Questions APRIL 2

 WGU -p.165

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

Viktor Frankl on moving beyond optimism and pessimism

Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything – on Viktor Frankl's birthday, his lost lectures on moving beyond optimism and pessimism to find the deepest source of meaning when facing the darkest times.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2020/05/17/yes-to-life-in-spite-of-everything-viktor-frankl/

https://www.threads.net/@mariapopova/post/C4_TQkKx5iW/?xmt=AQGzEOFJBu2zTMpELQf2GUMDyo6flxeEBtMcFba3QDP_bQ

Questions MARCH 28

 We're not meeting today. Post your comments.

WGU -p.122

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

Questions MARCH 26

 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

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?

SAAP (an unfortunate acronym but...

a worthy cause, and a good excuse for a field trip.)

I'm heading up to Boston next week for the annual gathering of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. 

I'll chair the William James Society's session, commencing with a few reflections on the legacy of my mentor John Lachs.

The next day I'll comment on two papers (and unofficially on two others if the opportunity presents itself).

Yesterday I made headway on some of those comments. Here's a snippet of what I think I'm going to say... (continues)

10 robust psychological discoveries

William James said the world of a newborn must be a "blooming buzzing confusion." Paul Bloom reports that the learning curve rises steeply and quickly.

1. Babies have a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of the physical and social world before their first birthday…

Paul Bloom

https://open.substack.com/pub/paulbloom/p/three-intruiging-findings-about-pleasure?selection=4d9a0446-a681-4791-bafb-f2b14423fdc2&r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Happiest Countries, 2024

Missed the cut:

The Top 20 World's Happiest Countries, 2024.

1. 🇫🇮 Finland
2. 🇩🇰 Denmark
3. 🇮🇸 Iceland
4. 🇸🇪 Sweden
5. 🇮🇱 Israel
6. 🇳🇱 Netherlands
7. 🇳🇴 Norway
8. 🇱🇺 Luxembourg
9. 🇨🇭 Switzerland
10. 🇦🇺 Australia
11. 🇳🇿 NZ
12. 🇨🇷 Costa Rica
13. 🇰🇼 Kuwait
14. 🇦🇹 Austria
15. 🇨🇦 Canada
16. 🇧🇪 Belgium
17. 🇮🇪 Ireland
18. 🇨🇿 Czechia
19. 🇱🇹 Lithuania
20. 🇬🇧 UK

https://www.threads.net/@veryfinnishproblems/post/C4vsMHdCwSQ/?xmt=AQGzroRKipmonTpbvrsVPpXE70zfgLQiLcd5Kp6YmQ4TKA

No rose-tinted glasses for Arthur

"No rose without a thorn. Yes, but many a thorn without a rose." — Arthur Schopenhauer

https://www.threads.net/@philosophors/post/C4voMgbiBPv/?xmt=AQGzWuxT83vYdDTA8n2MfUgSp2i3AtGIcLI5QOFxrgw1Tw

Dewey and Wittgenstein (and flies, ducks, and rabbits)

John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein were very different philosophers, but I think this is roughly what Wittgenstein meant about showing the fly the way out of the fly-bottle:

“Intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume -- an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them.”― John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays

 

And sometimes, you have to show that what you thought was a duck was in fact a rabbit, depending on how you're looking at it (and with whom)...

 

The right side of the U-curve

…People aged 60 and older in the U.S. reported high levels of well-being compared to younger people. In fact, the United States ranks in the top 10 countries for happiness in this age group.

Conversely, there's a decline in happiness among younger adolescents and young adults in the U.S. "The report finds there's a dramatic decrease in the self-reported well-being of people aged 30 and below," says report author Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a professor of economics and behavioral science, and the director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University…

U.S. drops in new global happiness ranking. One age group bucks the trend
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/03/20/1239537074/u-s-drops-in-new-global-happiness-ranking-one-age-group-bucks-the-trend

Questions MAR 21

 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. 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

==

NOTE: These questions are out of sync, probably due to the weather postponement at semester's beginning. But it'll all come out in the wash, as the saying goes.

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

Kahlil Gibran on enlightened parenting

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/09/09/on-children-kahlil-gibran/

Hannah Arendt and the art of beginning afresh: “we are free to change the world”

Hannah Arendt is a creative and complex thinker; she writes about power and terror, war and revolution, exile and love, and, above all, about freedom. Reading her is never just an intellectual exercise, it is an experience.

