"cowardice in a pure form"

"When you look at the body camera video of Nashville cops, guns drawn, dashing into the school, throwing doors open, shouting, “Shots fired, shots fired, move!” and a line of cops moving swiftly down the hall and up the stairs and shooting the attacker, you see men doing as they were trained to do, pursue a killer and take the killer out. From first call to completion of mission: 14 minutes. An expert operation carried out by dedicated public servants. And when you watch members of Congress tiptoe away from their duty to deal with the danger those men faced, you see cowardice in a pure form..."

https://open.substack.com/pub/garrisonkeillor/p/the-six-minute-video-speaks-louder?r=35ogp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

An Open Letter to Governor Lee on the Slaughter of Our Children

You may be the only one in this entire state who could do something to protect our children. You could do it if you wanted to.

...It was never likely that events this week would change your commitment to serving up every item on the gun lobby's agenda, I admit, but I still had hope. There's nothing "other" about this school community to hide behind, no way to pass it off as something that only happens in other places. Maybe you would see it this time. Maybe it would be personal this time. I kept hoping that your delay in responding was a sign that you were gathering the courage to do the right thing.

You weren't, though. When you finally spoke, it was not to introduce a plan to reduce gun violence and prevent the slaughter of our community's beloved children. When you finally spoke, it was to say nothing at all. 

--Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books "Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South" and "Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss."

Questions Apr 4

SSHM Prologue; William James (WJ), Is Life Worth Living? (link to full text below*); FL 39-40. Presentations:  1. WJ, Is Life Worth Living? #6 Karsyn, Dinah; #7 Felopater; #10 Ruby... 2. Sick Souls, Healthy Minds (SSHM) Prologue. #6 Joseph G; #7 Seth; #10 Madison... 3. FL 39-40 - #6 Derek (Ash); #7 Natalie

1. Young William James's problem, as he felt "pulled in too many directions" and worried that we might be nothing but cogs in a machine, was ____.

2. What is distinctive about "our age" that makes James particularly relevant?

3. What happened on Feb. 6, 2014 that prompted Kaag to write this book?

(See "Is Life Worth Living...)

4. "Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead" to what?

5. Human history is "one long commentary on" what?

6. A "wider world... unseen by us" may exist, just as our world does for ___.

7. The "deepest thing in our nature," which deals with possibilities rather than finished facts, is a "dumb region of the heart" called (in German) ___.

==
Discussion questions:

• Have you ever felt "pulled in too many directions"? 2 How did you respond?
• Do you approach philosophy as a "detached intellectual exercise," an "existential life preserver," or something else?
• Where would you place yourself on the spectrum between "sick soul" and "healthy-minded"? Does that change, over time?
• Can belief that life is worth living become self-fulfilling?
• Do you know any "sick souls"? 3 Or "healthy minds"? 4 Are they the same person?
• Do you agree that believing life to be worth living "will help create the fact"? 5
• Do you like WJ's answer to the question "Is life worth living?" 9
• Is suicide always "the wrong way to exit life"? 10
• Have you ever visited the Harvard campus? What were your impressions?
• Is "maybe" a good answer to the eponymous question of James's essay below?
• Do you like Whitman's poetic expression of "the joy of living"?
• Have you ever been as happy as Rousseau at Annecy?
• Do you agree that nature cannot embody the ultimate "divine" spirit of the universe? What if you remove (or re-define) "divine"? 489
• Do you agree that "sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life..."? 491
• Does the "purely naturalistic basis" suffice to make life worth living? 494
• Does life feel like a "real fight" to you? 502

==
*IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? (see the Library of America's terrific William James : Writings 1878-1899... vol.2 is William James : Writings 1902-1910).

When Mr. Mallock's book with this title appeared some fifteen years ago, the jocose answer that "it depends on the liver" had great currency in the newspapers. The answer which I propose to give to-night cannot be jocose. In the words of one of Shakespeare's prologues,—
"I come no more to make you laugh; things now,

That bear a weighty and a serious brow,

Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,"—

must be my theme. In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly; and I know not what such an association as yours intends, nor what you ask of those whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from the surface-glamour of existence, and for an hour at least to make you heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests and excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness. Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder bass-note of life. Let us search the lonely depths for an hour together, and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things our question may find... (continues)

FL 39-40

1. Who's the (former-fringe) freak and Sandy Hook "truther" who nonetheless draws the line at shape-shifting reptilian humanoids?

