META

Tomorrow's encyclopedia:

"Experience machine: see META." https://t.co/9ZQz6ijyqG
(https://twitter.com/EthicsInBricks/status/1454868312802873351?s=02)

Memento mori

...Memento mori is Latin for “Remember death.” The phrase is believed to originate from an ancient Roman tradition in which a servant would be tasked with standing behind a victorious general as he paraded though town. As the general basked in the glory of the cheering crowds, the servant would whisper in the general’s ear: “Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento! Memento mori!” = “Look behind you! Remember that you are but a man! Remember that you will die!”

Memento mori. Remember that you will die.

Us moderns don’t like to think too much about death. It’s a bit too depressing and morbid for our think-positive sensibilities. Our culture is devoted to perpetuating the lie that you can stay young forever and your life will go on and on.

But for men living in antiquity all the way up until the beginning of the 20th century, rather than being a downer, death was seen as a motivator to live a good, meaningful, and virtuous life...

https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/knowledge-of-men/memento-mori-art/

Happy Halloween

"Today is Halloween, or All Hallows’ Eve, a day in which the dead are traditionally believed to walk among the living. Communities all across the country throw Halloween parties and parades, but Salem, Massachusetts, goes all out...trying to make everyone happy.” WA

Bring your extra candy to class, if you want.

Went for a bikeride in the Sunday afternoon Nashville sunshine. How’d I get here? pic.twitter.com/gLDNYo0I2N

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) October 31, 2021

Kantian ethics is scary

	Ethics in Bricks ⁦‪@EthicsInBricks‬⁩ Halloween tip: Never EVER go to your deontologist friend's place when hiding from an axe murderer. pic.twitter.com/3gmNRdLi7z   10/30/21, 8:00 AM

 

(Here's why...)

Faking it

Just wait til you're  64, buddy.

	Stephen Law ⁦‪@stephenlaw60‬⁩ I'm 60. Yet I don't feel that I am a 'grown up', and feel I would be fraud if a pretended to be one (I do know how to *act* like a 'grown up').   10/30/21, 8:36 AM

The Afterlife of Rachel Held Evans

I followed her on Twitter, before her death in 2019 at just age 37. She was the thinking person's evangelical. Pride of Dayton TN.

"With humility and openness, Held Evans helped reintroduce a mode of spiritual inquiry in America that was based in seeking mystery, not certainty. "She made Christianity seem like a decent place to be while you asked questions, rather than something you had to abandon to be free," Kathryn Lofton, a professor of religious studies at Yale, said. Held Evans quickly became a major spiritual figure, appearing on television shows and serving as one of President Obama's faith advisers. "I think Rachel would be the first person to scoff at any attempt to beatify her," Sarah Bessey, her friend, told me. "She's one of the few spiritual teachers I've known who had the humility to regularly ask herself, 'What if I'm wrong?' "

https://www.newyorker.com/news/on-religion/the-afterlife-of-rachel-held-evans

Questions Nov 1/2

WGU

Study Questions

1. Kant's definition of maturity is what?

2. Education, travel, and work share what common purpose, ideally?

3. You're not grown-up if you've not rejected what? 

4. Why should languages and music be learned as early as possible?

5. What is the message of Rousseau's Emile?

6. What does it mean to love a book?

7. The internet, says Nick Carr, is a machine geared for what?

8. If you don't travel you're likely to suppose what?

9. What did Rousseau say about those who do not walk?

10. What is travel's greatest gift?

Discussion Questions

• What are some other signs of being grown-up, besides the ability to think for yourself? 123
• Are you good at accepting compromise? Are the adults in your life? 124
• Have you "sifted through your parents' choices about everything"? 125
• Do you "love the world enough to assume responsibility for it?" 126
• Has your educational experience so far broken or furthered your "urge to explore the world"? Do you still "desire to learn"? 127
• Should corporations like Coca-Cola be allowed to have "pouring rights" in public schools? 132
• "You must take your education into your own hands as soon as possible." Did you? How? 140
• Should the age of legal maturity be raised to match the age of brain maturity? 140
• "Minds need at least as much exercise as bodies..." 141 Do you get enough of both forms of exercise? Too much of one or the other? Do you subscribe to Mens sana in corpore sano?
• Do you love books and reading? 143 
• Do you agree with Mark Twain?: "A person who won't read has no advantage over a person who can't."
• Are you willing to go a month without internet? Or even a day? 148
• Were Augustine and Rousseau right about travel? 150-51
• Does group travel "preclude real encounters" with a place? 158
• Do you hope to live and work one day in another culture for at least a year? Do you think it will contribute to your maturity? 162-3

