RWE's "American Scholar"

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Questions Aug 31

Questions pertaining to the assigned reading will normally be posted the day before each class. Try to find the answers in the text, and post your thoughts in the comments space below. Some of these questions will be on the exams. Questions pertaining to the recommended texts will appear as bonus questions, with correct answers earning full credit.

LHP

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?

HWT

1. What's one of the great unexplained wonders of human history?
2. Do you agree that we cannot understand ourselves if we do not understand others?
3. What was Descartes's "still pertinent" conclusion?
4. Why did the Buddha think speculation about ultimate reality was fruitless? 
5. What aspects of western thought have most influenced global philosophy?
6. What do Africans not have, according to Kwame Appiah?

FL

1. What statement by Karl Rove began to "crystallize" Fantasyland, in Kurt Andersen's mind?

2. What are half of Americans "absolutely certain" about? What do a quarter believe about vaccines?

3. What is Andersen trying to do with this book?

Best philosophy podcasts

	Nigel Warburton #RejoinEU ⁦‪@philosophybites‬⁩ Apart from Philosophy Bites, which philosophy podcasts are worth listening to?   5/22/21, 11:53 AM

(There are many good suggestions here. In Our Time from the BBC is my favorite....as noted in class, my new favorite is Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics... and here's somebody else's long list...)

Book banning, in our backyard

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Peripatetics

 “No wonder so many philosophers walked. Socrates, of course, liked nothing more than strolling in the agora. Nietzsche regularly embarked on spirited two-hour jaunts in the Swiss Alps, convinced “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Thomas Hobbes had a walking stick custom made with a portable inkwell attached so he could record his thoughts as he ambled. Thoreau regularly took four-hour treks across the Concord countryside, his capacious pockets overflowing with nuts, seeds, flowers, Indian arrowheads, and other treasures. Immanuel Kant, naturally, maintained a highly regimented walking routine. Every day, he’d eat lunch at 12:45 p.m., then depart for a one-hour constitutional — never more, never less — on the same boulevard in Königsberg, Prussia (now Russia). So unwavering was Kant’s routine that the people of Königsberg set their watches by his perambulations.”― Eric Weiner, The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

Also see Gymnasiums of the Mind...

Comment on summer freshman read: "Life is in the Transitions"

If you have thoughts about this book, or about Bruce Feiler's Saturday convocation address (here's his substack post about it, along with the video; and here's my note about it), please share them in comments below. Feiler got his title, by the way, from my favorite philosopher:

“Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to be there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn,” William James wrote in 1904’s “A World of Pure Experience.”

"Life is in the Transitions" is also the name of Harvard's  Houghton Library exhibit devoted to exploring James's philosophy.

“Man’s Search for Meaning has gone on to sell over twelve million copies. Viktor Frankl’s message was that even in the face of unimaginable bleakness, humans can find hope. “You do not have to suffer to learn, but if you don’t learn from suffering . . . then your life becomes truly meaningless.” The key, he said, is to imagine a better time, to have a reason to live. He quotes Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change”. —CHARLES DARWIN

Introductions

 We're just a few days away from the Fall '23 semester Opening Day on Tuesday the 29th! Let's introduce ourselves. 

My brief bio is in the right sidebar. Who are you? Why are you here  (at MTSU, in an Intro to Philosophy class, on the planet...)? What's your present understanding of what philosophy is? Do you have a personal philosophy you can summarize in a few words, or a favorite philosopher? Have you had any particular experiences you've found philosophically instructive? What else would you like to say, by way of introduction?

Indicate your section # (10, 11, or 13), we're all sharing this site.

Looking forward to seeing you on the 29th!

jpo

"Education is the ability to listen..."