2. Where did the reptilian conspiracy idea begin?

3. What started to happen with "unhinged" people in the 90s?

4. What fictional work and author influenced libertarian/conservative politicians like Paul Ryan?

5. What has the GOP become, besides a distinctly Christian political party?

6. What two states "require officeholders to believe in Heaven and Hell"?

7. What did H.L. Mencken say about "civilized Tennesseans"?

DQ

• Why does anyone give Alex Jones any credibility at all?
• Why do people like Ayn Rand's message that selfishness is a virtue?
• Was Mencken right about the Scopes Trial? 375

A pluralistic direction

Tomorrow afternoon's Lyceum speaker John Stuhr:

"Near the very end of “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” James wrote that every day we each face choices between good and evil, between life and death. In a tone I take to be both egalitarian and humble, he added: “From this unsparing practical ordeal no professor’s lectures and no array of books can save us” (WB, 162).

James was right: By themselves, lectures and books and their authors will not save your life. They won’t win you friends. Reading a book—even this one!—will not get you a promotion or make you wealthy. They won’t make someone else love you, understand you, or even treat you kindly—or ensure that you treat others with love, understanding, and kindness. They will not take away all your fears or longings. They won’t bring you recognition, physical health, or personal well-being. No one has flourished merely by reading a book or simply by taking in a lecture.

Realization of purposes requires living, not just a theory of life. It requires living reflectively and not just a life of reflection. Above all, it requires action—and the hope, faith, or melioristic temperament to take up action in the face of possibilities without guarantees. And this requires the attention and hard work of staying at it, keeping up the action. I hope that this book on, across, with, and through James, at times without (and even against) James, and always from my own fallible angle of vision and selective purposes, can contribute for its readers—for you—to this larger pragmatic, radically empirical, and pluralistic endeavor.

James’s writings, when taken both in full and critically, constitute an invaluable resource for the future and its new problems, new possibilities, and new forms of personal and social life. In this sense, all persons who enter into and take up James’s vision and worldview share a journey with no end other than itself, a pluralistic admission—ever not quite!—and a pluralistic direction: TOWARD."

"No Professor's Lectures Can Save Us: William James's Pragmatism, Radical Empiricism, and Pluralism" by John J. Stuhr: https://a.co/1kQOPFk

The human dimension

"Religious, non-religious, philosophical, practical, and humanities-teaching humanists—what do all these meanings have in common, if anything? The answer is right there in the name: they all look to the human dimension of life.

What is that dimension? It can be hard to pin down, but it lies somewhere in between the physical realm of matter and whatever purely spiritual or divine realm may be thought to exist. We humans are made of matter, of course, like everything else around us. At the other end of the spectrum, we may (some believe) connect in some way with the numinous realm. At the same time, however, we also occupy a field of reality that is neither entirely physical nor entirely spiritual. This is where we practice culture, thought, morality, ritual, art—activities that are (mostly, though not entirely) distinctive to our species. Here is where we invest much of our time and energy: we spend it talking, telling stories, making pictures or models, working out ethical judgments and struggling to do the right thing, negotiating social agreements, worshipping in temples or churches or sacred groves, passing on memories, teaching, playing music, telling jokes and clowning around for others’ amusement, trying to reason things out, and just generally being the kinds of beings that we are. This is the realm that humanists of all kinds put at the center of their concern.

Thus, whereas scientists study the physical world, and theologians the divine one, humanities-humanists study the human world of art, history, and culture. Non-religious humanists make their moral choices based on human well-being, not divine instruction. Religious humanists focus on human well-being, too, but within the context of a faith. Philosophical and other kinds of humanists constantly measure their ideas against the experience of real living people."

"Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope" by Sarah Bakewell: https://a.co/3LETOjK

The experience of Opening Day

"The crowd and its team had finally understood that in games, as in many things, the ending, the final score, is only part of what matters. The process, the pleasure, the grain of the game count too." 

