? 
• WJ, What Pragmatism Means (1903) 

24 Final report presentations conclude

• Your choice of essays not previously discussed in Be Not Afraid: in the Words of William James (BNA, on reserve)
• Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives by Robert Richardson (TRB-on reserve) chapter on  Emerson

• TRB (on reserve) chapter on Thoreau

• TRB (on reserve) chapter on James

29 Exam 2

May 2  -- Final report blog post (final draft) due. Post earlier for feedback

Questions MAR 25

(Catch up: Mar 20)

Wittgenstein- #5 William P. #6 Kal I. 

Hannah Arendt- #5 Jadyn Cortes. #6 Adam S. #7 Sidney S.

FL 27-28-

Something in QE Part IV - Should speech be free?- #5 Inas I

===

QE Part V - What is happiness?- #6 Liz E. #7 Alexzander P.

John Rawls- #5 John G. #6 Jackson P. #7 Aedan D.

Alan Turing- #5 Larry Lehmann. #6 Troy R.

Peter Singer- #5 Parker #6 Samantha Johnson. #7 Autumn

FL 29-32- #5 Ben S.

1. What did John Rawls call the thought experiment he believed would yield fair and just principles, and what was its primary device?

2. Under what circumstances would Rawls' theory permit huge inequalities of wealth between people?

3. What was the Imitation Game, and who devised a thought experiment to oppose it?

4. What, according to Searle, is involved in truly understanding something?

5. How do some philosophers think we might use computers to achieve immortality?

6. What does Peter Singer say we should sacrifice, to help stranger

7. Why did Singer first become famous?

8. How does Singer represent the best tradition in philosophy?

WGU

1. Being grown-up is widely considered to be what? Do you agree?

2. Is Leibniz's optimism more likely to appeal to a small child? Why? 3

3. What was Kant's definition of Enlightenment? 5

4. What do Susan Neiman's children say she can't understand? Do you agree? 9

5. Why is judgement important? Is this a surprising thing to hear from a Kantian? 11

6. Being a grown-up comes to what? 12

7. What did Paul Goodman say about growing up? Are his observations are still relevant? 19

8. Why (in Neiman's opinion) should you not think this is the best time of your life, if you're a young college student? 20

9. What did Samoan children have that ours lack? 27 Can we fix that?

10. What is philosophy's greatest task? 31

No class Thursday 20th

 Stay on track with reading and posting, and scheduled presenters plan to report on Tuesday.

Sartre - existence precedes essence

"...there are two kinds of existentialists. There are, on the one hand, the Christians, amongst whom I shall name Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, both professed Catholics; and on the other the existential atheists, amongst whom we must place Heidegger as well as the French existentialists and myself. What they have in common is simply the fact that they believe that existence comes before essence – or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective. What exactly do we mean by that?

... 
--Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946)

Bertrand Russell's River of Life, message to future generations, and why he was not a Christian

‘An individual human existence should be like a river – small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and – in the end – without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man or woman who, in old age, can see his or her life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things they care for will continue.’ Bertrand Russell, How to Grow Old

Understanding Humanism

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQJ3sqkdCRE

There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.

             ...

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience has been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku-Klux-Klan or the Fascists?

            ... 

Of course I know that the sort of intellectual arguments that I have been talking to you about are not what really moves people. What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason. Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth - 

a graphic novel featuring Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein 

Questions MAR 20

Wittgenstein- #5 William P. #6 Kal I. 

Hannah Arendt- #5 Jadyn Cortes. #6 Adam S. #7 Sidney S.

FL 27-28-

Something in QE Part IV - Should speech be free?- #5 Inas I

Something in QE Part V - What is happiness?- #6 Liz E. #7 Alexzander P.

1. What was the main message of Wittgenstein's Tractatus?

2. What did the later Wittgenstein (of Philosophical Investigations) mean by "language games," what did he think was the way to solve philosophical problems, and what kind of language did he think we can't have?

3. Who was Adolf Eichmann, and what did Arendt learn about him at his trial?

4. What was Arendt's descriptive phrase for what she saw as Eichmann's ordinariness?

5. Both Popper and Kuhn changed the way people understood science. What did Popper say about the method for checking a hypothesis and what name did Kuhn give to major breaks in the history of science? 

