CoPhi: February 2022

Monday, February 28, 2022

Montaigne's 489th b'day

It’s the birthday of essayist Michel de Montaigne (books by this author), born in Périgord, in Bordeaux, France (1533). He is considered by many to be the creator of the personal essay, in which he used self-portrayal as a mirror of humanity in general. Writers up to the present time have imitated his informal, conversational style. He said, “The highest of wisdom is continual cheerfulness: such a state, like the region above the moon, is always clear and serene.” WA

Exam 1 review

Exam 1 will be drawn from the even-numbered questions (2,4,6...) in January and February. Wording will be adjusted to fit the exam format, which will include an answer bank. Best way to prepare: revisit the texts.

Recorded review, Part 1:

https://mtsu.zoom.us/rec/share/9PeH8HjElZ0Pzovr98QmPWpuyeMqOjtBzuRtS7rCbIlTnHY8HSHMLOTB9f7CoysD.Q4fBxwIN2bEGrofU /Access Passcode: ^!wda5%Z

Recorded review, Part 2:

https://mtsu.zoom.us/rec/share/auEButN_-cNAl_o7Wb2n6HZx5Lif6SMin80QQQRoPA6ZPZ1roQ66mzR_8AoPS52s.YOG13bLW6gSOe59v

Access Passcode: g8$W*7E@

Socrates and Plato-LH1; FL 1-2; HWT Intro & prologue...

LH
1. What kind of conversation was a success, for Socrates, and what did he mean by wisdom?

2. What theory is Plato's story of the cave connected with? Do you think some or all humans are naturally, in some allegorical sense, stuck in a cave?

3. What did Socrates say his inner voice told him? Do you think "inner voice" is literal?

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?

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?

Aristotle-LH 2; FL 3-4; HWT Sections 1-3

1. What point was Aristotle making when he wrote of swallows and summer? Do you agree?

2. What philosophical difference between Plato and Aristotle is implied by The School of Athens? Whose side are you on, Plato's or Aristotle's?

3. What is eudaimonia, and how can we increase our chances of achieving it, and in relation only to what? Do you think you've achieved it?

4. What reliance is completely against the spirit of Aristotle's research? Are there any authorities you always defer to? Why or why not?

5. What did Sir Walter Raleigh help invent (other than cigarettes) that contributed to "Fantasyland" as we know it today? Was he a "stupid git," as the Beatles song says?

6. What was western civilization's first great ad campaign?

7. What did Sir Francis Bacon say about human opinion and superstition? Do you ever attempt to overcome your own confirmation bias?

8. Which early settlers are typically ignored in the mythic American origin story?

9. What had mostly ended in Europe, but not America, by the 1620s, and what did the Puritans think would happen "any minute now"?

HWT

10. What is pratyaksa in classic Indian philosophy, and how does the Upanishads say to seek it?

11. There is widespread belief in India that the practice of yoga can lead to what?

12. What is metanoetics, in Japanese philosophy?

13. What does ineffable mean?

14. Unlike the west, religion in Japan is typically not about what?

Skepticism-LH 3. FL 5-6, HWT 4-5. Post your thoughts, responses, questions (etc.) in the comments space below.

1. How did the most extreme skeptics (or sceptics, if you prefer the British spelling) differ from Plato and Aristotle? What was their main teaching? Do you think they were "Socratic" in this regard?

2. Why did Pyrrho decide never to trust his senses? Is such a decision prudent or even possible?

3. What country did Pyrrho visit as a young man, and how might it have influenced his philosophy?

4. How did Pyrrho think his extreme skepticism led to happiness? Do you think there are other ways of achieving freedom from worry (ataraxia)?

5. In contrast to Pyrrho, most philosophers have favored a more moderate skepticism. Why?

1. What did Anne Hutchinson feel "in her gut"? What makes her "so American"?

2. What did Hutchinson and Roger Williams help invent?

3. How was freedom of thought in 17th century America expressed differently than in Europe at the time?

4. Who, according to some early Puritans, were "Satan's soldiers"?

5. What extraordinary form of evidence was allowed at the Salen witch trials? What does Andersen think Arthur Miller's The Crucible got wrong about Salem?

HWT

1. Logic is simply what?

2. What "law" of thinking is important in all philosophies, including those in non-western cultures that find it less compelling?

3. For Aristotle, the distinctive thing about humanity is what? How does Indian philosophy differ on this point?

4. According to secular reason, the mind works without what?

5. What debate reveals a tension in secular reason?

Epicureans and Stoics, LH 4-5; FL 7-8, HWT 6-8

ALSO RECOMMENDED: De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) Cicero's dialogue between a Skeptic, a Stoic, and an Epicurean... & JMH's smart commentary on it in Doubt: A History*... LISTEN (Sep '21)

1. According to Epicurus, fear of death is based on what, and the best way to live is what?

2. How is the modern meaning of "epicurean" different from Epicurus's?

3. What famous 20th century philosopher echoed Epicurus's attitude towards death?

4. How did Epicurus respond to the idea of divine punishment in the afterlife?

5. What was the Stoics' basic idea, and what was their aim?

6. Why did Cicero think we shouldn't worry about dying?

7. Why didn't Seneca consider life too short?

8. What does the author say might be the cost of stoicism?

1. The people we call the American founders were what?

2. Who was Jonathan Edwards and how was he like Anne Hutchinson?

3. Who was John Wesley and what did he demand of his followers?

4. Who was George Whitefield and what did he "implant" in American Christianity?

5. What did Thomas Jefferson tell his nephew?

6. What was Immanuel Kant's "motto of Enlightenment"?

HWT

1. Who were the three great founders of American pragmatism?

2. When does philosophy "recover itself" according to John Dewey, and what should it not doubt according to Charles S. Peirce?

