John Wesley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Today is the birthday of the founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley (1703). He was born in Epworth, Lincolnshire, England, and his father was a Nonconformist — a dissenter from the Church of England. Wesley studied at Oxford, where he decided to become a priest. He and his brother joined a religious study group that was given the nickname “the Methodists” for their rigorous and methodical study habits; the name wasn’t meant as a compliment, but Wesley hung onto it anyway and managed to attract several new members to the group, which fasted two days a week and spent time in social service.

By 1739, he felt he wasn’t really reaching people from the pulpit, so he took to the fields, traveling on horseback, preaching two or three times a day. He began recruiting local laypeople to preach as well, and ran afoul of the Church of England for doing so. He believed that Christians could be made “perfect in love” when their actions arose out of a desire to please God and to promote the welfare of the less fortunate. He wrote: “Love is the fulfilling of the law, the end of the commandment. It is not only ‘the first and great’ command, but all the commandments in one. ‘Whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise,’ they are all comprised in this one word, love.”

He was also an ardent abolitionist. In Thoughts on Slavery (1774), he wrote: “Are you a man? Then you should have an human heart. But have you indeed? What is your heart made of? Is there no such principle as Compassion there? Do you never feel another’s pain? Have you no Sympathy? No sense of human woe? No pity for the miserable? When you saw the flowing eyes, the heaving breasts, or the bleeding sides and tortured limbs of your fellow-creatures, was you a stone, or a brute? Did you look upon them with the eyes of a tiger? When you squeezed the agonizing creatures down in the ship, or when you threw their poor mangled remains into the sea, had you no relenting? Did not one tear drop from your eye, one sigh escape from your breast? Do you feel no relenting now? If you do not, you must go on, till the measure of your iniquities is full. Then will the Great GOD deal with You, as you have dealt with them, and require all their blood at your hands.”

He’s said to have traveled 250,000 miles, preached 40,000 sermons, and written, translated, or edited more than 200 volumes. He made £20,000 for his publications but gave most of it away and died in poverty. Though there’s no evidence that he actually wrote it himself, “John Wesley’s Rule” does a fair job of summing up his life:

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as you ever can.

It’s the birthday of the man who wrote, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”: philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, born in Geneva in 1712. He left home at 16 and wandered around Europe for the next 14 years. He moved to Paris when he was 30 and took up with a group of philosophers. He also took up with Thérèse Levasseur, a semi-literate laundry maid at his hostel; the two began a lifelong relationship that produced five children, according to Rousseau. He placed all of them into orphanages.

Rousseau was well versed in music, and he wrote ballets and operas; he could easily have been successful as a composer, but the stage made his Swiss Calvinist sensibilities uneasy. One day, he was walking to visit his friend and fellow philosopher Denis Diderot, who was in jail, and he had an epiphany: Modern progress had corrupted rather than improved mankind. He became famous overnight upon publication of his essay A Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750). The essay informed nearly everything else he wrote, and eventually he would turn away completely from music and the theater to focus on literature.

In Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), he continued to explore the theme that civilization had led to most of what was wrong with people: Living in a society led to envy and covetousness; owning property led to social inequality; possessions led to poverty. Society exists to provide peace and protect those who owned property, and therefore government is unfairly weighted in favor of the rich. In it, he wrote: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.” His next two books, a criticism of the educational system (Émile) and a treatise of political philosophy (The Social Contract), both published in 1762, caused such an uproar that he fled France altogether. His work would prove inspirational to the leaders of the French Revolution, and they adopted the slogan from The Social Contract: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

He grew increasingly paranoid in his later years, convinced that his friends were plotting against him. He spent some time in England with David Hume, but his persecution complex eventually alienated him from most of his associates, and he found comfort only with Thérèse, whom he finally married in 1768.

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Aristotle's world

 Touring  Aristotle's places of residence in ancient Greece and Turkey with Edith Hall.

The peripatetic highway to happiness

"The traditional name for Aristotle’s school of thought is Peripatetic philosophy. The word “Peripatetic” comes from the verb peripateo, which in Greek, both ancient and modern, means “I go for a walk.” Like his teacher Plato, and Plato’s teacher Socrates before him, Aristotle liked to walk as he reflected; so have many important philosophers since, including Nietzsche, who insisted that “only ideas gained through walking have any worth at all.” But the ancient Greeks would have been puzzled by the romantic figure of the lone wandering sage first celebrated in Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1778). They preferred to perambulate in company, harnessing the forward drive their energetic strides generated to the cause of intellectual progress, synchronizing their dialog to the rhythm of their paces. To judge from the magnitude of his contribution to human thinking, and the number of seminal books he produced, Aristotle must have tramped thousands of miles with his students across craggy Greek landscapes during his sixty-two years on the planet. There was an intimate connection in ancient Greek thought between intellectual inquiry and the idea of the journey. This association stretches far back in time beyond Aristotle to the opening of Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus’ wanderings allow him to visit the lands of many different peoples “and learn about their minds.” By the classical period, it was metaphorically possible to take a concept or idea “for a walk”: in a comedy first produced in Athens about twenty years before Aristotle was born, the tragedian Euripides is advised against “walking” a tendentious claim he can never substantiate. And a medical text attributed to the physician Hippocrates equates the act of thinking with taking your mind out for a walk in order to exercise it: “for human beings, thought is a walk for the soul.” Aristotle used this metaphor when he began his own pioneering inquiry into the nature of human consciousness in On the Soul. He says there that we need to look at the opinions of earlier thinkers if we hope “to move forward as we try find the necessary direct pathways through impasses”: the stem word here for a “pathway through” is a poros, which can mean a bridge, ford, route through ravines, or passageway through narrow straits, deserts and woods. He opens his inquiry into nature in his Physics with a similar invitation to us to take not just to the path but to the highway with him: the road (hodos) of investigation needs to set out from things which are familiar and progress toward things which are harder for us to understand. The standard term for a philosophical problem was an aporia, “an impassable place.” But the name “Peripatetic” stuck to Aristotle’s philosophy for two reasons. First, his entire intellectual system is grounded in an enthusiasm for the granular, tactile detail of the physical world around us. Aristotle was an empirical natural scientist as well as a philosopher of mind, and his writing constantly celebrates the materiality of the universe we can perceive through our senses and know is real. His biological works suggest a picture of a man pausing every few minutes as he walked, to pick up a seashell, point out a plant, or call a pause in dialectic to listen to the nightingales. Second, Aristotle, far from despising the human body as Plato had done, regarded humans as wonderfully gifted animals, whose consciousness was inseparable from their organic being, whose hands were miracles of mechanical engineering, and for whom instinctual physical pleasure was a true guide to living a life of virtue and happiness. As we read Aristotle, we are aware that he is using his own adept hand to inscribe on papyrus the thoughts that have emerged from his active brain, part of his well-exercised, well-loved body. But there is just one more association of the term “Peripatetic.” The Greek text of the Gospel of Matthew tells us that when the Pharisees asked Jesus of Nazareth why his disciples didn’t live according to the strict Jewish rules of ritual washing, the verb they used for “live” was peripateo. The Greek word for walking could actually mean, metaphorically, “conducting your life according to a particular set of ethical principles.” Rather than taking a religious route, Aristotle’s walking disciples chose to set out with him on the philosophical highway to happiness."

"Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life" by Edith Hall: https://a.co/8YfVaNZ

An interview with Cornel West on American pragmatism - Vox

As William James said, pragmatism is a house with many rooms. And there's a Rortian room. And that Rortian room is that of a Cold War liberal who's concerned about getting beyond the subjectivism and the solipsism of Descartes. It's all about a move toward community. And community for him was all about solidarity. We begin with a "we," not an "I." That's pragmatism…

https://www.vox.com/2022/6/5/23143285/vox-conversations-cornel-west-american-pragmatism

Misdirection, Fake News and Lies: The Best Books to Read on Disinformation

The phenomenon has undermined our trust in electoral systems, in vaccines — and in what happened at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Here are books on its history, techniques and effects.

 nyt

More philosophy

“I don’t want to go to grad school or become a professional philosopher, but I want more philosophy in my life. How can I get this?”

This is the question I hear most. Please help me come up with a GREAT answer to it. Leave your thoughts in the replies so I can steal them.

— Agnes Callard (@AgnesCallard) June 11, 2022

Natality

Hannah Arendt would agree. \

The people who have devoted their lives to combating climate change keep having children...“I unequivocally reject, scientifically and personally, the notion that children are somehow doomed to an unhappy life”... https://t.co/J6j1xW1rzM

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 5, 2022

Oxford Quartet

The Women Who Took On the Philosophical Establishment

"Metaphysical Animals" traces the careers and friendships of Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley.

...The biographical material in "Metaphysical Animals" is evocative and sparkling, sketching each woman's character with a novelist's mastery of detail. The photographs — Murdoch's peculiar flat, the common room where Anscombe and Foot debated, the tea-stained cover of a pamphlet Anscombe co-wrote at the beginning of the war, personal letters illustrated with hand-drawn cartoons — provide a charming sense of intimacy and the texture of everyday midcentury British life, its teacups and cats and ration coupons. What's less persuasive is the book's overall thesis that the four friends somehow redirected the course of British philosophy or even that they shared a distinct cause or approach. This never comes into focus. Anscombe, for example, was a committed Catholic who opposed both birth control and abortion. Foot was an atheist who told Anscombe that she saw no good reason to believe otherwise. Murdoch was drawn to existentialism and published the first English-language book on Sartre. Midgley became increasingly interested in the similarities between human beings and animals...nyt

Adam Smith, philosopher

Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith was baptized on this day in 1723 in Kircaldy, Fife. We don’t know much about his childhood, but it’s rumored that he was carried off — briefly — by gypsies at the age of four. He was absentminded and eccentric, talking to himself often, suffering from imaginary illnesses, and given to such engrossing daydreams that he occasionally walked out of the house in his nightgown.

Smith entered the University of Glasgow in 1737, at the age of 14. After he graduated, he won a scholarship to Oxford, which he found academically lackluster after the dynamic Scottish Enlightenment atmosphere in Glasgow; he largely taught himself while he was there. He became a professor of logic and, later, moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and he considered his time there “by far the happiest and most honourable period of [his] life.” His social circle included a chemist, an engineer, a publisher, several successful merchants, and fellow philosopher David Hume.

Smith published his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in 1759, to general acclaim, but it’s his second, The Wealth of Nations (1776), for which he is chiefly known today. It took him 10 years to write, and in it he posits that the pursuit of individual self-interest will lead, as if by an “invisible hand,” to the greatest good for all. He tended to oppose anything — government or monopolies — that interfered with pure competition; he called his laissez-faire approach “perfect liberty.” He’s been painted by some in recent years as a staunch defender of free market capitalism, supply-side economics, and limited government; other economists argue that this image is somewhat misleading, and that his devotion to the laissez-faire philosophy has been overstated. For example, he had a favorable view of taxes in general and progressive taxes in particular, as he wrote in Wealth of Nations: “The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state. … The rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.” He did argue, however, that the tax law should be as simple and transparent as possible.

Shortly before his death, he ordered his unfinished manuscripts and personal papers destroyed, as was the custom in his time. Lost to posterity are volumes on law, science, and the arts. His Essays on Philosophical Subjects was published posthumously.
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