-Why Time Begins on Opening Day, by Thomas Boswell

The Answer is "Maybe"

The William James Hall  stands out amongst the buildings that surround it. Standing tall at 215 feet and holding 15 stories, it houses the Behavioral Science Department at Harvard University. It was named after the father of modern psychology and philosophy, William James, who taught one of Harvard's first psychology courses in 1875, and continued to teach at the University until he retired in 1907. 

"Is life worth living?" Is a question that many, many people struggle with, and have struggled with for much of humanity's time. William James himself struggled with this very question. He sketched a self portrait in red crayon in a notebook, a man hunched in a chair with his head hanging down: HERE I AND SORROW SIT or, if you look closely, HERE I AM. He came to call those with similar indications, the people whose existence is "...little more than a series of zigzags" and whose "spirit wars with their flesh" the "sick souled." 

James's philosophy was built towards saving lives, including his life. James’s philosophy was a sort of pragmatism, that is, truth should be judged based on how it impacts life; the consequences that it has. However, when life seems meaningless to you, that holds very little weight, and James knew this. He crafted a philosophy to combat this.

So, is life worth living? James argued that there was one answer: "Maybe." Maybe life is worth living. "it depends on the liver." Maybe life can be too terrible and unbearable to continue battling existence- but maybe not. Maybe there is still time to make it worth living or to make something of value within it. To exit life through suicide is the wrong way to go, and through William James's philosophy, you may find your way. 

Why (and how) walking helps us think

...Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.

What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.

The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa. Psychologists who specialize in exercise music have quantified what many of us already know: listening to songs with high tempos motivates us to run faster, and the swifter we move, the quicker we prefer our music. Likewise, when drivers hear loud, fast music, they unconsciously step a bit harder on the gas pedal. Walking at our own pace creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state that we cannot experience as easily when we’re jogging at the gym, steering a car, biking, or during any other kind of locomotion. When we stroll, the pace of our feet naturally vacillates with our moods and the cadence of our inner speech; at the same time, we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down... Ferris Jabr

https://www.instagram.com/p/CqYFHluMMoT/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY=

Questions MAR 30

WGU -p.234. Rec: FL 37-38. Reports:

1. What mixed messages keep us in states of immaturity?

2. The older you get, the more you know what?

3. What does the U-bend tell us about aging?

4. Growing up means realizing what?

5. Philosophy is an attempt to wrestle with what three questions, according to Kant?

6. The young have only vague and erroneous notions of what, according to de Beauvoir?

7. Shakespeare's As You Like It is a gloss on what modern message?

8. Philosophers seek answers to children's questions such as what?

FL

1. What was the message of The Courage to Heal?

2. What happened in Bakesfield CA in the early '80s?

3. A line of "consequential synergy" extends from flying saucers to what?

4. What's important to recognize about the Branch Davidian cult in Texas in the '90s?

5. What tv-radio"symbiosis" stoked conspiracism in the '90s?

Discussion Questions:

• "Children make more compliant subjects and consumers." 193 Are we a nation of children, in this sense? 
• Do you know any adults who never grew up, or who say they admire Peter Pan, or who are "young at heart" and "open to the world"? 194 Or any young people who missed out on the joys of childhood? 
• Do you wish you looked older than you do? Why?
• Is life like a journey in Neurath's boat? 196
• "Maturity cannot be commanded, it must be desired." 198 Do you desire it?
• "I wish I'd known enough to ask my teachers the right questions before they died." 198 Do you (now) have questions for people it's too late to ask? 
• "Most people grow happier as they grow older." 198 Does this surprise you?
• "Growing up means realizing that no time of one's life is the best one," just as each season of the year brings its own unique joys. 202 "To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring." (George Santayana) Do you agree?
• Do you understand what Kant meant by saying you have duties to yourself? 203
• Have you yet discovered the pleasures of generativity and generosity? 204
• Do you know anyone who treats people as means to their own ends? 206 Do you want to?
• Did you grow up in "a home filled with good books and articulate people"? 209 Do you intend to provide such a home for your children? 
• If musicians and bilingual speakers have more neural connections than others, why aren't music and languages more heavily emphasized in our schools? 210
• Do you see college as an opportunity to "expand your judgment and enlarge your mind"? 213
• Is "think for yourself" necessarily vague? 215
• Are you glad you didn't live before the Enlightenment, when your life would have been largely determined by your father's (and his, and his...)? 216
• Do you agree with Leibniz, that most people would choose on their deathbed to live their lives again only on the condition that they would be different next time? 
• Do you prefer Nietzsche's version of eternal recurrence (220), or Bill Murray's in Groundhog Day, or Hume's preference for the next ten years and not the last (221), or none of the above? 
• Do you enjoy the music of any older popular musicians (Dylan, Springsteen...)? 225
• "The fear of growing up is less a fear of dying than a fear of life itself." 230 Agree?
• Was Shakespeare really saying life sucks and then you die? Or was he mocking that view?