3. What did Richard Rorty say pragmatists desire?

4. As earlier noted in Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland, Karl Rove said what about "reality"?

Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas-LH 6-8. FL 9-10, HWT 9-10

1. How did Augustine "solve" the problem of evil in his younger days, and then after his conversion to Christianity? Why wasn't it such a problem for him originally?

2. What does Boethius not mention about himself in The Consolation of Philosophy?

3. Boethius' "recollection of ideas" can be traced back to what philosopher?

4. What uniquely self-validating idea did Anselm say we have?

5. Gaunilo criticized Anselm's reasoning using what example?

6. What was Aquinas' 2nd Way?

1. How did Enlightenment values advance in America in the 19th century?

2. What fantasy about 1776 has been accepted as fact by Americans across the religious spectrum (and Ronald Reagan) ever since?

3. How was religion in America, unlike Europe, non-binary?

4. How did Thomas Jefferson characterize America's religious differences in the north and the south?

5. What happened in Cane Ridge, KY in 1801, and how did a Vanderbilt historian describe it?

6. Who was Charles Finney, and what did he understand about American Christianity?

7. What did de Tocqueville say was different about religion in America, compared to Europe?

8. Who was William Miller and what beliefs did he help revive?

9. Who was Joseph Smith and what is the most interesting thing about him?

HWT

1. What fundamental and non-western sense of time has underpinned much of human history?

2. What is "dreamtime" and how is it alien to the modern west?

3. The universalism of western universities implies that what is unimportant?

4. What does John Gray say about the idea of progress?

5. Karma originally concerned what, and lacked what connotations now commonly associated with it?

6. What western ideas have displaced karma, for many young Indians?

Machiavelli, Hobbes-LH 9-10. FL 11-12, HWT 11-12.

1. What did Machiavelli say a leader needs to have?

2. Machiavelli's philosophy is described as being "rooted" in what?

3. The idea that leaders should rule by fear is based on what view of human nature?

4. Life outside society would be what, according to Hobbes?

5. What fear influenced Hobbes' writings?

6. Hobbes did not believe in the existence of what?

FL

1. What was Arthur C. Clarke's 3d law regarding technology, and what's its converse?

2. What was the original "alternative medicine" and what is its "upside"?

3. What national craze of the 1830s relied on a "totally bogus extrapolation"?

4. Who was Mary Baker Eddy and what are her followers misleadingly called?

5. Who was Dr. William A. Rockefeller?

6. What did Mark Twain say about history?

7. How was the California Gold Rush an "inflection point" in how Americans thought about reality?

8. What did de Tocqueville say was "the chief or secondary motive in everything Americans do"?

HWT
1. How do eastern and western philosophies differ in their approach to things, and what is ma?

2. An interest in what is much more developed in eastern thought?

3. What is dukkha?

4. What is Sakura?

5. What takes the place of religion in China?

6. Chinese thought does not distinguish between natural and ____, focusing on what?

7. What is the famous story of Zhuangzi?

8. The Japanese fascination with robots reflects what traditional view?

Montaigne, Descartes, & Pascal-LH 11-12. FL 13-14, HWT 13-15

1. What state of mind, belief, or knowledge was Descartes' Method of Doubt supposed to establish? OR, What did Descartes seek that Pyrrho spurned?

2. Did Descartes claim to know (at the outset of his "meditations") that he was not dreaming?

3. What strange and mythic specter did Gilbert Ryle compare to Descartes' dualism of mind and body? ("The ____ in the ______.")

4. Pascal's best-known book is _____.

5. Pascal's argument for believing in God is called ________.

6. Pascal thought if you gamble on God and lose, "you lose ______."

7. (T/F) By limiting his "wager" to a choice between either Christian theism or atheism, says Nigel Warburton, Pascal excludes too many other possible bets.

(See Montaigne questions below*)

1. Conspiratorial explanations attempt to make what kinds of connections?

2. What was the Freemasons' grand secret, according to Franklin?

3. What conspiracy did Abe Lincoln allege in his famous "House Divided" speech in 1858?

4. Why did many northerners think the Civil War went badly for them early on?

5. What did the narrator of a popular 1832 work of fiction say about the slaves?

HWT

1. What familiar western distinction is not commonly drawn in Islamic thought?

2. According to Sankara, the appearance of plurality is misleading. Everything is ____.

3. The Islamic concept of unity rules out what key western Enlightenment value, and offers little prospect of adopting modern views on what?

4. What Calvinist-sounding doctrine features heavily in Islamic thought?

5. What deep philosophical assumption, expressed by what phrase, has informed western philosophy for centuries? To what concept did Harry Frankfurt apply it?

* BONUS QUESTIONS

Also recommended: (How to Live, ch1); LISTEN Sarah Bakewell on Michel de Montaigne (PB); A.C. Grayling on Descartes' Cogito (PB); WATCH Montaigne(SoL); Descartes (HI)

Sarah Bakewell says Montaigne's first answer to the question "How to live?" is: "Don't worry about _____."
What was Montaigne's "near death experience," and what did it teach him?
Montaigne said "my mind will not budge unless _____."
What pragmatic American philosopher was Descartes' "most practical critic"?
(T/F) A.C. Grayling thinks that, because Descartes was so wrong about consciousness and the mind-body problem, he cannot be considered a historically-important philosopher.
What skeptical slogan did Montaigne inscribe on the ceiling of his study?

FEB 15 Spinoza, Locke, & Reid-LH 13-14. FL 15-16, HWT 16-17. Midterm report PRESENTATIONS begin (3 presentations per class)... LISTEN ('19)

HWT
1. What are atman and anatta, and what classical western idea do they both contradict?

2. What was John Locke's concept of self or soul? What makes you you?

3. Shunning rigid essentialized identities, younger people increasingly believe what?

4. What cultural stereotype did Baggini find inaccurate when he went to Japan?

5. What important distinction did Nishida Kitaro draw?

6. What point about individuality did Monty Python make?

7. What is ubuntu?

1. Spinoza's view, that God and nature (or the universe) are the same thing, is called _______.

2. If god is _____, there cannot be anything that is not god; if _____, god is indifferent to human beings.

3. Spinoza was a determinist, holding that _____ is an illusion.

4. According to John Locke, all our knowledge comes from _____; hence, the mind of a newborn is a ______.

5. Locke said _____ continuity establishes personal identity (bodily, psychological); Thomas Reid said identity relies on ______ memories, not total recall.