[…]

She loved the human condition for what it was: terrible, beautiful, perplexing, amazing, and above all, exquisitely precious. And she never stopped believing in a politics that might be true to that condition. Her writing has much to tell us about how we got to this point in our history, about the madness of modern politics and about the awful, empty thoughtlessness of contemporary political violence. But she also teaches that it is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, matters the most.

She too lived in a "post-truth era," she too watched the fragmentation of reality in a shared world, and she saw with uncommon lucidity that the only path to freedom is the free mind. Whether she was writing about love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss or about lying in politics, she was always teaching her reader, as Stonebridge observes, not what to think but how to think — a credo culminating in her parting gift to the world: The Life of the Mind...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/03/15/we-are-free-to-change-the-world-hannah-arendt/

Peter Singer on Buddhism

"… When I was still a graduate student in philosophy, I came to see that there is no justification for our exclusion of animals from the circle of beings to whom we have ethical obligations, and I stopped eating meat. Some people asked me if this view had anything to do with Buddhism. It didn't, but it did give me a sense of affinity between my own ideas and Buddhism, because the Buddhist precept of refraining from taking life includes all sentient beings. This is, in my view, a distinct improvement over the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic religious traditions, which limit their injunctions against killing solely to members of our own species..."

https://open.substack.com/pub/boldreasoningwithpetersinger/p/an-extract-from-my-latest-book-the?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Final Report Presentations

 🌞🌄🌅 SPRING BREAK

Final report presentations begin- (don't submit any requests prior to Spring Break... we're starting a day late, if you sign up for the 12th you'll go on the 14th). On these beautiful Spring days, please consider taking us outside for your presentation.

This presentation will eventually pair with a blog post, the final version of which is to be published during final exam week at semester's end. The blog post should complement and elaborate on the presentation. You can post an early draft for use during your presentation, and for early feedback, if you wish. Let me know if you want to do that, and I'll send you an author invitation so you can post a draft.

MAR

12 

• Wittgenstein
• Arendt - H3 Shelby
• Something discussed in Be Not Afraid (BNA) 
• Three Roads Back (TRB)-Emerson

14 

• Turing & Searle - H2 Madison
• Singer - H1 Ryan
• Something discussed in WGU Introduction-p.35
• Something discussed in FL 29-32
• Chesterton - H1 Wyatt 

19 

• Rawls - H1 Carly
• Something discussed in WGU -p.79 - H2 Nicholas
• Something discussed in FL 33-34 - H1 Mera; H2 Archer
• Something discussed (but not by a previous presenter) in Be Not Afraid (BNA)
• Three Roads Back (TRB)-Thoreau (and see Weiner 4, FL 15) - H2 Spencer

21 

• Something discussed in WGU -p.122.
• Something discussed in FL 35-38 - H1 Nat; H2 Keira
• Something discussed (but not by a previous presenter) in Be Not Afraid (BNA)
• Three Roads Back (TRB)-James

26 

• Something discussed in WGU -p.165. H1 Ani; H3 Adriana
• SSHM Prologue and BNA 5 Is Life Worth Living? - H1 Emma
• Something discussed in Setiya preface/intro/1 - H1 Ally

APR

2 

• Something discussed in WGU -p. 234 - H1 Hannah; H3 Tessa
• Something discussed in SSHM ch2; H1 Jaylin
• Something discussed in Setiya 2-3 - H1 Jackson

9 

• Something discussed in SSHM ch4 - H1 Jocelyn
• Something discussed in Setiya 4 - H2 JT
• Simone Weil (see Weiner 7, Setiya 5) - H1 Grace; H2 Eliah; H3 AJ
• Something discussed (but not by a previous presenter) in Be Not Afraid (BNA)

11

• Something discussed in SSHM ch3
• Something discussed in FL 45-6

16 

• SSHM ch6 - H1 Madison
• Setiya 6-7 - H1 Jake;
• Something discussed (but not by a previous presenter) in Be Not Afraid (BNA)

Questions MAR 19

Wittgenstein, Arendt, Popper & Kuhn, Foot & Thomson-LH 34-37. REC: FL 27-28, WGU Introduction-p.35, Weiner ch4, FL ch15

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

Weiner ch4

1. Thoreau was among the first western philosophers to do what? How does this make him like Marcus Aurelius? Is that good, philosophically?
2. What's the difference between wilderness and wildness? Is it good to be wild, in the Thoreauvian sense? Are you wild that way?
3. What was Thoreau's view of the rationalism-empiricism debate, and the reliability of the senses? Do you agree with him?
4. What's another way Thoreau is like Marcus, and how is he like Socrates? Do you "vacillate" too?
5. Why did Thoreau say he went to live at Walden? Do you think such an experience would expand your sense of what it means to live and/or "see"?

