Scroll down to find Thursday's (Questions Aug 27). Post your questions and comments about the day's assigned readings PRIOR to class. Three will let you "touch 'em all" and come home to score (and shade each leg of the diamond).
Wednesday, August 26, 2026
Midterm report presentations
Starting Sep 10 you can indicate your preference (in the comments' space of this post) for the topic and date of your report presentation. It can be on any relevant topic of your choice that you can relate to the reading assignments (required and recommended) on the corresponding date. Presentations will begin on the 15th. We'll do two or three presentations per class, hoping to finish before Fall Break. I'll give you a free base or two on the scorecard if you volunteer to present on the 15th.
Take a look ahead at the coming syllabus assignments (reprinted below). Scan the assigned texts and select your topic accordingly. Also scan the lists of recommended books in the right sidebar, to see if you would like to use any of them as a basis for your report. If the library does not have the text(s) you choose, go to the circulation desk and request via interlibrary loan.
Have fun with the project. Be creative. Consider using the podcast/video resources in the library's MakerSpace to prepare your presentation. Plan to present for about 10 minutes, with the goal of teaching us something we wouldn't have learned merely reading the assignment. Then lead a brief class discussion. Don't stress, you'll get all 25 available points if you fulfill these minimal criteria.
15 Kaag 1 - SSHM... Midterm report presentations begin. Machiavelli, Hobbes-LHP 9-10. Rec: FL 11-12. HWT 11-13.
17 Kaag 2... Montaigne, Descartes, & Pascal-LHP 11-12. Weiner 14. Rec: FL 13-14. HWT 14-15.
22 Kaag 3... Spinoza, Locke, & Reid-LHP 13-14. Rec: FL 15-16. HWT 16-17.
24 Kaag 4... Berkeley, Leibniz, Hume, & Rousseau-LHP 15-18. Weiner 3. Rec: FL 17-18. HWT 18-19.
29 Kaag 5... Kant, Bentham, Hegel, Schopenhauer-LHP 19-23. Weiner 5. Rec: FL 19-20. HWT 20-22.
OCT
1 Kaag 6... Mill, Darwin, Kierkegaard, Marx-LHP 24-27. Rec: FL 21-22. HWT 23-24.
6 Exam 1.
8 Peirce & James, Nietzsche, Freud-LHP 28-30. Weiner 11. Rec: FL 23-24. HWT 25-26.
Russell, Ayer, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus-LHP 31-33. Weiner 13. Rec: FL 25-26. HWT 27-28.
Fall Break
'Declaring Independence' by Pulitzer Prize-Winning Historia...
Declaring Independence by Pulitzer Prize-Winning Historian Edward J. Lawson was MTSU’s freshman summer read... If you read it, what are your thoughts? Share them in the comments space below (and claim a base on the scorecard for doing so).
MTSU 2026 Convocation, Sat Aug 22, featuring Edward J. Larson (his address begins at 38 minutes):
“The self-evident truths of 1776 hover over our national divisions—as inspiring ideals, as measures of how far we still must come, as the hypocrisy of slaveholders, as intrusions on local traditions. The revolutionary politics of 1776 turned from securing the rights of Englishmen to establishing the authority of an independent nation. The battlefields of 1776 cast the military mold for the war years to come and gave us an enduring symbol of gritty determination in the actions of Washington’s depleted forces at Trenton and Princeton.
Drawing together the eloquence of Jefferson and the insistence of Paine, the strategies of generals and the audacious tactics of armies on the move, and the powerful political movement that transformed colonies into states, this history of 1776 is a leading scholar’s distillation of the pivotal events we must reckon with two hundred and fifty years after the nation’s birth.“ g’r
Drawing together the eloquence of Jefferson and the insistence of Paine, the strategies of generals and the audacious tactics of armies on the move, and the powerful political movement that transformed colonies into states, this history of 1776 is a leading scholar’s distillation of the pivotal events we must reckon with two hundred and fifty years after the nation’s birth.“ g’r
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
Questions Aug 27
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ANSWER ALL OF THESE QUESTIONS, or indeed any of them. They're here to prompt your own reflections. If you can access this without my questions, feel free.
Questions pertaining to the assigned reading will normally be posted prior to each class.That's where you should always share your thoughts, in the comments space below each day's post (at least three relevant comments/questions/observations per class, so you can shade the whole diamond on the scorecard when you come to class, and thus receive full participation credit for that date... more than that gets you extra credit). You can also respond to your own questions(s) or your classmates' posted comments. Respond not merely with the authors' textual statements but also with your own thoughts & reflections.) 25 exam questions will pertain to the required texts. Additional bonus questions pertaining to the recommended texts will also appear.