 

FL

• If/when you become a parent, will you be "anxious, frightened, overprotective" and constantly worried about the threat of child-napping? 326
• What do you think of "the message of The Courage to Heal"? 328
• What accounts for the "rising chorus of panicky Christian crazy talk"? 330
• Do you know any real "Devil worshippers"? Do you believe devils exist? Why? 334
• What do you think of Bakersfield's "big outbreak" and LA County's "Satanic Panic"? 337
• "Younger people know nothing about [our Satanic Panic of just a generation ago], and almost nobody is aware of its scale and duration and damage." True? 340
• What's the harm of obsessing about flying saucers etc.? 345
• Do you know anyone who believes that "everybody has been in on" a one-world government conspiracy orchestrated by space aliens? 347-8
• Were the Branch Davidians fundamentally different from mainstream Protestantism? 350
• What do you think of The X-Files? 354

Humanly Possible, by Sarah Bakewell

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001kgm7?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

Lyceum Friday

 FRIDAY March 31 AT 5 PM

Philosophy Lyceum: Freedom, Democracy, and Its Institutions

MTSU College of Education, Room 164.

 

The Department of Philosophy and Religious Studes is happy to welcome Professor John Stuhr (Emory University) for a Spring Philosophy Lyceum.

In his presentation, he will consider the following questions:

• What is freedom? In practical terms, what does it mean to choose freely, act freely, or live in a free society?
• What freedoms are central to democratic societies? And are there some kinds of freedom that are at odds with democracy?
• What kinds of social and political institutions create and sustain democratic freedoms? How do these institutions depend on love and solidarity, and how can they foster this love and solidarity?

Professor Stuhr (Ph.D. Vanderbilt) is the author or editor of many books and articles, including the recent No Professor's Lectures Can Save Us: William James's Pragmatism, Radical Empiricism, and Pluralism  (Oxford University Press, 2022). He is Director of the American Philosophies Forum, as well as editor of The Journal of Speculative Philosophy.

The Wikipedia entry for Professor Stuhr can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_J._Stuhr

 

The event is free and open to the public. An informal reception will follow the presentation.

NYTimes.com: 6 Killed in Shooting at Christian School in Nashville, Hospital Says

Heartbreaking. Disgusting. Why does this society continue to tolerate such unspeakable barbarism?!

The shooter died after police officers responded Monday morning at the Covenant School, the authorities said. Details remained sparse.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/27/us/nashville-shooting-covenant-school.html?smid=em-share

My excellent adventure

 (But I'm not in Kansas any more.)

 Back from yet another fine Baseball in Literature and Culture conference in Ottawa, on the Kansas side of KC. I talked this time about characterful characters of the game, players who were characters in the eccentric sense of the term but also possessed of character in the Greek sense (αρετη [aretê], excellence, virtue)... (continues)

Meliori-, not multi-, is the better 'verse

I Fantasized About Multiple Timelines, and It Nearly Ruined My Life

The multiverse has become a favorite pop cosmology. But there's a danger in getting fixated on the fantasy that there are other, better versions of our world.

...It's easy to see the appeal of the multiverse, even as metaphor: the notion that we're surrounded by a multitude of parallel selves, one of which might be living in a better timeline than the one we're stuck in. It's probably no coincidence that the idea has become so popular during an era of pandemic, climate change and political turmoil, when so many of us have felt helpless and trapped. Who doesn't want to imagine a different world?