6. Locke's articulation of what natural rights influenced the U.S. Constitution?

Berkeley, Leibniz, Hume, & Rousseau-LH 15-18. FL 17-18, HWT 18-19

HWT

1. In what way was the idea of a separable soul a "corruption"? What French philosopher of the 17th century defended it? What Scottish skeptic of the 18th century disputed it?

2. What do Owen Flanagan's findings suggest, that contrasts with Aristotle's view of human nature?

3. If you ask an American and a Japanese about their occupation, how might they respond differently?

1. How did Samuel Johnson "refute" Berkeley's theory?

2. What made Berkeley an idealist, and an immaterialist?.

3. In what way did Berkeley claim to be more consistent than Locke?

4. What was Berkeley's Latin slogan?

5. What obvious difficulty does Berkeley's theory face?

6. What English poet declared that "whatever is, is right," and what German philosopher (with his "Principle of Sufficient Reason") agreed with the poet?

7. What French champion of free speech and religious toleration wrote a satirical novel/play ridiculing the idea that everything is awesome?

8. What 1755 catastrophe deeply influenced Voltaire's philosophy?

9. What did Voltaire mean by "cultivating our garden"?

10. Did Hume think the human eye is so flawless in its patterned intricacy that, like Paley's watch, it constitutes powerful evidence of intelligent design?

11. What was Hume's definition of "miracle"? Did he think we should usually believe others' reports of having witnessed a miracle?

12. Rousseau said we're born free but everywhere are in ____, but can liberate ourselves by submitting to what is best for the whole community, aka the _______.

1. What amazing theme park was erected in Brooklyn at the turn of the 20th century?

2. Who was Robert Love Taylor?

3. What was Birth of a Nation?

4. What did H.L. Mencken say about southerners?

5. What did The New Theology say about the supernatural?

6. How did Modernists reconcile science and religion?

7. What famous trial was held in Tennessee in 1925, and what did Clarence Darrow say about it, and what was its cultural impact?

Questions FEB 22

Kant, Bentham, Hegel, Schopenhauer-LH 19-23. FL 19-20, HWT 20-22. PRESENTATIONS: 1. Immanuel Kant vs. Jeremy Bentham: Is ethics about creating the greatest happiness for the greatest number? #6 Becky Vorabouth; #9 Nicholas Miller; 2. Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy of pessimism - #6 Sameria Bohanon; #9 Karmina Ghobrial 3. The rise of virtue ethics - #6 Daniel S.; Moksa and Nirvana - #9 Kaylee [FL 19-20 or HWT 20-22]... #9 Gerges Cosmic philosophy

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?

HWT

1. What one word most characterizes the ideal Chinese way of life?

2. Western suspicion of hierarchy is built on what?

3. What did the late Archbishop Tutu say was "the greatest good"?

4. What omission in western ethics would seem bizarre to the classical Chinese thinkers?

5. What is the most famous Confucian maxim?

6. Virtue is never solitary, said Confucius, it always has ____.

1. How, according to Scientific American in 1915, are motion pictures like drugs?

2. What came into existence simultaneously with America and created the concept of celebrity?

3. What place did film critic Pauline Kael call a "fantasy-brothel"?

Mill, Darwin, Kierkegaard, Marx-LH 24-27. FL 21-22, HWT 23-24. PRESENTATIONS 1. Charles Darwin's natural selection: its importance for philosophy-#6 Eden Tucker; #9 Phillip Smith; 2. Karl Marx's revolutionary philosophy - #6 Bayleigh Elliott; #9 Keegan Barrett; 3. Moksa - #9, Andrew Quinn Burton [ FL 21-22 or HWT 23-24]

HWT
1. What two concepts from Indian and Buddhist philosophy are essentially the same?

2. What are the four stages of Hindu life?

3. What is "the smile of philosophy"?

1. What were Americans spending a third of their time doing, by the end of the '50s?

2. Who grew up in Marceline, MO?

3. What fantasy did Hugh Hefner sell?

4. What was added to currency in 1954?

5. What did Jane Roberts "discover" in 1963?

6. The sudden embrace of what, in the 60s, helped turn America into Fantasyland?

LH

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. Who wrote a memoir of life on the Kentucky frontier that turned him into a "real-life superhero"? (He's in my family tree, btw.)

2. Who built a cabin by a lake, moved in on the 4th of July, and epitomized a perennial American pastoral fantasy? What do you think he'd say about modern suburbia?

3. What did The New York Sun announce in a week-long "news" story in 1835? Who believed it?

4. Who was P.T. Barnum, and what was his fundamental Fantasyland mindset?

5. Whose touring play marked what key milestone in America's national evolution?

6. Who was Aunt Jemima?

Weston WIlliams' Nietzsche powerpoint

Hey Dr.Oliver here's my presentation Friedrich Nietzsche Whats an Ubermensch.pptx

Saturday, February 26, 2022

Live-tweeting the philosophy conference

These conferences involve a lot more sitting and listening than I'm accustomed to. I've amused myself by tweeting about it...

Last tweets from the conference, before flying home in the morning:

Rorty revisited #APACentral22 #americanphilosophy #authority https://t.co/8ZNvAukrOA via @SlideShare
— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) February 26, 2022

Enjoyed the irony of quoting James saying THIS, at a conference awash in words: “What an awful trade that of professor is, paid to talk, talk, talk! . . . It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words." #APACentral22
— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) February 26, 2022

Thursday, February 24, 2022

Questions MAR 1

Peirce & James, Nietzsche, Freud-LH 28-30, FL 23-24, HWT 25-26.