6. What is the Law of Double Effect? Many people who disagree with its principle--and with Thomson's violinist thought experiment--think that whatever our intentions we shouldn't play who?

WGU

1. Being grown-up is widely considered to be what? Do you agree?

2. Is Leibniz's optimism more likely to appeal to a small child? Why? 3

3. What was Kant's definition of Enlightenment? 5

4. What do Susan Neiman's children say she can't understand? Do you agree? 9

5. Why is judgement important? Is this a surprising thing to hear from a Kantian? 11

6. Being a grown-up comes to what? 12

7. What did Paul Goodman say about growing up? Are his observations are still relevant? 19

8. Why (in Neiman's opinion) should you not think this is the best time of your life, if you're a young college student? 20

9. What did Samoan children have that ours lack? 27 Can we fix that?

10. What is philosophy's greatest task? 31

Weiner ch4

1. Thoreau was among the first western philosophers to do what? How does this make him like Marcus Aurelius? Is that good, philosophically?
2. What's the difference between wilderness and wildness? Is it good to be wild, in the Thoreauvian sense? Are you wild that way?
3. What was Thoreau's view of the rationalism-empiricism debate, and the reliability of the senses? Do you agree with him?
4. What's another way Thoreau is like Marcus, and how is he like Socrates? Do you "vacillate" too?
5. Why did Thoreau say he went to live at Walden? Do you think such an experience would expand your sense of what it means to live and/or "see"?

FL

1. What did Henry David Thoreau do in 1844, at age 27? What American fantasy does Andersen say this epitomized? Do you agree? Do most Americans make an effort to live in harmony with nature? Do you?

Discussion Questions:

• Was Wittgenstein's main message in the Tractatus correct? 203
• What are some of the "language games" you play? (What are some different things you use language for?) 204
• Can there be a "private language"? 206
• "Eichmann wasn't responsible..." 208 Agree?
• Are unthinking people as dangerous as evil sadists? 211
• Is "the banality of evil" an apt phrase for our time? 212
• Was Popper right about falsifiability? 218
• Was Kuhn right about paradigms? 220
• How would you respond it you woke up with a violinist plugged into your kidneys? Is this a good analogy for unwanted or unintended pregnancy? 226

FL

• Pro wrestling is obviously staged. Why is it so popular?
• What do Burning Man attendees and other adults who like to play dress-up tell us about the state of adulthood in contemporary America? 245
• What do you think of Fantasy sports? 248
• Was Michael Jackson a tragic figure? 250
• Is pornography "normal"? 251

Darvon Hassan's presentation

 Simone de Beauvoir.pptx

Ethan Klein's presentation

Presentation https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Lvrj1VxDR3GGcKLdKyW_MrnHzd7Wf_P_ib_scRehDjk/edit?usp=sharing

One day the ‘why’ arises

"Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm — this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the 'why' arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement..."

― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

The humanities- both essential and vulnerable

… [It is] a precarious moment in America — a moment of transformative technologies, escalating climate crises and global instability. It's a moment that demands more from universities, not less. "The core mission of the humanities is more important than ever," Robin Kelsey, a former dean of arts and humanities at Harvard, told me. As he explained, the humanities as we know them emerged in response to the violence of the two world wars, precisely because those conflicts revealed that scientific progress does not guarantee moral progress. A humanist education teaches us to question dominant narratives, to recognize how certain ways of thinking rise to prominence while others fade from view.

Dr. Kelsey warned against abandoning the humanities precisely when their lessons are most needed. "One of the contradictions at the heart of the humanities," he said, "is that they are supposed to practice the same skepticism, open inquiry and refusal of dogma that science is known for — while also addressing questions about meaning, virtue and ethics, which had long been the domain of religion." That contradiction has made the humanities both essential and vulnerable, open to attack from those who see them as frivolous or politically suspect. But what is now more clear than ever is that Mr. Rufo and other Trump-aligned ideologues actually know how important the humanities, and the civic and aesthetic values they explore, are. That is precisely why so much effort is being spent on trying to impose a set of nostalgic, premodern views at the heart of the university…

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/opinion/university-defunding-trump-rufo.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Pale Blue Dot

Don't be sad it's over, be glad it happened. A post-Spring Break reality check. Keep it all in perspective.

"That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization ..."

One of the most wonderful things our species has created https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/12/10/pale-blue-dot-motion-graphics/