- Socrates saw himself as a what? Do you think such a person is valuable to a community? Can you think of anyone in our time who fills that role?
- What kind of conversation was a success, for Socrates, and what did he mean by wisdom?
- What made Socrates wise and unusual? Do you think he was wrong about writing? In whose writing does "Socrates" appear?
- What theory is Plato's story of the cave connected with? What was his name for a perfect exemplar of anything (such as a circle)? Do you think some or all humans are naturally, in some allegorical sense, stuck in a cave? Do you think we need to conceive Ideas of perfection in order to pursue improvement in life effectively? (For instance, can you become a better person without having a perfectly formed notion of what a "perfect person" would be?)
- What was Plato's profoundly un-democratic view of how the state should resemble the mind (as he understood it)? Would you want to live in Plato's Republic?
- What was Socrates' "annoying" response to the jury that, by narrow vote, sentenced him to death? Do you think it was courageous? What would you have said, in his situation?
What did Socrates say his inner voice told him? Do you think "inner voice" is literal?
Weiner
- "Philosopher" means what? Philosophy was what, in ancient Athens? (Introduction)
- What did Camus say is the one truly serious philosophical problem? Do you agree?
- What did Marcus Aurelius need, at dawn, to remind himself of? (And ask me about his morning mantra, which I daily remind myself of. UPDATE: Turns out it wasn't Marcus, but a 19th century American named Elbert Hubbard, whose morning mantra* has been falsely attributed to the Stoic emperor.)
- What was the first question young Needleman experienced? Have you experienced it? Do you think it is a good question? How do you answer it?
- What kinds of questions most interested Socrates?
- The Socratic dialogues consisted of what kinds of conversations? Do you enjoy participating in such conversations?
- What did Socrates say about the unexamined life? What corollaries does Weiner propose? Do you think Socrates was wrong?
Plato's Euthyphro:
...EUTHYPHRO: Yes, I should say that what all the gods love is pious and holy, and the opposite which they all hate, impious.
SOCRATES: Ought we to enquire into the truth of this, Euthyphro, or simply to accept the mere statement on our own authority and that of others? What do you say?
EUTHYPHRO: We should enquire; and I believe that the statement will stand the test of enquiry.
SOCRATES: We shall know better, my good friend, in a little while. The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods.
EUTHYPHRO: I do not understand your meaning, Socrates.
SOCRATES: I will endeavour to explain...
...Having thus brought his subject to a conclusion, Socrates proposes to bathe himself, in order not to trouble others to wash his dead body. Crito thereupon asks if he has any commands to give, and especially how he would be buried, to which he, with his usual cheerfulness, makes answer, "Just as you please, if only you can catch me;" and then, smiling, he reminds them that after death he shall be no longer with them, and begs the others of the party to be sureties to Crito for his absence from the body, as they had been before bound for his presence before his judges.
After he had bathed, and taken leave of his children and the women of his family the officer of the Eleven comes in to intimate to him that it is now time to drink the poison. Crito urges a little delay, as the sun had not yet set; but Socrates refuses to make himself ridiculous by showing such a fondness for life. The man who is to administer the poison is therefore sent for; and on his holding out the cup, Socrates, neither trembling nor changing color or countenance at all, but, as he was wont, looking steadfastly at the man, asked if he might make a libation to any one; and being told that no more poison than enough had been mixed, he simply prayed that his departure from this to another world might be happy, and then drank off the poison, readily and calmly. His friends, who had hitherto with difficulty restrained themselves, could no longer control the outward expressions of grief, to which Socrates said, "What are you doing, my friends? I, for this reason, chiefly, sent away the women, that they might not commit any folly of this kind; for I have heard that it is right to die with good omens. Be quiet, therefore, and bear up."
When he had walked about for a while his legs began to grow heavy, so he lay down on his back; and his body, from the feet upward, gradually grew cold and stiff. His last words were, "Crito, we owe a cock to Æsculapius; pay it, therefore, and do not neglect it."
"This," concludes Phædo, "was the end of our friend—a man, as we may say, the best of all his time, that we have known, and, moreover, the most wise and just." Phaedo
Phaedo audio...
==
*"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, though the Internet seems to think otherwise. Don't confuse him with looney L. Ron...
And check out:
Rec-
HWT
- What's one of the great unexplained wonders of human history?
- Do you agree that we cannot understand ourselves if we do not understand others?
- What was Descartes's "still pertinent" conclusion?