 FL

• What do you think of Marianne Williamson's "basic idea"? 295 Would she have made a good president?
• Does Oprah live in Fantasyland? 296
• Is Dr. Oz reliable? 301
• Is "alternative medicine" respectable? 302
• Is "the placebo effect" an example of the "law of attraction" in action? 304

 

Nick Kristof, meliorist

A Farewell to Readers, With Hope
A columnist offers lessons learned from decades on the front lines of reporting and explains why he is leaving to run for office.

"...while I've spent my career on the front lines of human suffering and depravity, covering genocide, war, poverty and injustice, I've emerged firmly believing that we can make real progress by summoning the political will. We are an amazing species, and we can do better..." nyt

“Meta” doesn’t sound so good

	Long Now Foundation ⁦‪@longnow‬⁩ Neal Stephenson coined the term "Metaverse" in 1992 to describe a dystopian future world based around virtual reality. It has since taken on a life of its own. Join us 11/17 with Neal as we discuss his new book Termination Shock and his long-term vision. eventbrite.com/e/termination-… pic.twitter.com/3rbRIZhr31   10/28/21, 1:45 PM

« Let’s go back in Plato’s cave ! » pic.twitter.com/Cll6UJvpo6

— Guillaume Dumas (@introspection) October 30, 2021

Amor fati?

 LISTEN. Time to close Sarah Bakewell's fine Montaigne bio, in Happiness. Our time with him for now is ended, but not finished. I think he's now in a dead heat with David Hume as one of my favorite skeptics. But I do have reservations.

For instance, if amor fati means "cheerful acceptance of whatever happens" I cannot join him in being firmly wedded to such a complacent-sounding stance. Loving one's fate, as I understand the concept, does not mean loving everything about everyone's fate and cheerfully renouncing the meliorist's mission to work for better futures all around. The tenor of Bakewell's discussion, in terms of Christian salvation, suggests a narrower focus--on one's personal fate--than pragmatic meliorists prefer. 

But if amor fati is more about renouncing impotent, debilitating, self-destructive regret for one's own past errors and fallibilities ("18. Reflect on everything; regret nothing") while still learning from them and cultivating conscientious, humane regard for others and a "willingness to leap between different people's points of view," that elicits my cheer... (continues)

Twenty-six

Older daughter turned that age yesterday. Today, the first day of the rest of her life, is full of promise. The rest, Susan Neiman quite rightly insists, is best.

"Having failed to create societies that our young want to grow into, we idealize the stages of youth. Watching the wide-eyed excitement with which babies face every piece of the world, we envy their openness and naivety, while forgetting the fear and frustration that accompany every bit of progress, from standing upright to drawing a stick-figure. The most pernicious bit of idealization is the very widespread view that the best time of one’s life is the decade between sixteen and twenty-six, when young men’s muscles and young women’s skin are at their most blooming. That’s due to hormones, and evolutionary biologists will explain that it happens for a reason. But your goal is not to maximize reproduction, whatever may be said of your genes. By describing what is usually the hardest time of one’s life as the best one, we make that time harder for those who are going through it. (If I’m torn and frightened now, what can I expect of the times of my life that, they all tell me, will only get worse?) And that is the point. By describing life as a downhill process, we prepare young people to expect – and demand – very little from it. Few things show this better than the progressive transformation of the Peter Pan story. In the original novel, grown-ups are simply dull: Mr Darling’s knowledge is confined to stocks and shares; his only passion is being exactly like his neighbours. By the mid-twentieth century the character is slightly menacing, an authoritarian who could become a tyrant so easily that the same actor could play father and pirate. By the end of the twentieth century, the grown-up had become ridiculous. In Hook, Steven Spielberg’s disturbing twist on the story, Peter Banning is an object of contempt. Grown-ups are still boring and rigid, but they are now so pitiful that teenagers are right to mock them. The variations on the story reflect the decline of the image of adulthood itself. At the beginning of the twentieth century, growing up looked merely dreary; by the end it looked positively pathetic. This book will discuss the ways in which our understanding of the way the world is, and the way it should be, are furthered – and hindered – by different kinds of experience. It will argue that being grown-up is itself an ideal: one that is rarely achieved in its entirety, but all the more worth striving for."

Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age" by Susan Neiman: https://a.co/iDa2pvg

Rorty

	Michael S Roth ⁦‪@mroth78‬⁩ My take on Dick Rorty: "Pragmatists can only point out that we depend on one another & thus should develop narratives that will encourage us to listen to one another in order to find more inclusive solutions to the problems that plague us" ⁦‪@LAReviewofBooks‬⁩ lareviewofbooks.org/article/we-can…   10/27/21, 10:48 AM

"[W]e do not, if I am right, need a theory of rationality, we do need a narrative of maturation." He is committed to the anti-authoritarian Enlightenment project of replacing obedience to the Divine (whether in the shape of a deity or a monarch) with obedience only to "a law one gives oneself," as Rousseau and Kant had it. We may arrive at an agreement about the laws we give ourselves — we don't discover the One True Law. Pragmatism is anti-authoritarian because it rejects the notion that we need something nonhuman (God, Reality, Truth) for our salvation.

Greta animated

	New York Times Opinion ⁦‪@nytopinion‬⁩ "Things may look dark, but I'm telling you there is hope. And that hope comes from the people, from democracy, from you," says ⁦‪@GretaThunberg‬⁩. pic.twitter.com/dAL63BPFnP   10/27/21, 7:32 AM

How to Talk to a Science Denier | Center for Inquiry

A generation ago, the flat-earther at the end of the bar or the anti-evolutionist in front of a congregation could be ignored. But today's science deniers—climate change skeptics and Covid anti-vaxxers—threaten all of us: solutions to both global catastrophes require the public's collective buy-in. Drawing on the latest academic research and his own experience speaking with those doubtful of established facts—including at a recent Flat Earth convention in Denver—McIntyre outlines the common themes and psychological roots of science denialism, illustrating a throughline from the disinformation campaigns created by tobacco companies in the 1950s to today's climate deniers, anti-vaxxers and Covid-deniers. Importantly, he also offers tools, techniques, and reasoning strategies that are effective in mitigating the effects of scientific disinformation. When science denial becomes a public health threat, all of us—laypeople and experts alike—have a responsibility to help combat it
https://centerforinquiry.org/video/how-to-talk-to-a-science-denier/

Flattery

 LISTEN. For Matt, and other Fantasyland Flatlanders.

  

...we have video from space of the rotating spherical earth the earth is round... what's what's odd is there are people who think earth is flat but recognize that the moon is round, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and the Sun are all spheres but earth is flat... Star Talk

...Eratosthenes asked himself how, at the same moment, a stick in Syene could cast no shadow and a stick in Alexandria, far to the north, could cast a pronounced shadow.... The only possible answer, he saw, was that the surface of the Earth is curved... Cosmos

Looking for Life on a Flat Earth

What a burgeoning movement says about science, solace, and how a theory becomes truth.

...Believing in a flat Earth is hard work; there is so much to relearn. The price of open-mindedness is isolation. “It took me about four months before I could talk to someone outside the apartment about this,” Marble said during his presentation. “You’ve gotta be ready to be called crazy.” Several people described the relief of “coming out” as a flat-Earther. “You can tell people you’re gay, you can tell people you’re Christian, but you don’t get ridiculed like a flat-Earther,” I overheard one woman say. “It’s really that bad.” At the bar, I fell into conversation with a woman who was attending a real-estate conference in the hotel. She asked what my conference was about; when I told her, she doubled over with laughter. I cringed a little, protectively, and glanced around to see if anyone had heard her.

The reward is existential solace. This, I came to understand, was the real draw, the thing that could make, say, an unemployed clerical worker drive twelve hours, alone, from Michigan to Raleigh. To believe in a flat Earth is to belong not only to a human community but to sit, once again, at the center of the cosmos. The standard facts of astronomy are emotionally untenable—a planet spinning at a thousand miles per hour, a mote in a galaxy of unimaginable scale, itself a mote in the vast and expanding universe. “That, to me, is a huge problem,” Campanella said. “You are a created individual. This is a created place. It’s not an accident; it’s not an explosion in space; it’s not random molecules joining together.”