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?

HWT

1. What really distinguishes utilitarianism, for Baggini?

2. How did Mozi's maxim resemble J.ZS. Mill's principle of utility?

3. Each item of Jonathan Israel's key principles of Enlightenment concerns what?

4. Pluralism is often mistaken for what?

1. What are paradigm shiftds? When do they occur?

2. Charles Tart devoted his career to proving what?

Kaag quotes Thoreau: "We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake... by an infinite expectation of the dawn..." What do you think that means? Agree? 67
Kaag agrees with Thoreau that one of walking's greatest gifts is time. How so? Do you feel like you have enough time? 69
COMMENT: "The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise..." 69
Have you ever encountered a UFO? How do you explain others' "close encounters"?
Who should select textbooks for primary and secondary education?
Do you agree with Jefferson that those with alternative religious beliefs, or NO religious beliefs, do you no harm?
Have you ever been involved in an interminable debate that finally ended when someone clarified the definitions of the terms involved? Are most philosophical disputes like that?
Can something be true, but then later found to be false? Can a statement that was previously false be made true by events? (Consider: if you'd said "Neil Armstrong walked on the moon" in 1968...)
Should we distinguish provisional, falsifiable truth from ultimate truth?
Does it really "work" to believe in Santa? Didn't you continue to receive presents after you stopped believing? Is believing in Santa analogous to believing in God?
Are words tools, or more like pictures?
Is it possible that God is dead for some but not others, in some places and times more and in others less?
Are compassion and kindness distinctively religious values? Do you know any kind and compassionate atheists? ("Please allow me to introduce myself...")
Should we embrace the irrational and emotional aspects of human nature, or try to overcome them?
Is the "unconscious" well-supported scientifically? Does it need to be, in order to be useful to people in coming to terms with their own inner lives?
Is Freudian dream symbolism (snakes and caves etc.) profound or silly? Could it be both?
Have you ever committed an interesting Freudian slip?
What do you think of Freud's account of religion?
Your DQs

Robert Richardson's terrific James biography... Richardson speaking at the 2010 Chocorua James conference (YouTube)... Peirce's pragmatic maxim (in Richardson)... The pragmatic attitude (in Menand's Metaphysical Club... James on The Sentiment of Rationality and The Dilemma of Determinism...John Kaag, Hiking With Nietzsche (Longreads book excerpt)... Falling Out With Superman (nyt-on Nietzsche)... a skeptical critique of Freud... Story Corps at Thanksgiving... Should frats be scrapped?

Falling Out With Superman

stumbled upon Friedrich Nietzsche when I was 17, following the usual trail of existential candies -- Camus, Sartre, Beckett -- that unsuspecting teenagers find in the woods. The effect was more like a drug than a philosophy. I was whirled upward -- or was it downward? -- into a one-man universe, a secret cult demanding that you put a gun to the head of your dearest habits and beliefs. That intoxicating whiff of half-conscious madness; that casually hair-raising evisceration of everything moral, responsible and parentally approved -- these waves overwhelmed my adolescent dinghy. And even more than by his ideas -- many of which I didn't understand at all, but some of which I perhaps grasped better then than I do now -- I was seduced by his prose. At the end of his sentences you could hear an electric crack, like the whip of a steel blade being tested in the air. He might have been the Devil, but he had better lines than God.

I was sold. Like those German soldiers in World War I who were found dead with copies of ''Thus Spake Zarathustra'' in their pockets, I hauled my tattered purple-covered copy of the Viking Portable Nietzsche with me everywhere. It was with me when I dropped out of college after a semester to go work in a shipyard, with me years later when, sitting on a knoll on a tiny island off Vancouver, I decided to wake up from my dream of total escape and go back to school. I read him to elevate myself, to punish myself, to remind myself of the promises I had broken. He was the closest thing I had to a church.

Eventually, I stopped going to church. There were various reasons for this, some of them good and some of them not; I couldn't sort out which was which then, and can't now. Maybe it was just satiation. The philosopher John Searle once told me that reading Nietzsche was like drinking cognac -- a sip was good, but you didn't want to drink the whole bottle. I'd been pounding Nietzsche by the case.

So I left Nietzsche alone on his mountaintop. But as every lapsed believer knows, you never wholly escape the church. Nietzsche had come to stand for something absolute and pure, like gilded Byzantium or Ahab's whale; he represented what I imagined I might have been. He had become a permanent horizon.

Oddly, during this long, strange love affair, I avoided learning much about Nietzsche's life. Maybe this was because I had turned him into a shrine -- after all, totems have no history. I knew only the superficials: that he was a desperately lonely man, poor and largely unread, plagued by bad health, who went mad at the age of 44.

Then, last summer, I planned a trip to Switzerland. As a highlight, I decided to visit Sils-Maria -- the small village near St. Moritz where Nietzsche spent seven summers and wrote many of his masterpieces. The tourist soon won out over the iconoclast: now that I was going to stand where the Master stood, I couldn't pretend I didn't care about how he lived, what people he liked, what he wore. So I immersed myself in various biographical accounts: ''Nietzsche in Turin,'' Lesley Chamberlain's psychologically penetrating book about the philosopher's final year; Ronald Hayman's challenging ''Nietzsche: A Critical Life''; and a book that only a Nietzsche cultist would consume, ''The Good European: Nietzsche's Work Sites in Word and Image.''

It wasn't the grand narrative of his life but the details that stayed with me. The joke photograph in which he and his friend Paul Ree posed in a cart over which Lou Salome, the 21-year-old woman with whom he was timidly, desperately in love, held a whip. Nietzsche in the Caligari-shadowed last days of his sanity, once again turning himself into a character in an unhappy novel, lamenting that a journey was ''perhaps the most unfortunate I have made'' simply because he had climbed aboard the wrong train. The fact that he liked ''Tom Sawyer.'' The solicitude of an old female friend who tried to buck him up but was unable to teach him not to let everything wound him. The visitor who simply reported how much he liked Herr Nietzsche, the lonely, earnest professor with the bad eyes.