FL

1. What did Henry David Thoreau do in 1844, at age 27? What American fantasy does Andersen say this epitomized? Do you agree? Do most Americans make an effort to live in harmony with nature? Do you?

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

ATTN: Section #3 - Campus events: "Revisiting the Holocaust"-Tuesday 19th 2:40 pm AND 7 pm...

Forgot to ask in class, #3: would any of you like to go to this?-- 

Student and Faculty talk

March 19, 240- 405 pm, Peck Hall Room 227: Small Group

This event is open to interested faculty and MTSU students. Browning will be discussing a wide range of topics such as his involvement in several high-profile trials related to the Holocaust and Holocaust denial, his role as a senior scholar in the field of Holocaust studies, and his research related to perpetrators and witness testimony. Please feel free to attend and invite your students. 

And,

Tuesday March 19, 7 pm. 

On campus: Ned McWherter Learning Resources Center-1558 MTSU Boulevard Murfreesboro, TN 37132

 

Dr. Christopher R. Browning is a distinguished scholar of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He is the author of eight books and has written over 100 scholarly articles. Additionally, he has served as an expert witness in “war crimes” trials in Australia, Canada, and Great Britain. He has also served as an expert witness in two “Holocaust denial” cases: the second Zündel trial in Toronto in 1988 and in David Irving’s libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt in London in 2000.

"Space and the mysteries of the universe"

Neil deGrasse Tyson interviewed on This is Nashville...

and, all about the coming eclipse.

Ripples: Terry Pratchett

'No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away... The span of someone's life is only the core of their actual existence.' The great humanist author Terry Pratchett. He was our patron and is sorely missed. He died #OnThisDay 2015. GNU Terry Pratchett.

https://www.threads.net/@humanists_uk/post/C4ajxc3I9ur/?xmt=AQGzKkiKd2K0_NxXdYXJBmuxbTDFt3-Xw8wBpkH7flo3kg

The sun queen

Dr. Mária Telkes learned to harness the power of sunlight—and the limelight.

With the publicity that a sun-powered home and a woman scientist generated, she finally brought solar into the public eye.

Tune in tonight at 9/8c on @PBS to watch THE SUN QUEEN, or stream anytime in the PBS App → https://to.pbs.org/40kMeLz

https://www.threads.net/@americanexperiencepbs/post/C4bE-7psn7t/?xmt=AQGzGyOSOskWD4xPTmYo7LeY7Kw6aDGiraVRw8F0o7_XAg

Origins (podcast)

How It All Began
TED Radio Hour

In this hour, TED speakers explore our origins as a species — who we are, where we come from, where we're headed — and how we're connected to everything that came before us. In an updated interview, futurist Juan Enriquez says homo sapiens are becoming a new species, right before our eyes. Other guests from the original 2014 episode include geneticist Spencer Wells, historian David Christian, paleontologist Jack Horner, and anthropologist Louise Leakey. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ted-radio-hour/id523121474?i=1000458821274

Questions MAR 14

(We're also expecting a very brief visit today from Professor Olaf Berwald, Ph.D., Chair, Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and Professor of German.)

1. Reading whose autobiography led young Bertrand Russell to reject God? OR, What did he see as the logical problem with the First Cause Argument? Do you agree with Russell about this?

2. The idea of a barber who shaves all who don't shave themselves is a logical ______, a seeming contradiction that is both true and false. Another example of the same thing would be a statement like "This sentence is ___." Do these examples show a deep problem with language and its ability to accurately portray reality?

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

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

5. What was Sartre's frustrating advice to the student who didn't know whether to join the Resistance? Should he have said something else?

6. When Simone de Beauvoir said women are not born that way, she meant that they tend to accept what? Are any essential identities conferred by birth?

7. Which Greek myth did Albert Camus use to illustrate human absurdity, as he saw it? Do you ever feel that way? Do you worry that someday you might, in work or relationships or something else?