You, we, are special. “It’s like God is patting me on the shoulder, saying, ‘You deserve this!’ ” a man from New Orleans told me. He was a trucker, the son of a former newscaster, and an occasional musician. As we were talking, an older man in a wheelchair approached and, in a drawl, introduced himself and asked if we were Christians. He brought up the notion of infinite space and the lack of a creator. “How can people live with that?” he asked.

“Those people are fucking miserable,” the trucker said. “They’re so unhappy.”

(continues)

Questions Oct 27/28

 WGU -122 (Not included on Exam 2)

Study Questions

1. "The miracle that saves the world," said Hannah Arendt, is ____.

2. For Kant the most important fact about us is what?

3. What is "the metaphysical wound at the heart of the universe"? 

4. How did David Hume dispel "this philosophical melancholy and delirium"? 

5. What did Kant say we must take seriously, in order to grow up?

6. What must reason find intolerable about the world?

Discussion Questions

• Is Hannah Arendt's emphasis on natality as important as mortality, in defining the human condition? Would it still be, if we ever achieved natural immortality? 80-81
• Is the US still a proud nation of immigrants, or more like those European nations "struggling with what they regard as the problem of immigration? 81
• Are there ways other than travel to "experience the world as babies do" etc.? 83
• Did your upbringing make it easier or harder for you to trust? 86
• "Once you start asking why, there's no natural place to stop." 88 So why do so many people stop, or else never start?
• How long would we have to live, to see this as Leibniz's "best possible world" 89
• Was Hume right about reason being slave to the passions? 93
• Was Thrasymachus right about justice? 94
• Do you agree with the cliche about socialism? 100
• Is Hume's strategy for dispelling melancholy good? 104
• Has the gap between ought and is narrowed in the world, historically?107
• Was Nietzsche right about stoicism? 113
• Is it childish to expect the world to make sense? 114
• How can philosophy help us grow up? 119
• Do we have a right to happiness? 122

IMPORTANT: FINISHING PRESENTATIONS

 Presentations conclude: EVERYONE who's not yet presented, plan to report on Monday/Tuesday this week. Exam 2 is Wednesday/Thursday.

What goes around

World Series starts tonight.

So, which present Astro rookie will manage the Braves in the 2074 WS? https://t.co/IvFtMNht6Y

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) October 26, 2021

To the journey

  LISTEN. In our Happiness reading today we find Montaigne audaciously telling the king that if he likes the book he must like the author. But is that so audacious? Of course books convey the core humanity of their creators. The good ones do, at any rate. Montaigne must have inspired Whitman's “This is no book, / Who touches this touches a man . . . ”

We noted of Kant, in CoPhi, that he'd never ranged further than forty miles from his native Konigsberg. But Susan Neiman reminds us what an ordeal it would have been, to traverse such "stony excuses for roads" in the 18th century. Travel must have been even more of an "extreme sport" in Montaigne's day, never knowing when you might happen upon plague or pirates... (continues)

How to prepare for an exam

 How to prepare for an exam: relax

If you want really to do your best in an examination, fling away the book the day before, say to yourself, “I won’t waste another minute on this miserable thing, and I don’t care an iota whether I succeed or not.” Say this sincerely, and feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep, and I am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the method permanently. William James, “Gospel of Relaxation"

If you’ve been up all night cramming, in other words, good luck. You’ll need it. But if you’ve been diligent, have steeped yourself in the subject all semester long, and either went out to play or to an early bed the night before, your luck will be the residue of design. You’ll do fine. Relax.

But don’t try too hard to relax.

It is needless to say that that is not the way to do it. The way to do it, paradoxical as it may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are doing it or not.

Care later. On exam day just show up and do your best.

The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Leaf Blowers

Nearly everything about how Americans "care" for their lawns is deadly, but these machines exist in a category of environmental hell all their own.

...the gasoline-powered leaf blower exists in a category of environmental hell all its own, spewing pollutants — carbon monoxide, smog-forming nitrous oxides, carcinogenic hydrocarbons — into the atmosphere at a literally breathtaking rate.