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Robert Frost

1874-1963

"Choose Something

Like a Star"

(1916)

O Star (the fairest one in sight), We grant your loftiness the right To some obscurity of cloud – It will not do to say of night, Since dark is what brings out your light. Some mystery becomes the proud. But to be wholly taciturn In your reserve is not allowed. Say something to us we can learn By heart and when alone repeat. Say something! And it says "I burn." But say with what degree of heat. Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade. Use language we can comprehend. Tell us what elements you blend. It gives us strangely little aid, But does tell something in the end. And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,* Not even stooping from its sphere, It asks a little of us here. It asks of us a certain height, So when at times the mob is swayed To carry praise or blame too far, We may choose something like a star To stay our minds on and be staid. * Read John Keats' inspiration for Frost.

What’s the question?

The Biggest Question Mark in Astronomy? You're Looking at It.

The James Webb Space Telescope was conducting its usual business — staring at objects of scientific interest across the cosmos — when it accidentally captured something hilariously familiar in the distant universe…

What is college for?

The late Gary Gutting said college is much more than career-prep. Fundamentally it's about engaging a richer world, developing wider interests, and becoming an interesting/interested human with an intellectual life.

Most American college students are wrapping up yet another semester this week. For many of them, and their families, the past months or years in school have likely involved considerable time, commitment, effort and expense. Was it worth it?

When practical skills outweigh theoretical understanding, we move beyond the intellectual culture that defines higher education.

Some evidence suggests that it was.  A Pew Research survey this year found that 74 percent of graduates from four-year colleges say that their education was “very useful in helping them grow intellectually.” Sixty-nine percent said that “it was very useful in helping them grow and mature as a person” and 55 percent claimed that “it was very useful in helping prepare them for a job or career.”  Moreover, 86 percent of these graduates think “college has been a good investment for them personally.”

Nonetheless, there is incessant talk about the “failure” of higher education.  (Anthony Grafton at The New York Review of Books provides an excellent survey of recent discussions.)  Much of this has to do with access: it’s too expensive, admissions policies are unfair, the drop-out rate is too high.  There is also dismay at the exploitation of graduate students and part-time faculty members, the over-emphasis on frills such as semi-professional athletics or fancy dorms and student centers, and the proliferation of expensive and unneeded administrators.  As important as they are, these criticisms don’t contradict the Pew Survey’s favorable picture of the fundamental value of students’ core educational experience.

But, as Grafton’s discussion also makes clear, there are serious concerns about the quality of this experience.  In particular, the university curriculum leaves students disengaged from the material they are supposed to be learning.  They see most of their courses as intrinsically “boring,” of value only if they provide training relevant to future employment or if the teacher has a pleasing (amusing, exciting, “relevant”) way of presenting the material. As a result, students spend only as much time as they need to get what they see as acceptable grades (on average, about 12 to 14 hour a week for all courses combined).  Professors have ceased to expect genuine engagement from students and often give good grades (B or better) to work that is at best minimally adequate.

THE STONE VIDEO SERIES

Philosophers Speak

A weekly series of interviews with contemporary thinkers and philosophers on questions that matter.

• Browse the series »

This lack of academic engagement is real, even among schools with the best students and the best teachers, and it increases dramatically as the quality of the school decreases.  But it results from a basic misunderstanding — by both students and teachers — of what colleges are for.

First of all, they are not simply for the education of students.  This is an essential function, but the raison d’être of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture; that is, a world of ideas, dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically.  In our society, this world is mainly populated by members of college faculties: scientists, humanists, social scientists (who straddle the humanities and the sciences properly speaking), and those who study the fine arts. Law, medicine and engineering are included to the extent that they are still understood as “learned professions,” deploying practical skills that are nonetheless deeply rooted in scientific knowledge or humanistic understanding.  When, as is often the case in business education and teacher training, practical skills far outweigh theoretical understanding, we are moving beyond the intellectual culture that defines higher education.

Our support for higher education makes sense only if we regard this intellectual culture as essential to our society.  Otherwise, we could provide job-training and basic social and moral formation for young adults far more efficiently and cheaply, through, say, a combination of professional and trade schools, and public service programs.  There would be no need to support, at great expense, the highly specialized interests of, for example, physicists, philosophers, anthropologists and art historians.  Colleges and universities have no point if we do not value the knowledge and understanding to which their faculties are dedicated.