Weiner ch 13

1. What is an "unrealizable"? Can you imagine yourself at age 60+?
2. What did Cicero say old age does to personality? Do you think that's inevitable?
3. What was Sartre's metaphor for what to do instead of trying to "find" yourself? What metaphor for life is implied by de Beauvoir's early declaration that her life would be an improvised "beautiful story"? Do you like either or both?
4. How does the "balance shift" as we age? When do you think the shift will begin for you?
5. What is "bad faith"? How does Sartre's example of the waiter illustrate it? Can you think of another example?
6. What does the latest happiness research confirm? Do you think this will matter more to you later?
7. What did Camus say is "enough..."? Is he right, do you think, about absurdity and its overcoming?
8. What wasBertrand Russell's advice? Do you know any older people who've followed it? Are they role-models for you?

HWT

1. What do you think of the Japanese sensitivity to nature and the seasons? 293
2. What do you think of Shinto's "no clear-cut separation between the aesthetic, the moral, and the religious"? 294
3. What do you think it means to think without concepts? 295
4. Do you agree with what "the enlightened [Buddhist] declares"? 296
5. Is time more a feeling than a concept? 296 What would Kant say?
6. What do you think of Hume's "is/ought gap"? 297
7. What can tea teach us? 299
8. What is wabi-sabi? 300
9. Was Kravinsky crazy? 301 How about Peter Singer? 302
10. Should we consider the welfare of distant strangers as much as of kith and kin? 303
11. Are Mozi and Mill saying the same thing? 304
12. Kant's categorical imperative, again: any comment? 309
13. Do you like Rawls' veil of ignorance idea? 309
14. Do you agree with the key principles of the Enlightenment? 310
15. Is Owen Flanagan right about "no sensible person"? 312
16. Is the mixing desk a good metaphor for moral pluralism? Do you agree that it's not the same as laissez-faire relativism? 314-15

Discussion Questions

• Reading Mill's autobiography led young Bertrand Russell to reject God. Do you agree or disagree with his reasoning? Why? 185

I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day at the age of eighteen I read _____'s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?'" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. Why I Am Not a Christian

(More Russell Quotes)

• Should it bother us that logical paradoxes that seem to be true AND false can be formulated in grammatically correct statements? Does this show something important about the limits of language, thought, and (thus) philosophy? 186
• Were young A.J. Ayer and the Positivists on the right track with their Verification Principle? Or was the older, post-Near Death Experience Ayer wiser about beliefs that cannot be conclusively verified? 190, 194
• Do you agree with Sartre that humans, unlike inanimate objects such as inkwells, don't have an essential nature? Is our common biology, DNA etc. not essential to our species identity? 197
• If you become deeply involved in your work  (or seem to, like Sartre's Waiter) are you in "bad faith"? 198
• What do you think of Sartre's advice to the student who didn't know whether to join the Resistance? 199
• Do you agree with Simone de Beauvoir about accepting a gender identity based on men's judgments? 200
• Is life a Sisyphean struggle? Is it "absurd"? Do you agree with Camus that Sisyphus must be happy? Why or why not? 201

FL

• Do you see any parallels between 1962 (as reflected in the SDS Manifesto, for instance) and today? 212
• What's your opinion of "Gun nuts"? And what should we do about the epidemic of gun violence in America? 218
• Do you think of The Force (in Star Wars) as a "spiritual fantasy" or does it name something you consider real? 222
• Was the sudden and widespread availability of contraception (The Pill) in the '60s a positive development, all things considered? 230
• Is the fantasy of perpetual youth an infantilizing force in America? 233 (Compare with our next read, Why Grow Up)
• Are we becoming "fake humans"? 234

Oct13/14

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Podcasts-Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Russell, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Arendt, Popper, Ordinary Language, Trolley Problems

In Our Time

Sartre. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Jean-Paul Sartre, the French novelist, playwright, and philosopher who became the king of intellectual Paris and a focus of post war politics and morals. Sartre's own life was coloured by jazz, affairs, Simone de Beauvoir and the intellectual camaraderie of Left Bank cafes. He maintained an extraordinary output of plays, novels, biographies, and philosophical treatises as well as membership of the communist party and a role in many political controversies. He produced some wonderful statements: "my heart is on the left, like everyone else's", and "a human person is what he is not, not what he is", and, most famously "we are condemned to be free". Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how Sartre's novels and plays express his ideas and what light Sartre's life brings to bear on his philosophy and his philosphy on his life.