But it can also be a dangerous way of imagining the cosmos. Like the Capgras patient, we risk becoming detached from the world we can see and touch. Regardless of whether we can prove that the multiverse exists, the idea of it can distract us from doing the work we need to do to make this world better. This timeline is the only one we have access to, and it's got to be enough... S.I. Rosenbaum

Solvitur ambulando

As I never tire of repeating...

Whatever the Problem, It's Probably Solved by Walking

A walk begins to carve out space between my thoughts that allows clarity to rise up through my shoes.

Walking is the worst-kept secret I know. Its rewards hide under every step.

Perhaps because we take walking so much for granted, many of us often ignore its ample gifts. In truth, I doubt I would walk often or very far if its sole benefit was physical, despite the abundant proof of its value in that regard. There's something else at play in walking that interests me more. And with the arrival of spring, attention must be paid... Andrew McCarthy

Questions MAR 28

WGU -p.192. Rec: FL 35-36. FINAL REPORT PRESENTATIONS begin...

1. What hallmark of modernity reversed Plato's and Aristotle's judgment?

2. What gives life meaning, for Kant?

3. In a truly human society, according to Marx, how would our capacities to work develop?

4.  Most jobs involve what, according to Paul Goodman? 

5. People were certain, as late as 2008, that what?

6. What alternatives to consumerism have small groups begun to develop?

FL

1. What are "squishies"?

2. Who (who should have been defenders of reason) instead became enablers of Fantasyland?

3. Who is Jodi Dean?

4. What is Responsive Ed?

5. Why did Jefferson say America should neither ban nor embrace any particular religion?

Discussion Questions

• Was Locke's "sweet" labor theory of value invalidated by the invention of money? 166
• Do we have a duty to our own humanity to work? 167
• Was Arendt correct about the distinction between labor and work, and about their rootedness  in natality? 168-9
• Was Rousseau right about the value of learning to work with your hands, particularly carpentry?  172
• Do you worry, as Paul Goodman did, that there may be "no decent work to grow up for"? 173
• Is it a "travesty" to call people who work in advertising "creatives"? 175
• Is consumer capitalism infantilizing?
• Do you regularly discard "unfashionable" clothes or other goods before they wear out or break down? Should you? 179
• Do you want to produce something of value? Why? 181
• Do you expect to find meaning in your work? If not, where will you find it? 185
• 
  

• Is there something self-contradictory about being a "committed relativist," if all knowledge claims are "self-serving opinions or myths"? 308
• Have you had any "nonjudgmental Squishie" teachers who taught that reason was not for everyone, or that "someone's capacity to experience the supernatural" depends on their "willingness to see more than is materially present"? 308 
• What do you think of Schwartz's "synchronicities"? 310
• What do you think of Jodi Dean's defense of UFO "abductees"? 311
• What do you think of "the boy who came back from heaven," etc.? 314
• Have you had any textbooks similar to Responsive Ed's science texts? 315
• Will COVID give survivalism more momentum? (317) Will it boost alternative medicine? 318
• Are Survivalists and Preppers "wacky and sad"? 319 Why is this such an American phenomenon?
• Do you agree with Jefferson's statement about freedom of and from religion? 320
• COMMENT, in light of recent events?: "Some American fantasies have become weaponized, literally." 321 
• Do you agree "that so many of our neighbors are saying so many loony things [and Kurt Andersen wrote that before the Q-Anon conspiracy loonies surfaced, and before January 6] is doing us real injury"? 322  

Questions MAR 23

 WGU -p.165. FL 33-34.; NOT MEETING TODAY, but read and post...

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
1. Who was Mary Baker Eddy, and what was her basic idea?

2. How is Oprah like Ronald Reagan?

3. What's the "law of attraction"?

Mar24

JWST’s cosmic revelations will change our interior lives too

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
– from Critique of Practical Reason (1788) by Immanuel Kant

Enlightenment philosophers were vexed that their expanding empirical science of the external, material world collided with long-standing religious and moral traditions premised solely on internal, a priori knowledge. But for Immanuel Kant, the 'sensible world' of appearances emerged from cognitive faculties of the human mind, constitutive of observations gained through human experience. 'We can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them,' he wrote. Kant analogised his reframing of metaphysics to Copernicus's heliocentrism, in which the astronomer's observations made sense only when he placed the Sun, rather than Earth, at the centre. 'An object of the senses' like a new planet observed from a telescope, wrote Kant, 'conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition', resolving the perceived discrepancy between the observable world and the mind's contemplation of it.