This particular environmental catastrophe is not news. A 2011 study by Edmunds found that a two-stroke gasoline-powered leaf blower spewed out more pollution than a 6,200-pound Ford F-150 SVT Raptor pickup truck. Jason Kavanagh, the engineering editor at Edmunds at the time, noted that "hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower are about the same as a 3,900-mile drive from Texas to Alaska in a Raptor."

Margaret Renkl (continues)

Franklin statues on p.1

From The New York Times:

Remove a Confederate Statue? A Tennessee City Did This Instead.

Some residents want the monument removed. In the meantime, Franklin, Tenn., erected a statue of a U.S. Colored Troops soldier, broadening the way the community memorializes the Civil War.

FRANKLIN, Tenn. — For decades, when Hewitt Sawyers drove past the monument of the Confederate soldier standing tall in his city's public square, he felt the weight of slavery's long shadow.

Mr. Sawyers, 73, had attended a segregated school in Franklin, about 20 miles south of Nashville. He read from torn books passed down from the local white high school. The courthouse offered a "colored" water fountain, and the movie theater did not welcome him on the lower floor. As Confederate monuments across the South began to come down after a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., he wanted the 37-foot local statue, known as "Chip," gone, too.

"Chip represented a large part of the reason I was not part of the downtown arena," Mr. Sawyers, a Baptist minister, said. "Every time I went around that square, it was a reminder of what had gone on." (continues)

Graphic risk

OK, this is going in my email to students, and to faculty.
Nice and simple. pic.twitter.com/WgUd6Ngi9o

— Mindy ChenWishart (@MindyWishart) October 24, 2021

Rich or poor

"If you live in harmony with nature you will never be poor; if you live according what others think, you will never be rich."
- Seneca https://t.co/WbOOUA5SkC
(https://twitter.com/EthicsInBricks/status/1451911956407930889?s=02)

Freddie Ayer

	BBC Radio 4 ⁦‪@BBCRadio4‬⁩ The extraordinary life of A.J. "Freddie" Ayer, the Oxford philosopher who loved ⁦‪@SpursOfficial‬⁩ and hanging out with celebrities. A really lovely listen, on ⁦‪@BBCSounds‬⁩ 🧠 ⚽ 🧠 ⚽ 🧠 ⚽   10/23/21, 5:49 PM

Exam 2 Study Questions & Zoom link

Link to recorded zoom review emailed in D2L Friday morning. The exam will be based on the even-numbered questions.

1. Kant said we can know the ____ but not the ____ world.

2. What was Kant's great insight?

3. What, according to Kant, is irrelevant to morality?

4. Kant said you should never ___, because ___. Kant called the principle that supports this view the ____ _____.

5. Who formulated the Greatest Happiness principle? What did he call his method? Where can you find him today?

6. Who created a thought experiment that seems to refute Bentham's view of how pleasure relates to human motivation?

7. What did Hegel mean when he spoke of the "owl of Minerva"? What did he think had been reached in his lifetime?

8. What Kantian view did Hegel reject?

9. What is Geist? When did Hegel say it achieved self-knowledge?

10. What "blind driving force" did Schopenhauer allege to pervade absolutely everything (including us)?

11. What did Schopenhauer say could help us escape the cycle of striving and desire?
==
1. How did Mill disagree with Bentham about pleasure?

2. What view did Mill defend in On Liberty?

3. What's the benefit to society of open discussion, according to Mill, and what's wrong with being dogmatic?

4. Who did Bishop Wilberforce debate at Oxford in 1860?

5. The single best idea anyone ever had was what, according to whom?

6. What scientific developments since Darwin's time establish evolution by natural selection as more than just a theory or hypothesis?

7. Who was the Danish Socrates, and what was most of his writing about?

8. Why is faith irrational, according to Nigel Warburton?

9. What is "the subjective point of view"?

10. Why was Karl Marx angry? How did he think the whole of human history could be explained?

11. What was Marx's "vision"?

12. What did Marx call religion?
==
1. What's the point of James's squirrel story?

2. Who said truth is what we would end up with if we could run all the experiments and investigations we'd like to? (And what's a word his name rhymes with?)