Simone de Beauvoir. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Simone de Beauvoir. "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," she wrote in her best known and most influential work, The Second Sex, her exploration of what it means to be a woman in a world defined by men. Published in 1949, it was an immediate success with the thousands of women who bought it. Many male critics felt men came out of it rather badly. Beauvoir was born in 1908 to a high bourgeois family and it was perhaps her good fortune that her father lost his money when she was a girl. With no dowry, she pursued her education in Paris to get work and in a key exam to allow her to teach philosophy, came second only to Jean Paul Sartre. He was retaking. They became lovers and, for the rest of their lives together, intellectual sparring partners. Sartre concentrated on existentialist philosophy; Beauvoir explored that, and existentialist ethics, plus the novel and, increasingly in the decades up to her death in 1986, the situation of women in the world.

Camus. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Algerian-French writer and Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus. Shortly after the new year of 1960, a powerful sports car crashed in the French town of Villeblevin in Burgundy, killing two of its occupants. One was the publisher Michel Gallimard; the other was the writer Albert Camus. In Camus’ pocket was an unused train ticket and in the boot of the car his unfinished autobiography The First Man. Camus was 46. Born in Algeria in 1913, Camus became a working class hero and icon of the French Resistance. His friendship with Sartre has been well documented, as has their falling out; and although Camus has been dubbed both an Absurdist and Existentialist philosopher, he denied he was even a philosopher at all, preferring to think of himself as a writer who expressed the realities of human existence. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Camus’ legacy is a rich one, as an author of plays, novels and essays, and as a political thinker who desperately sought a peaceful solution to the War for Independence in his native Algeria.

Bertrand Russell. Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the influential British philosopher Bertrand Russell. Born in 1872 into an aristocratic family, Russell is widely regarded as one of the founders of Analytic philosophy, which is today the dominant philosophical tradition in the English-speaking world. In his important book The Principles of Mathematics, he sought to reduce mathematics to logic. Its revolutionary ideas include Russell's Paradox, a problem which inspired Ludwig Wittgenstein to pursue philosophy. Russell's most significant and famous idea, the theory of descriptions, had profound consequences for the discipline.

In addition to his academic work, Russell played an active role in many social and political campaigns. He supported women's suffrage, was imprisoned for his pacifism during World War I and was a founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He wrote a number of books aimed at the general public, including The History of Western Philosophy which became enormously popular, and in 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Russell's many appearances on the BBC also helped to promote the public understanding of ideas.

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, work and legacy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. There is little doubt that he was a towering figure of the twentieth century; on his return to Cambridge in 1929 Maynard Keynes wrote, “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train”.Wittgenstein is credited with being the greatest philosopher of the modern age, a thinker who left not one but two philosophies for his descendents to argue over: The early Wittgenstein said, “the limits of my mind [language] mean the limits of my world”; the later Wittgenstein replied, “If God looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of”. Language was at the heart of both. Wittgenstein stated that his purpose was to finally free humanity from the pointless and neurotic philosophical questing that plagues us all. As he put it, “To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle”.How did he think language could solve all the problems of philosophy? How have his ideas influenced contemporary culture? And could his thought ever achieve the release for us that he hoped it would?With Ray Monk, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton and author of Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius; Barry Smith, Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London; Marie McGinn, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York.

Ordinary Language Philosophy. Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Ordinary Language Philosophy, a school of thought which emerged in Oxford in the years following World War II. With its roots in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ordinary Language Philosophy is concerned with the meanings of words as used in everyday speech. Its adherents believed that many philosophical problems were created by the misuse of words, and that if such 'ordinary language' were correctly analysed, such problems would disappear. Philosophers associated with the school include some of the most distinguished British thinkers of the twentieth century, such as Gilbert Ryle and JL Austin.

Hannah Arendt. In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt. She developed many of her ideas in response to the rise of totalitarianism in the C20th, partly informed by her own experience as a Jew in Nazi Germany before her escape to France and then America. She wanted to understand how politics had taken such a disastrous turn and, drawing on ideas of Greek philosophers as well as her peers, what might be done to create a better political life. Often unsettling, she wrote of 'the banality of evil' when covering the trial of Eichmann, one of the organisers of the Holocaust.