- Why did the Buddha think speculation about ultimate reality was fruitless?
- What aspects of western thought have most influenced global philosophy?
- What do Africans not have, according to Kwame Appiah?
FL
1. What statement by Karl Rove began to "crystallize" Fantasyland, in Kurt Andersen's mind?
2. What are half of Americans "absolutely certain" about? What do a quarter believe about vaccines?
3. What is Andersen trying to do with this book?
More from The School of Life
==
In class on Opening Day I was asked if I could summarize my philosophy in a word or phrase like Sally Brown, who finally decides her philosophy is simply "No!"
I should have said Yes! The word is meliorism (closely related, in my philosophy as in WJ's, to possibility):
"...there are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism.
Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation inevitable.
Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.
It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism..." Pragmatism by William James
Monday, August 24, 2026
Philosophy Bites, Nihilism vs. Meliorism
Nigel Warburton’s podcast, a good supplement to his Little History of Philosophy (which we are reading): https://philosophybites.com/
If you search the site for "definitions of philosophy" this comes up... including an episode from 2010 that asks numerous contemporary philosophers What is Philosophy? No two answers are the same. Philosophers do tend to think for themselves. The good ones, though, do not think by themselves. They converse and collaborate. They're Co-Philosophers, like we aim to be in this course.
My own definition of philosophy, beyond the etymological/literal "love of wisdom," is William James's: "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly," and to live in the light of that clarity.
And my own personal philosophy, if reduced to a word, is decidedly not Sally Brown's "No!" That's too much like deep pessimism or even nihilism.
No, the word I'd choose is: meliorism. You'll hear it again.
It rejects pure optimism and deep pessimism alike. It means trying to make things better. And it comes from, guess who... "Willie" James (as one of mty old Vandy mentors familiarly called my favorite philosopher who's been dead but not gone for 116+ years now. In Pragmatism-"a new name for some old ways of thinking" dedicated
To the Memory of John Stuart Mill
from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind
and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive to-day.
he writes:
...there are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism.
Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation inevitable.
Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.
It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism...
Me too.
Introductions
Let’s introduce ourselves, CoPhilosophers of Fall ‘26 (and MTSU class of 2030).
Go to the comments space below and tell us who you are, why you’re here, how you’d summarize your personal philosophy of "life, the universe, and everything" (but be less concise than "42"), & anything else you’d care to share. Include your section number, 1, 2 or 3 (940, 1 PM, 240 respectively).
Who am I, why am I here? Here’s an interview I gave recently:
==
I consider myself a philosopher in the peripatetic tradition, at least in the ambulatory sense: Like teachers and students at Aristotle's Lyceum, I prefer the outdoors and generally would rather roam than sit (at least on the nicer days). I agree with Kierkegaard, who said he'd walked himself into his best thoughts; and Nietzsche, who said the best thoughts are conceived while walking; and Emerson, who said walking is a gymnasium of the mind. So I look forward to getting us all out of our classroom and onto the grounds of our Lyceum at MTSU, when the weather allows.
This is me, with Nell and Pita (who we brought home with us from the humane shelter in 2018):
==
So, shall we hit the ground running? And not say, like Douglas Adams's jaded bowl of petunias in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, "Oh no, not again!"
==
Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
👣Solvitur ambulando
💭Sapere aude
Sunday, August 23, 2026
What Do Students Lose When They Stop Writing?
… Students need to write well enough to have a sense of which A.I. text suggestions to accept and which to reject, she said. Ms. Maxwell also insisted that creativity in writing would persist, because people would still want to express their personal voice and style.
To that end, companies like Grammarly, Google and OpenAI are creating so-called Socratic versions of their chatbots, sold to schools as writing helpers that will guide students through assignments without doing the work for them...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/17/us/student-writing-essays-ai.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
Debate start dates
“My undergraduates open their free will essays the same way every term: "The problem of free will has been debated since time immemorial." It hasn't. Socrates never mentions it. It isn't in Plato or Aristotle. Not because they missed it — because they had no concept of will for it to be free or unfree. The thing you assume is the most basic fact about being a person turns out to have a start date.“
Friday, August 21, 2026
Applied Philosophy Lyceum: Oct 2, 5 pm, COE 164
The Digital Cave
Reading, Thinking, and Dwelling in the Age of the Algorithm
An Applied Philosophy Talk by John Kaag
Abstract
We live in an era of industrial-scale shadow-play. The map of reality is no longer drawn from our own experience but projected by algorithms designed to keep us looking at a particular kind of wall. This talk argues that the oldest resources in the philosophical canon offer the most precise diagnosis of our newest predicament. Plato's cave anticipates the architecture of the feed—with one grim perversion: his prisoners at least shared a wall, while the algorithm builds a bespoke cavern for each of us. The Buddhist vocabulary of maya, tanha, and upadana describes with uncanny accuracy the mechanics of craving, clinging, and curated selfhood that the infinite scroll exploits. And Heidegger's account of Enframing—read alongside his catastrophic biography, which cannot be waved away—explains how attention itself became “standing reserve,” a resource to be extracted.