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More From The Stone

Read previous contributions to this series.

This has important consequences for how we regard what goes on in college classrooms.  Teachers need to see themselves as, first of all, intellectuals, dedicated to understanding poetry, history, human psychology, physics, biology — or whatever is the focus of their discipline.  But they also need to realize that this dedication expresses not just their idiosyncratic interest in certain questions but a conviction that those questions have general human significance, even apart from immediately practical applications.  This is why a discipline requires not just research but also teaching.  Non-experts need access to what experts have learned, and experts need to make sure that their research remains in contact with general human concerns. The classroom is the primary locus of such contact.

Students, in turn, need to recognize that their college education is above all a matter of opening themselves up to new dimensions of knowledge and understanding.  Teaching is not a matter of (as we too often say) “ making a subject (poetry, physics, philosophy) interesting” to students but of students coming to see how such subjects are intrinsically interesting.  It is more a matter of students moving beyond their interests than of teachers fitting their subjects to interests that students already have.   Good teaching does not make a course’s subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests — and so makes them more interesting.

Students readily accept the alleged wisdom that their most important learning at college takes place outside the classroom.  Many faculty members — thinking of their labs, libraries or studies — would agree.  But the truth is that, for both students and faculty members, the classroom is precisely where the most important learning occurs. Gary Gutting, The Stone 12.14.11

Aristotle, assholes, and the Good Life

"...A few days into my Ph.D. program, I met a fellow-student, a logician, who announced that he didn't share my philosophical interests. "My parents taught me the difference between right and wrong," he said, "and I can't think what more there is to say about it." The appropriate response, and the Aristotelian one, would be to agree with the spirit of the remark. There is such a thing as the difference between right and wrong. But reliably telling them apart takes experience, the company of wise friends, and the good luck of having been well brought up. Even the philosophers who think that we would ideally act in accordance with statable principles must ask themselves how someone without experience could identify such principles in the first place.

I'm convinced that we are all Aristotelians, most of the time, even when forces in our culture briefly persuade us that we are something else. Ethics remains what it was to the Greeks: a matter of being a person of a certain sort of sensibility, not of acting on "principles," which one reserves for unusual situations of the kind that life sporadically throws up. That remains a truth about ethics even when we've adopted different terms for describing what type of person not to be: we don't speak much these days of being "small-souled" or "intemperate," but we do say a great deal about "douchebags," "creeps," and, yes, "assholes."

In one sense, it tells us nothing that the right thing to do is to act and feel as the person of good judgment does. In another sense, it tells us virtually everything that can be said at this level of generality. It points us in the right direction: toward the picture of a person with a certain character, certain habits of thinking and feeling, a certain level of self-knowledge and knowledge of other people. In Aristotle's view, I might, in a couple of years, be just about ready to start studying ethics..."

Nikhil Krishnan
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/03/how-to-flourish-an-ancient-guide-to-living-well-aristotle-susan-sauve-meyer-book-review

Aristotle's rules

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Barbenheimer

Good discussion question for the first day of class: Is Diogenes Ken?

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Proof That One Life Can Change the World

What Father Strobel understood is that compassion is the only thing that can save us.

"...Across the country, 35 other cities have created programs that follow the Room in the Inn model. All of it is a testament to Father Strobel’s vision of a right relationship between neighbors in a community.

“His radical idea,” wrote Ms. Patchett in 2013, “was that the homeless need not be served in low, dark places, and that people with nothing should be able to stand beside people with everything and hold up their heads.”

None of this was a capitulation to the political and economic realities of living in a deeply red state. Father Strobel never gave up holding politicians to account, pushing them to provide at the governmental level what individuals, no matter how good-hearted and full of neighborly love, cannot, or at least cannot on a scale that meets needs so fundamental and so widespread: housing, education, job opportunities, addiction and mental-health treatment, compassionate policing, judicial justice and the like..."

Margaret Renkl

"Alone"

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