Karl Popper. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, Karl Popper whose ideas about science and politics robustly challenged the accepted ideas of the day. He strongly resisted the prevailing empiricist consensus that scientists' theories could be proved true. Popper wrote: “The more we learn about the world and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance”. He believed that even when a scientific principle had been successfully and repeatedly tested, it was not necessarily true. Instead it had simply not proved false, yet! This became known as the theory of falsification.He called for a clear demarcation between good science, in which theories are constantly challenged, and what he called “pseudo sciences” which couldn't be tested. His debunking of such ideologies led some to describe him as the “murderer of Freud and Marx”. He went on to apply his ideas to politics, advocating an Open Society. His ideas influenced a wide range of politicians, from those close to Margaret Thatcher, to thinkers in the Eastern Communist bloc and South America. So how did Karl Popper change our approach to the philosophy of science? How have scientists and philosophers made use of his ideas? And how are his theories viewed today? Are we any closer to proving scientific principles are “true”?

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The Scientific Method. Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the evolution of the Scientific Method, the systematic and analytical approach to scientific thought. In 1620 the great philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon published the Novum Organum, a work outlining a new system of thought which he believed should inform all enquiry into the laws of nature. Philosophers before him had given their attention to the reasoning that underlies scientific enquiry; but Bacon's emphasis on observation and experience is often seen today as giving rise to a new phenomenon: the scientific method.The scientific method, and the logical processes on which it is based, became a topic of intense debate in the seventeenth century, and thinkers including Isaac Newton, Thomas Huxley and Karl Popper all made important contributions. Some of the greatest discoveries of the modern age were informed by their work, although even today the term 'scientific method' remains difficult to define.

The Meaning of Life According to AJ Ayer. What was an English philosopher doing at a New York party, saving the young model Naomi Campbell from a rather pushy boxing heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson? The philosopher was Alfred Jules Ayer, who was just as at home mixing with the glitterati as he was with Oxford dons. On the one hand he was an academic, on the other a celebrity and bon viveur.

So what does this logician have to say about the meaning of life?

In 1988, a year before his death, he gave a lecture at the Conway Hall in which he set out his notion of existence. By this time, ‘Freddie’ Ayer was one of the UK’s most prominent public intellectuals, with regular television and radio appearances, discussing the moral issues of the day.

Ayer’s former student at Oxford, philosopher AC Grayling, remembers the tutor that became his friend. He explores the man of contradictions – the atheist who almost recanted after a near-death incident; the deep thinker with a weakness for mistresses and Tottenham Hotspur. What was his contribution to philosophy? How did it inform the way he lived his life? What, if anything, can we learn from Freddie’s view on the big question?

Trolleyology
The Philosopher's ArmsSeries 4 Episode 2 of 4

Pints and Philosophical Problems with Matthew Sweet. This week, trolleyology: how should you decide between two morally troubling courses of action? This is a question which affects both soldiers in the heat of action and decision-makers in the NHS. Matthew is joined in the snug by philosopher David Edmonds.

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Philosophy Bites

Sebastian Gardner on Jean-Paul Sartre on Bad Faith

Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness is sometimes described as the bible of existentialism. At its core is the notion of Bad Faith. For this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast Sebastian Gardner, author of a recent book about Bei...

Kate Manne on Misogyny and Male Entitlement

Cornell philosopher Kate Manne discusses misognyn, male entitlement, together with the notion of 'himpathy', a term she coined, in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast. Manne is the author of two recent highly influential books, ...

Ray Monk on Philosophy and Biography

Ray Monk discusses the relationship between philosophy and a philosopher's life in this interview with Nigel Warburton for the Philosophy Bites podcast. Can understanding the biographical context of a philosopher and the type of person t...

David Edmonds on Wittgenstein's Poker

For this second special lockdown episode of Philosophy Bites, Nigel Warburton interviewed David Edmonds about his bestseller Wittgenstein's Poker, which he wrote with John Eidinow. This brilliant book is an exploration of an event that...

Melissa Lane on Plato and Totalitarianism

Was Plato's ideal state a totalitarian one? Karl Popper, thought so, and made his case in The Open Society and Its Enemies. Melissa Lane, author of Plato's Progeny discusses Popper's critique of Plato in this episode of Philosophy Bites....

David Edmonds on Trolley Problems

Is it ever morally acceptable to kill one person to save five? Most people think that it can be. But are we consistent in this? In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast Nigel Warburton interviews David Edmonds (co-creator of Philo...

Julian Baggini on Thought Experiments

Philosophers often use elaborate thought experiments in their writing. Are these anything more than rhetorical flourishes? Or do they reveal important aspects of the questions under discussion. Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosophers'...