The Enlightenment's radical political philosophy, shifting Europeans' governance from aristocratic absolutism to freedom gained through reason, dovetailed with Kant's philosophy of science. Observations of a band of stars that appeared to enring the sky led him to surmise that the solar system was shaped like a disc around the Sun. 'Matter [is] … bound to certain laws, and when it is freely abandoned to those laws, it must necessarily bring forth beautiful combinations,' he wrote in 1755. 'There is a God just because nature even in chaos cannot proceed otherwise than regularly and according to order.' A reasoned universe and a reasoned mind operated together.

Kant's 'sensible world' of the 18th century was Earth, the solar system and the stars in the sky. If Kant's philosophy holds true, then anticipated astrophysical phenomena of the observable cosmos must continue to be integrated into humans' self-emplacement in an ever-expanding internal universe as well. Increasingly sophisticated technologies of visual perception – from Galileo's spyglass to ground- and then space-based telescopes – mediate our entwined expanding astrophysical and moral universes.

Data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began returning images in July 2022, and is poised to deepen humans' sensibility of the cosmos and ourselves. Astronomers expect that it will reveal novel astrophysical phenomena both one step beyond the familiar and the presently unimaginable. With its 6.5-metre gold-coated primary mirror and unprecedented sensitivity to long infrared wavelengths, the telescope's deep field resolves distant star clusters in unparalleled detail. These images could help astronomers model the 'cosmic spring' that led to the formation of galaxies through gravitational mechanisms and life itself. The JWST could also pave the way to realise NASA scientists' long-quested goal to detect extraterrestrial life, expanding beyond microbes on the surface of Mars or in the Venusian atmosphere, which would shore up a generalised theory of biology and evolution. The apprehension of biosignatures – indications of life in exoplanetary atmospheres – would demand a reordering, not only of how humans perceive the Universe, but of ourselves as living, if perhaps not lonely, beings within it... Aeon

“far better”

"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
— Carl Sagan

Questions MAR 21

WGU -p.122. Rec: FL 31-32. #7 Taryn P; If you missed your scheduled reporting date earlier due to illness, PLAN TO REPORT TODAY... OPEN HOUSE With FREE PIZZA 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm JUB 202. Remember, no class this week on Thursday. But read and post.

 WGU -p.122. FL 31-32

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

FL

1. What percentage of evangelicals believe "Jesus will return no later than he year 2050"?

2. Who's "the most prominent blame-the-victims horror-storyteller"?

3. How many Americans say they believe in the devil  or demonic possession?

4. How many people in the U.K. said they have no religion?

5. What's the latest scholarly consensus about America's exceptional religiosity?

19 Works of Nonfiction to Read This Spring

Especially looking forward to

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, by Sarah Bakewell 

Bakewell illuminates the long tradition of humanism — which explores the moral dimensions of what it really means to be human — using the work of great philosophers, artists and writers. The beauty of her study is the range of her examples: We're unlikely to see Charles Darwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, Matthew Arnold and E.M. Forster, to name a few, together anywhere else outside of an encyclopedia.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/books/new-nonfiction-books-spring-2023.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
19 Works of Nonfiction to Read This Spring

Open House

  Philosophy & Religious Studies

Open House

With

Free Pizza

Tuesday, March 21, 2023

4:30 pm – 5:30 pm

JUB 202

The Good Life

What makes a life fulfilling and meaningful? The simple but surprising answer is: relationships. The stronger our relationships, the more likely we are to live happy, satisfying, and overall healthier lives. In fact, the Harvard Study of Adult Development reveals that the strength of our connections with others can predict the health of both our bodies and our brains as we go through life...

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Good-Life-Audiobook/B0B4X9FJ1X

9 signs that you're a philosopher

#s 2 & 6 especially: you're curious and you love to ask questions...