The talk concludes with the question increasingly posed to our machines: why is talking to a large language model so strange? The answer reveals a schism between information and meaning, between the calculative synthesis at which AI excels and the meditative, embodied, abductive thinking that a life—with something at stake—alone makes possible. Philosophy's task has not changed since the cave: to make us suspicious of the reality that appears most obvious, and to recover the gritty practices that might let us turn our heads, a few degrees, toward the light.
About the Speaker
John Kaag is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of three widely acclaimed books published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux: American Philosophy: A Love Story, Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are, and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life. These books were named NPR Best Books of the Year and New York Times Editors' Choice selections.
His work bridges American pragmatism, intellectual history, ethics, and the philosophy of technology, and he writes regularly for general audiences on why philosophy still matters for everyday life.
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Canada internship opportunity
We encourage students to consider applying for the Fulbright Canada-Mitacs Globalink Internship Program for Summer 2027.
Interested students should contact Laura.Clippard@mtsu.edu.
Program Information:
https://www.fulbright.ca/
This prestigious program offers U.S. undergraduate students the opportunity to undertake a 10 to 12-week research internship with Canadian university faculty across a variety of academic disciplines, from science and engineering to the humanities and social sciences. Previous research experience is required, but students from all majors are welcome to apply.
Key Details:
- Application Deadline: September 16, 2026
- Reference Submission Deadline: September 23, 2026
Program Overview:
- Duration: 10 to 12 weeks, with internships beginning between May and July 2027
- Location: Canadian universities
- Experience: Engage in advanced research projects while exploring cultural, social, and recreational opportunities in Canada
Eligibility Requirements:
- Must be currently enrolled as an undergraduate at a U.S. university
- Must be a U.S. citizen with a valid U.S. passport
- Must have one to three semesters remaining in their undergraduate program as of Fall 2027 (Meaning graduation in Fall 2027, Spring 2028 or Fall 2028)
- A competitive GPA of 3.8 or higher is recommended
Program Benefits:
- Join the prestigious Fulbright network
- Gain access to top research facilities in Canada
- Obtain valuable international experience
- Develop academic research and professional skills
- Receive a grant of up to CAD $9,000
A
gain, interested students should email Laura.Clippard@mtsu.edu.
We encourage students to take advantage of this unique opportunity to expand your academic and professional horizons.
Warm regards,
Laura Clippard
Undergraduate Fellowships Director
Monday, August 17, 2026
What is Philosophy For?
William James:
Addicted to study
School starts in a week. Time to celebrate one of the more positive addictions.
“…As obvious as this may seem, it typically goes unsaid: to be a student is ... to study. Students are not clients; they are not consumers; they are not users who can be “captured” by outcomes, indicators, or throughputs. Experts recognize this fact, yet study is not a main theme or even a topic in the shelf of books I have on recent debates. Few philosophical arguments about the future of the university analyze what it means to study.
So before we go any further, let the first idea of this book be the idea of study. What, this humanities professor asks, does the word student mean? In the academic field of higher education, students are the subject matter for vast research. But philosophers often examine what seems obvious, and, to me, this idea of study especially has the power to help reorient the research university. Framing the idea of study means making explicit a goal that exceeds our current practices.
Framing the idea of study does not mean offering an empirical account of what students today “do.” Rather, it is an attempt to identify the ideas that may guide them. With some irony, I’ll try to outline the idea of study by exploring the words student and study as documented by the Oxford English Dictionary, which emerged from the philological research of great humanities scholars.
So let me link, or turn to, the 1989 version of the Oxford English Dictionary, conveniently available to students and faculty online. student, n. 1. A person who is engaged in or addicted to study. 2. a. A person who is undergoing a course of study and instruction at a university or other place of higher education or technical training. Also const. of, in (a subject); often with defining word prefixed, as art student, law student, medical student...”
— What Could a University Be?: Revolutionary Ideas for the Future (On Campus) by Robert B. Gibbs
— What Could a University Be?: Revolutionary Ideas for the Future (On Campus) by Robert B. Gibbs
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)