This wasn't the Nietzsche I remembered. The philosopher I had worshiped was an uncanny hybrid, simultaneously a terrifying Old Testament prophet and a 19th-century free spirit. To be sure, much of Nietzsche -- maybe the best of him -- was as lucid, critical and quick-footed as Stendhal. Yet it was the monstrous doctrines at the heart of his thought -- the Overman, the Eternal Recurrence -- that had drawn me; they hypnotized me because I couldn't figure out whether they were coming from man or some frightening gospel. Now that I understood how much of Nietzsche's work was an attempt to turn his personal torment into something lasting, I realized that perhaps those enigmatic pronouncements were best seen not as antitruths handed down from on high, but as words he whispered to himself, beacons he lighted in the darkness to cheer himself up. What was great in Nietzsche was not, I began to see, his holiness, maybe not even his wisdom. It was his courage.

Then I went to Sils.

Sils-Maria is a bland one-horse resort village under spectacular mountains between two crystalline lakes. Terminally respectable Swiss burghers polish their vacation homes; tourists (''They climb mountains like animals, stupid and sweating,'' Nietzsche wrote) fill the hotels. The Nietzsche-Haus stands near the center. In his day it was a tea and spice shop whose owner rented an upstairs room to Nietzsche; now it is a museum. In front of the tidy white-and-green building stands a sculpture of a large black eagle -- one of the companions that consoled Zarathustra in his last loneliness. On a gray afternoon I pulled open the door and climbed the stairs to his room.

No one was there. I looked in. A small, low-ceilinged room, walls of knotty pine. A lumpy-looking bed. A small table with a green silk cover. A washbasin. A single window, looking out onto a patch of the forest.

We go to literary shrines to touch things. We run our fingers along the writing table, we furtively step over the red velvet rope and finger the water jug by the edge of the bed. Yet to feel the pedestal is to call the very idea of the pedestal into question. Which is why there is something comic in all pilgrimages: while Don Quixote holds loftily forth, Sancho Panza steals the ashtray.

But as I ran my fingertips along the knotty pine, it all rose up: the indelible words that had been created here; the misery of the man who had shivered out his life in this room; and all the years I had spent charting my course by a dream. Standing outside in the hallway, I was surprised to find myself beginning to weep, like the most breast-heaving pilgrim.

A familiar voice, very old and once sacred to me, protested. I could not pity Nietzsche. It was a betrayal of everything he had believed. He had railed against pity. Compassion was for the hearth-huddlers, the followers, those who lacked the strength to turn themselves into ''dancing stars.'' The last temptation of the higher man, Nietzsche had taught, was pity; on its far side was a roaring, Dionysian, inhuman laughter.

I could recite this chapter and verse, but I had never been able to live it. It was the most alien and terrifying of Nietzsche's teachings. Still, long reverence pulled me up short. Here, of all places, I must feel no pity.

But my heart won the war. Maybe it was resignation -- the final acceptance that I was not going to forge myself into a new shape. Maybe it was weariness with a doctrine, with all doctrines, that sounded delirious but that couldn't be used. Whatever it was, I stopped fighting. Yes, part of Nietzsche would always stand far above the tree line, and I would treasure that iciness. But I had to walk on the paths where I could go.

Still confused, I stood in the doorway. And then, as a gift, the following words came into my head, words spoken by Zarathustra to his disciples, disciples that Nietzsche himself never had. ''You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you. You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? . . . Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.''

I took a last look at the room. Then I walked out the door.

NYT... Gary Kamiya is executive editor of the online magazine Salon.com.

Hiking With Nietzsche

by John Kaag (excerpt)

I often tell my students that philosophy saved my life. And it’s true. But on that first trip to Sils-Maria—on my way to Piz Corvatsch—it nearly killed me. It was 1999, and I was in the process of writing a thesis about genius, insanity, and aesthetic experience in the writings of Nietzsche and his American contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson. On the sheltered brink of my twenties, I’d rarely ventured beyond the invisible walls of central Pennsylvania, so my adviser pulled some administrative strings and found a way for me to escape. At the end of my junior year he handed me an unmarked envelope—inside was a check for three thousand dollars. “You should go to Basel,” he suggested, probably knowing full well that I wouldn’t stay there.

Basel was a turning point, a pivot between Nietzsche’s early conventional life as a scholar and his increasingly erratic existence as Europe’s philosopher-poet. He had come to the city in 1869 as the youngest tenured faculty member at the University of Basel. In the ensuing years he would write his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in which he argued that the allure of tragedy was its ability to harmonize the two competing urges of being human: the desire for order and the strange but undeniable longing for chaos. When I arrived in Basel, still a teenager, I couldn’t help thinking that the first of these drives—an obsessive craving for stability and reason that Nietzsche termed “the Apollonian”—had gotten the better of modern society.

The train station in Basel is a model of Swiss precision—beautiful people in beautiful clothes glide through a grand atrium to meet trains that never fail to run on time. Across the street stands a massive cylindrical skyscraper, home to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the most powerful financial institution in the world. I exited the station and ate my breakfast outside the bank as a throng of well-suited Apollos vanished inside on their way to work. “The educated classes,” Nietzsche explained, “are being swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy.” The prospects for life in modern capitalist society were lucrative but nonetheless bleak: “The world has never been so worldly, never poorer in love and goodness.” (continues)

Old post-

Peirce & James, LISTEN: Robert Talisse on Pragmatism (PB)... Podcast... Also see "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" and "Sentiment of Rationality/Dilemma of Determinism"

The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise.

DQ
1. Will there ever be an end of science, or a complete catalog of truths?

2. Do you agree that a "distinction without a (practical) difference" is irrelevant, and that truth and falsehood are practically the same if you can't specify the difference?