3. What did Bertrand Russell say about James's theory of truth?

4. What 20th century philosopher carried on the pragmatist tradition? What did he say about the way words work?

5. What did Nietzsche mean by "God is dead"? (And what's a word his name rhymes with?)

6. Where did Nietzsche think Christian values come from?

7. What is an Ubermensch, and why does Nigel find it "a bit worrying"?

8. How did Nietzsche differ from Kant but anticipate Freud?

9. What were the three great revolutions in thought, according to Freud?

10. The "talking cure" gave birth to what?

11. Why did Freud think people believe in God?

12. What was Karl Popper's criticism of Freudian psychoanalysis?
==
1. Reading whose autobiography led young Bertrand Russell to reject God? OR, What did he see as the logical problem with the First Cause Argument?

2. The idea of a barber who shaves all who don't shave themselves is a logical ______, a seeming contradiction that is both true and false. Another example of the same thing would be a statement like "This sentence is ___."

3. A.J. Ayer's ______ Principle, stated in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic, was part of the movement known as _____ ______.

4. Humans don't have an _____, said Jean Paul Sartre, and are in "bad faith" like the ____ who thinks of himself as completely defined by his work.

5. What was Sartre's frustrating advice to the student who didn't know whether to join the Resistance?

6. When Simone de Beauvoir said women are not born that way, she meant that they tend to accept what?

7. Which Greek myth did Albert Camus use to illustrate human absurdity, as he saw it?
==
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?
==
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 strangers?

7. Why did Singer first become famous?

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

Questions Oct 25/26

Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age (not included on Exam 2)

Study Questions

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

2. Why did Kant say we choose immaturity?

3. Why is judgement important?

4. What is "the most pernicious bit of idealization"?

5. What is philosophy's greatest task?

6. What "perfidious reversal leaves us permanently confused"?

7. What are you committed to, if you're committed to Enlightenment?

8. What is freedom, according to Rousseau and Kant?

Discussion Questions

WGU

• Do you think of growing up as "a matter of renouncing your hopes and dreams"? 1
• Do you like the "well-meaning Uncle's" advice? Or the Rolling Stones'? 4
• Is Kant right, in "What is Enlightenment?," about why people "choose immaturity"? 5
• If distractions, especially "since the invention of cyberspace," are "literally limitless," is Enlightenment in Kant's sense a realistic goal for most people? 9
• Do you agree that it takes courage to think for yourself? 11
• Is travel necessary for growing up? 13-16
• Is Larry Summers wrong about language-learning? 16
• Do you believe the best time of life is between the ages of 18 and 28? 20
• How innocent should childhood be? What do you think of the way French children were raised in the 17th century? 24
• Do you wish you'd had a Samoan childhood? Do you think tests in school prepare you for life? 27
• Is it bad to be "WEIRD" (In the sense of the acronym)? 32
• COMMENT?: "...the important decisions are made by others we cannot even name. Or did you choose a world in which oil companies profit from wrecking the planet? Women are stoned for adultery or murdered for going to school? Children die of easily preventable diseases or are collaterally damaged by drones? Do your choices make a difference to any of these?" 34
• • Should philosophers pay more attention to child-rearing and parenting? 36
  • What do you think Cicero meant by saying that philosophy is learning to die?
  • Do you feel fully empowered to "choose your life's journey"? If not, what obstacles prevent that? 37
  • In what ways do you think your parents' occupations influence the number of choices you'll be able to make in your life?
  • If you've read 1984 and Brave New World, which do you find the more "seductive dystopia"? 39
  • Are we confused about toys and dreams? 40
  • Do others make the most important decisions for you? 41
  • Do you "make a regular appointment with your body"? 42
  • Do you trust anyone over 30? 45
  • Is it "reasonable to expect justice and joy"? 49
  • Are you "committed to Enlightenment"? 51
  • Do the passions for glory and luxury make us wicked and miserable? 53
  • What does it mean to say there are no atheists in foxholes? Is it true? 54
  • Was Rousseau right about inequality and private property? 55
  • Should philosophy be taught to children, so as to become thinking adults? 57
  • Should children "yield to the commands of other people"? 61
  • Should parents "let the child wail"?
  • Are Rousseau and Kant right about the true definition of freedom? 62
  • Is Rousseau right about desire? 65
  • Did Rousseau's abandonment of his children discredit his thoughts on child-rearing? 69 Or show him to be a hypocrite for saying no task in the world is more important than raising a child properly? 72
  
  

 

American moral philosopher and author, Susan Neiman, talks us about why we have been tricked to think we are happiest when we are young and why it is we need to grow up. Watch the full interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNQV... Institute of Art & Ideas

Say something

"My philosophy is very simple. When you see something that's not right, not fair, not just, stand up, say something, and speak out."
- John Lewis https://t.co/F3MLLeDURN
(https://twitter.com/EthicsInBricks/status/1451092981704966144?s=02)

Why the Popularity of ‘Squid Game’ Terrifies Me

What does the appeal of this violent, dystopian fantasy say about us?