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
― Albert Einstein

 Medium

"We are literally connected"

The Transcendent Brain: The Poetic Physicist Alan Lightman on Spirituality for the Science-Spirited

"Most transcendent experiences are completely ego-free. In the moment, we lose track of time and space, we lose track of our bodies, we lose track of our selves. We dissolve. And yet… spirituality emerges from consciousness and the material brain. And the paramount signature of consciousness is a sense of self, an "I-ness" distinct from the rest of the cosmos. Thus, curiously, a thing centered on self creates a thing absent of self…"


And when we really are dissolved, when the material brain and body have dispersed their atoms and no trace of ego and self remains? What then?

"The atoms in my body will remain, only they will be scattered about. Those atoms will not know where they came from, but they will have been mine. Some of them will once have been part of the memory of my mother dancing the bossa nova. Some will once have been part of the memory of the vinegary smell of my first apartment. Some will once have been part of my hand. If I could label each of my atoms at this moment, imprint each with my Social Security number, someone could follow them for the next thousand years as they floated in air, mixed with the soil, became parts of particular plants and trees, dissolved in the ocean, and then floated again to the air. And some will undoubtedly become parts of other people, particular people. So, we are literally connected to the stars, and we are literally connected to future generations of people. In this way, even in a material universe, we are connected to all things future and past." Alan Lightman, cited by Maria Popova

That's simply the spiritual core of Darwinian evolution, raised to cosmic proportions. "We are literally connected to the stars" and "to future generations..."

Questions Mar 16

Rawls, Turing & Searle, Singer-LH 38-40, FL 29-30, WGU -p.79.

Reports: #6 Carlos-Turing & Searle, Isaac W-Singer; #7 Tanner-Rawls, Kevin-Turing & Searle, Justin-Singer. If you missed your scheduled reporting date earlier due to illness, plan to report today.

LH

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Why did Singer first become famous?

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

WGU

1. After Plato, the next philosopher to turn his attention to the details of child-rearing was who?

2. What's the first step of human reason, according to Kant?

3. If we have hope for moral progress, what do we want for the next generation?

4. What was Orwell's nightmare?

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

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

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

8. What's the key to whether or not we grow up?

Discussion Questions
WGU

• 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

Mar17

Today is Albert Einstein‘s birthday

[And Pi Day] He was born in Ulm, Germany (1879), and his pre-kindergarten fascination with a compass needle left an impression on him that lasted a lifetime. He liked math but hated school, dropped out, and taught himself calculus in the meantime. Einstein worked for the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, where his job was to evaluate patent applications for electromagnetic devices and determine whether the inventions described would actually work. The job wasn’t particularly demanding, and at night he would come home and pursue scientific investigations and theories.

In 1905, he wrote a paper on the Special Theory of Relativity, which is that if the speed of light is constant and if all natural laws are the same in every frame of reference, then both time and motion are relative to the observer. That same year, he published three more papers, each of which was just as revolutionary as the first, among them the paper that included his most famous equation: E = mc². E is energy, m is mass, and c stands for the velocity of light.

Einstein received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921. He said, “The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.” WA

AI "changes everything"

"I have tried to spend time regularly with the people working on A.I. I don’t know that I can convey just how weird that culture is..." Ezra Klein

“...as A.I. continues to blow past us in benchmark after benchmark of higher cognition, we quell our anxiety by insisting that what distinguishes true consciousness is emotions, perception, the ability to experience and feel: the qualities, in other words, that we share with animals.”

This is an inversion of centuries of thought, O’Gieblyn notes, in which humanity justified its own dominance by emphasizing our cognitive uniqueness. We may soon find ourselves taking metaphysical shelter in the subjective experience of consciousness: the qualities we share with animals but not, so far, with A.I. “If there were gods, they would surely be laughing their heads off at the inconsistency of our logic,” she writes...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/12/opinion/chatbots-artificial-intelligence-future-weirdness.html?smid=em-share

Questions Mar 14

 Wittgenstein, Arendt, Popper & Kuhn, Foot & Thomson-LH 34-37, FL 27-28, WGU Introduction-p.35...  [But first catch up on the Existentialists etc.]

Reports: #6 Dinah-Wittgenstein, Enrique-Arendt, Harlie-Popper & Kuhn; #7 Kaylie-Wittgenstein, Mikell-Arendt, Melvin-Popper & Kuhn #10 Zainab-Wittgenstein.

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

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

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

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

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

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

WGU

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. What is philosophy's greatest task? 31

Discussion Questions:

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

FL

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