3. When James said truth is what works, did he mean what works for me, now? Or for us, on the whole and in the long run? Does this matter, practically? Does it bear on Bertrand Russell's criticism?

4. Do you think of words as tools for expressing your ideas and feelings, communicating with yourself and others, and generally "coping"... or as mental photographs that copy the world? Could they be both? What would it be like to have no words? (Could you even think about that, or about anything?) Do words ever get in the way of thought, or distort it?

5. What makes an idea valuable to you?

6. What's the difference between a fiction and a lie? Can fiction convey truth?
==
William James would agree:

Marco Rubio said in last night's (11.10/15) GOP debate: "Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers." William James would disagree. We need more philosophical welders, business-people, people generally... so we need more philosophers.

An old post-
April 21, 2015
It's Peirce and James (and Vandy's Robert Talisse on the pragmatists and truth)...

Through the years I've written repeatedly and delightedly on Peirce, James, and Nietzsche@dawn, especially WJ.

I’m not especially pleased with Nigel Warburton’s take on James, true enough to the letter but not at all to the spirit of his pragmatic conception of truth. More on that later. At least he gets thesquirrel right.

Here's what James actually said, about the squirrel and about pragmatism's conception of truth:

...Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: "Which party is right," I said, "depends on what you PRACTICALLY MEAN by 'going round' the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb 'to go round' in one practical fashion or the other."

Altho one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair-splitting, but meant just plain honest English 'round,' the majority seemed to think that the distinction had assuaged the dispute.

I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example of what I wish now to speak of as THE PRAGMATIC METHOD. The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—material or spiritual?—here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other's being right... Pragmatism, Lecture II
==
Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their 'agreement,' as falsity means their disagreement, with 'reality.' Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course. They begin to quarrel only after the question is raised as to what may precisely be meant by the term 'agreement,' and what by the term 'reality,' when reality is taken as something for our ideas to agree with...
Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"
The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: TRUE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CAN ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE, CORROBORATE AND VERIFY. FALSE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CANNOT. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as...
...truth is ONE SPECIES OF GOOD, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. THE TRUE IS THE NAME OF WHATEVER PROVES ITSELF TO BE GOOD IN THE WAY OF BELIEF, AND GOOD, TOO, FOR DEFINITE, ASSIGNABLE REASONS...
Certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also helpful in life's practical struggles. If there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really BETTER FOR US to believe in that idea, UNLESS, INDEED, BELIEF IN IT INCIDENTALLY CLASHED WITH OTHER GREATER VITAL BENEFITS.
'What would be better for us to believe'! This sounds very like a definition of truth. It comes very near to saying 'what we OUGHT to believe': and in THAT definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought we ever not to believe what it is BETTER FOR US to believe? And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart?
Pragmatism says no... Pragmatism, Lec. VI

This is a contentious and contestable view, admittedly, but it is not the caricatured reduction to whatever is "expedient" in a situation James's critics (like Bertrand Russell) made it out to be. It's more like Richard Rorty's invitation to an open and ongoing conversation between all comers with something to contribute. It is decidedly not a "Santa Claus" philosophy of truth.

James may have been wrong about truth, but (to paraphrase A.C. Grayling's comment on Descartes) if he was, he was interestingly, constructively, engagingly, entertainingly, provocatively wrong.

Besides, he's the best writer in the James family (sorry, Henry) and possibly the best writer in the entire stable of American philosophers. I call him my favorite because he's the one I'd most like to invite to the Boulevard for a beer. Unfortunately he didn't drink. (Too bad they don't serve nitrous oxide.) Also, unfortunately, he died in 1910. Read his letters and correspondence, they humanize his philosophy and place his "radical" views in the context of their genesis: the context of experience, and of life.

They also counter my friend Talisse's hasty semi-assent to Nigel's outrageous misreading of the pragmatists as missing "a sense of awe and wonder." James had it in spades, and so did Dewey and Peirce in their own ways. Likewise Rorty, who did not like being called a "relativist" and who would not agree that "Nazism and western liberal democracy are the same." Not at all.

But, I do think Talisse does a good job of summarizing James's rejection of "truth-as-correspondence" as an unhelpful formula, once you move past trivial matters like catching the bus. He's also correct in pointing out James's interest in religion as rooted in the lives and experience of individuals, not particularly in God, heaven, the afterlife and so on. He psychologizes and naturalizes religion. It's mostly about life on earth, for Jamesians, not (again) about Santa.

Steve Jobs

It's his birthday. Connect the dots...

Transcript of Steve Jobs' address: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news...

...No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary...

What would Kant say? But then, what life-changing invention did Kant ever create?

Tuesday, February 22, 2022

The ideal subject

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction [..] and the distinction between true and false [..] no longer exists."
- Hannah Arendt https://t.co/eQuP9Yb9Cf
(https://twitter.com/EthicsInBricks/status/1496063094275166209?s=02)

Questions FEB 24

HWT
1. What two concepts from Indian and Buddhist philosophy are essentially the same?

2. What are the four stages of Hindu life?

3. What is "the smile of philosophy"?

1. What were Americans spending a third of their time doing, by the end of the '50s?

2. Who grew up in Marceline, MO?

3. What fantasy did Hugh Hefner sell?

4. What was added to currency in 1954?

5. What did Jane Roberts "discover" in 1963?

6. The sudden embrace of what, in the 60s, helped turn America into Fantasyland?

LH

Discussion Questions

Was Mill right about Bentham's account of happiness? Would you rather be a sad human or a happy pig? 139
Was Mill right about the best way to organize society? 141
Was Mill right about the importance of open discussion and free speech? 143
What do you think of Huxley's reply to Wilberforce? 144
Is Dennett right about Darwin's idea of natural selection? 146
Darwin said the subject of God is too profound for the human intellect. 151 Agree?
More on the Scopes Trial: re-visit the Fantasyland discussion from last week. Should the judge have allowed "my first landlord" and the other scientific experts to testify?
If you heard a voice purporting to be God, telling you to murder your child, what would you do? 152
Do you agree with Kierkegaard that faith is an irrational "leap"? 154
Kierkegaard was a Christian who hated the Danish church and reviled "christendom"... Was he a good Christian? 155
Is the "subjective point of view all-important"? 157
Was Marx right about history as "class struggle"? 159
What do you think of "Marx's vision"? 161