Are there teenagers or young adults in your life? Ask them about "Squid Game." They've probably watched it. They've quite possibly loved it. And that terrifies me. --Frank Bruni 

Okay, I'm asking...

Be kind

  LISTEN. How to live? More suggestions today in Happiness...

9. Be convivial: live with others. 10. Wake from the sleep of habit. 11. Live temperately. 12. Guard your humanity.

Introducing children to the art of conversation, Montaigne thought, brings them out of their private worlds and engenders indispensable social graces. The graceless and rude incivility of so much of our recent public discourse would seem to vindicate that view. He was a humanist in the fashion of Kurt Vonnegut, "trying to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishment" in a post-human paradise or hell. "We owe justice to men, and mercy and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of receiving it." 

Or as Kurt put it, addressing our newest humans: "There's only one rule... God damn it, you've got to be kind." (continues)

 

My presentation was on Hannah Arendt 

 

Hannah Arendt is arguably one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century due to her works discussing the complexities of evil and power in politics. Born in 1906 to a secular Jewish family in Hanover, Germany Arendt grew up in a very turbulent and tumultuous time. The rise of the Nazi Party in the 1930s certainly shaped and influenced the philosophical thought of Arendt. It is also the reason she was forced to flee her home country, Germany; and later it would cause her to have to leave France. After relocating twice to escape the Nazi Party Hannah would move a final time to New York City where she would reside the remainder of her life.  

  

It is in New York City that Hannah Arendt would go on to publish most of her most famous and acclaimed works like The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), On Revolution (1963), and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). It is through examining these works that one is able to familiarize themselves with Arendt’s philosophy. Her ideas regarding totalitarianism, the nature of evil, and revolutionary thought have stirred a multitude of conversations ranging from scathing criticism to enthusiastic support. One of her most controversial thoughts that is still debated today is her stance on the Eichmann trial where she claims that Eichmann is misrepresented throughout the trail as a villain that acted on the evils stemming from his own heart. Arendt believed that he instead was a thoughtless man that failed to think critically about the tasks he was again. She went on to call this an example of the “banality of evil”.  

 

Discussion Questions 

1. Do you agree with Arendt’s critics that feel like her perspective on Eichmann and his trial absolve him of some of the guilt associated with his crimes? 

2. Do you think there are any current/modern examples of “banal evil” in our society? 

   
   

   Short Video on Arendt's Major Ideas and Works
   

   
   

   Podcast Discussing "The Banality of Evil"
   

   
   

 
References  

“Arendt, Hannah | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | An Encyclopedia of Philosophy Articles Written by Professional Philosophers., https://iep.utm.edu/arendt/. Accessed 20 Oct. 2021. 
 

“Arendt:The Human Condition (Analysis).” Philosophy & Philosophers, Philosophy & Philosophers, 17 May 2012, https://www.the-philosophy.com/arendt-human-condition-analysis. 
 

College, Bard. “About Hannah Arendt.” Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, https://hac.bard.edu/about/hannaharendt/. Accessed 20 Oct. 2021. 
 

“Hannah Arendt.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, 10 Oct. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hannah-Arendt. 
 

Passerin, Maurizio. “Hannah Arendt (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/. Accessed 20 Oct. 2021. 
 

Popova, Maria. “The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt on the Normalization of Human Wickedness and Our Only Effective Antidote to It – Brain Pickings.” Brain Pickings, 7 Feb. 2017, https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/02/07/hannah-arendt-the-banality-of-evil/. 
 

“The World of Hannah Arendt (March 2001) - Library of Congress Information Bulletin.” Home | Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0103/arendt.html. Accessed 20 Oct. 2021. 
 

“Why Hannah Arendt Is the Philosopher for Now - New Statesman.” New Statesman, 20 Mar. 2019, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2019/03/why-hannah-arendt-is-the-philosopher-for-now.