Do you watch TV (and YouTube, Netflix, etc.) and play video games as much as (or more than) the average American? 151 Do you think you watch too much? Do you read for pleasure?
Were Walt Disney and Steve Jobs great Americans? Have their fantasy worlds made life better? 153-4
What do you think of Hugh Hefner's Playboy philosophy? 157 [See Carlin Romano, America the Philosophical 272f.]
What do you think of Billy Graham? 166-7 Do we need a national ad hoc pastor-in-chief?
Should "under God" be in the pledge of allegiance? Should small children be made to recite a pledge? Should any of us pledge blind allegiance to anything? 167
Do people who don't like churches and religions need something like Esalen? 178
Are you New Age? Do you believe you "create your own reality"? 180
Did psychotropics make America more of a fantasyland, in a bad or a good way (or both)? 186
Do you talk to your plants? 187

HWT

Is it more important to form good habits or to follow strong principles, in order to build your character and become a good person? Or both?
If you pursue excellence (arete) in life will you be more likely to be happy? More or less likely to value happiness? What do these terms mean to you?
Would you rather be Socrates dissatisfied or a fool satisfied? 249
COMMENT: "Nurture makes actual what nature makes possible." 252
Are "manners" important? 255
Is Aristotle right about the "mark of virtue"? 257 About "the mean"? 259 Does the Confucian Doctrine of the Mean apply to philosophy itself, and some philosophers' tendency to over-emphasize "one aspect"? 261
Should virtue expect a reward? 263
What do you think is the best version of The Golden Rule? 264-5
Do truly good people need a Golden Rule? 266

"Communism Store" (continues)

More Marx comics

More DQs

Name two or three of your favorite pleasures. Are any of them higher or better than the others? In what way? Are any of yours higher or better than those of a friend whose list includes none of yours? Why or why not?
Is state paternalism ever warranted?
Why don't we ever talk about state maternalism?
What are the appropriate legal limits on speech and expression in a free society, if any?
How would you reply to Wilberforce's debate question?
What do you think was the best idea ever?
Do you want a map of your own genome? Why or why not?
Do you agree with Darwin that the subject of God is "too profound for human intellect"? Does it mean we should all be agnostic?
What would you have done, in Abraham's position? Would you have doubted the "message" or challenged the messenger?
Does it damage the parent-child relationship if Mom or Dad make it clear to the child that they'll always defer to the perceived instructions of a "heavenly father," even including murderous instructions? Does anything "trump the duty to be a good [parent]"?
Would you ever do something you considered morally wrong, in the name of faith?
Does taking a "leap of faith" make you irrational?
How do you balance your subjective point of view with objectivity, and with the subjectivity of others? What role should inter-subjectivity play, in forming that balance?
If you ever own a business will you pay your workers as little as possible and extract as much "surplus value" from them as you can?
Is anything in history "inevitable"?
Does religion make people more reconciled to oppression and exploitation, and less likely to revolt?

Texts Spring 2024

REQUIRED: Nigel Warburton, LITTLE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY... Susan Neiman, WHY GROW UP... John Kaag, SICK SOULS, HEALTHY MINDS: How William James Can Save Your Life... Kieran Setiya, LIFE IS HARD... Eric Weiner, THE SOCRATES EXPRESS: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers... RECOMMENDED (and available for 3-day checkout at the library): Kurt Andersen, FANTASYLAND: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen ... Julian Baggini, HOW THE WORLD THINKS... Kaag & J. van Belle, BE NOT AFRAID OF LIFE: In the Words of William James... Robert Richardson, THREE ROADS BACK: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives

JPO bio

The author of "William James's Springs of Delight: The Return to Life, (VU Press, 2001) " Phil Oliver specializes in the American philosophical tradition with supporting interests in applied ethics (particularly Bioethics and Environmental Ethics), Anglo-American literature, history, humanism, naturalism, science and exploration, peripatetic ("walking & talking") philosophy, baseball, cycling, swimming, the pursuit of happiness, and the perpetual dawn of day. One of his favorite MTSU courses is The Philosophy of Happiness. He is academic advisor for minors in American Culture (American Studies), and a founding board member and current Vice-President of the William James Society. You can follow him on Threads, Instagram (@OSOPHER), Mastodon (@osopher@c.im), Substack (philoliver.substack.com) and on his blogsite Up@dawn (jposopher.blogspot.com) but of course, as Immanuel Kant and Monty Python's Brian Cohen agreed: You don't have to follow anybody. "Sapere aude," have the courage to think for yourself. But not by yourself. Good philosophy collaborates and converses.

Philosophy tutor & Writing Center

The tutor for this year is Elle Robinson. Her email address, should you need to contact her, is: ljr3s@mtmail.mtsu.edu ... Her hours will be Mondays & Wednesdays, 6 pm until 7:45 pm, Feb 19--Apr 24. She will offer tutoring in the library... No tutoring will be offered during Spring Break... WRITING CENTER: The Margaret H. Ordoubadian University Writing Center is located in LIB 362 and online at www.mtsu.edu/writing-center. Here, students can receive valuable (and FREE!) one-to-one assistance in person or online on writing projects for any course. Please make your appointment by stopping by LIB 362, calling 615-904-8237, or visiting the UWC website. Visit early and often! https://www.mtsu.edu/writing-center/

Gymnasiums of the Mind

"Followers of the Greek Aristotle were known as peripatetics because they passed their days strolling and mind-wrestling through the groves of the Academe. The Romans’ equally high opinion of walking was summed up pithily in the Latin proverb: “It is solved by walking.” Nearly every philosopher-poet worth his salt has voiced similar sentiments. Erasmus recommended a little walk before supper and “after supper do the same.” Thomas Hobbes had an inkwell built into his walking stick to more easily jot down his brainstorms during his rambles. Jean- Jacques Rousseau claimed he could only meditate when walking: “When I stop, I cease to think,” he said. “My mind only works with my legs.” Søren Kierkegaard believed he’d walked himself into his best thoughts. In his brief life Henry David Thoreau walked an estimated 250,000 miles, or ten times the circumference of earth. “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,” wrote Thoreau, “unless I spend four hours a day at least – and it is commonly more than that – sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from worldly engagements.” Thoreau’s landlord and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson characterized walking as “gymnastics for the mind...” Christopher Orlet, Philosophy Now https://philosophynow.org/issues/44/The_Gymnasiums_of_the_Mind

Vote!

"The 2024 election is going to be decided by people under 30, who have the most at stake, and they need to register to vote in order to make a difference. That’s the answer, simple democracy." -GK... Please visit TennVoterLookup if you would like to check your Tennessee registration status or check RockTheVote.org. TN residents can update or change their information on the TN Government's website. If you're currently registered in another county it may be easier for you to vote here. Register in Rutherford County: https://www.mtsu.edu/amerdem/register-to-vote.php

Thinking is a social activity

"We do not (on Justice Holmes's reasoning) permit the free expression of ideas because some individual may have the right one. No individual alone can have the right one. We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need. Thinking is a social activity. I tolerate your thought because it is part of my thought—even when my thought defines itself in opposition to yours." — The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand https://a.co/8qI6C9a

A proper education

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.” ― Wendell Berry

The college project

“The American college may be considered a continuation, at the human level, of the self-education process of the earth itself: universe education, earth education, and human education are stages of development in a single unbroken process...The entire college project can be seen as that of enabling the student to understand the immense story of the universe and the role of the student in creating the next phase of the story.” --Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth

Planting seeds

One thing is certain: if our educational system does not honestly and explicitly promote the central tenet of science—that nothing is sacred—then we encourage myth and prejudice to endure. We need to equip our children with tools to avoid the mistakes of the past while constructing a better, and more sustainable, world for themselves and future generations. We won’t do that by dodging inevitable and important questions about facts and faith. Instead of punting on those questions, we owe it to the next generation to plant the seeds of doubt." Lawrence M. Krauss, "Teaching Doubt"-The New Yorker

Enlightened thoughts

“Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world.”

“A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you’re committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.”

“Freedom cannot simply mean doing whatever strikes you at the moment: that way you're a slave to any whim or passing fancy. Real freedom involves control over your life as a whole, learning to make plans and promises and decisions, to take responsibility for your actions' consequences.”

“Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way that it should be, while never losing sight of the way that it is, is what being a grown-up comes to.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

The thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment saw an urgent need for a secular foundation for morality, because they were haunted by a historical memory of centuries of religious carnage: the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, the European wars of religion. They laid that foundation in what we now call humanism, which privileges the well-being of individual men, women, and children over the glory of the tribe, race, nation, or religion. It is individuals, not groups, who are sentient—who feel pleasure and pain, fulfillment and anguish. Whether it is framed as the goal of providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number or as a categorical imperative to treat people as ends rather than means, it was the universal capacity of a person to suffer and flourish, they said, that called on our moral concern.”

“The Enlightenment thus translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’—thereby heralding a new praxis of personal and social adjustment.”

“The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers.”― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“We must cultivate our garden.”

“Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.” Voltaire

“Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company and reflection must finish him.”

“To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.” ― John Locke

“One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.”

“I pretend not to teach, but to inquire; and therefore cannot but confess here again,–that external and internal sensation are the only passages I can find of knowledge to the understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this DARK ROOM. For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without: which, would they but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man, in reference to all objects of sight, and the ideas of them.”

― John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.”

“Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

“It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

Religion. Your reason is now mature enough to examine this object. In the first place, divest yourself of all bias in favor of novelty & singularity of opinion... shake off all the fears & servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear... ...Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you... In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it... [Jefferson, Letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, advising him in matters of religion, 1787]”

“The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.”― Albert Einstein

“There is strong shadow where there is much light.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen

“How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?”
― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

“Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life.”
― William Blake

“To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

“We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clicks into place. One immediately sees how many previously puzzling facts are neatly explained by the new hypothesis. One could kick oneself for not having the idea earlier, it now seems so obvious. Yet before, everything was in a fog.”
― Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit

“I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
==

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American life is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

“We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

“If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

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On the other hand, eastern enlightenment...

“Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen.”
― Bodhidharma, The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma

How to add links, embed videos etc.

Videos: in Blogger, after clicking on "New Post"-- 1. Copy the URL of the video you want to share. 2. Click on "More options" on the far right of the toolbar above, then Insert Video icon (3d from left) 3. Select YouTube 5. Select Search 6. Paste the URL & Select it == To insert links: 1. Highlight a word or phrase in your text 2. Click on the link icon 3. Paste the URL address of the site or passage you want to link to == To insert graphics, either just copy-&-paste... OR, click on the "insert image" icon (to the right of the link icon, to the left of the "insert video" icon) and select the appropriate option == To embed Google Books pages: 1. Find the book you want to embed. 2. Select Preview 3. Select (click on) the page you want to embed. 4. Click More Actions (the three vertical dots in the upper right) 5. Select Embed (unless you just want to link the page) 6. Copy the code 7. In edit mode on blogger, select the pen icon in the upper left and click on HTML view 8. Paste the code == Familiarize yourself with the edit icons in the drop-down menu (link, insert image, insert video, etc.) Always make sure, after you Publish, that the formatting is correct on the blogsite. If not, click More options (the three horizontal dots in the upper right) and then Clear Formatting on the far right (the T with a diagonal slash).