I found a lunchbox in LIB272 after your 2:40 class today. Will you please ask your students if it belongs to one of them? I left the item with the Library Service desk right inside the entrance. They take all lost and found items to the Student Union on Saturdays. If the lunchbox does belong to one of your students and they can't pick it up today or tomorrow, they can email me, and I'll retrieve it before it goes to the Student Union.
Kristen West K.West@mtsu.edu
Select a topic related to the day's scheduled assigned reading OR to one of the RECOMMENDED texts #1-8 on reserve in the library, below* (focus on the first couple of chapters, if you wish you can return to the rest of it for your final report presentation later):
18 Montaigne, Descartes, & Pascal-LHP 11-12. Weiner 14. Rec: FL 13-14. HWT 14-15.
23 Spinoza, Locke, & Reid-LHP 13-14. Rec: FL 15-16. HWT 16-17.
25 Berkeley, Leibniz, Hume, & Rousseau-LHP 15-18. Weiner 3. Rec: FL 17-18. HWT 18-19.
30 Kant, Bentham, Hegel, Schopenhauer-LHP 19-23. Weiner 5. Rec: FL 19-20. HWT 20-22.
OCT
2 Mill, Darwin, Kierkegaard, Marx-LHP 24-27. Rec: FL 21-22. HWT 23-24.
7 Peirce & James, Nietzsche, Freud-LHP 28-30. Weiner 11. Rec: FL 23-24. HWT 25-26.
9 Exam 1.
Fall Break
16 Russell, Ayer, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus-LHP 31-33. Weiner 13. Rec: FL 25-26. HWT 27-28.
21 Wittgenstein, Arendt, Popper & Kuhn, Foot & Thomson-LHP 34-37, Rec: FL 27-28.
23 Rawls, Turing & Searle, Singer-LHP 38-40. WGU Introduction-p.35. Rec: FL 29-32.
28 WGU -p.79 Rec: FL 33-34.
*How the World Thinks (HWT) by Julian Baggini - because Western philosophy is not the whole story. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen (FL) - because the contemporary crisis of American democracy is rooted in our history. How to Think Like Socrates, by Donald J. Robertson - because he was, as the Monty Python song says, "a lovely little thinker..." How to Think Like Marcus Aurelius, by Donald J. Robertson - because he was a wise stoic and emperor, as close to a Philosopher-King as we've had or are likely to get. The Philosopher Queens: the lives and legacies of philosophy's unsung women, by Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting - because women have always philosophized too. Starry Messenger: cosmic perspectives on civilization, by Neil deGrasse Tyson - because we are cosmopolitans, citizens of the cosmos. Question Everything: A Stone Reader, eds. Catapano and Critchley - short popular essays by contemporary philosophers published in the New York Times, because philosophy is relevant to contemporary issues. Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives by Robert Richardson - because we'll all eventually lose someone close. Be Not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James-companion anthology to Sick Souls - because William James can save your life, or at least ameliorate it. Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help by Kieran Setiya - because we'll all eventually be challenged by something hard. Night Vision: seeing ourselves through dark moods, by Mariana Allesandri - because all is not sunshine and light.
Epicureans and Stoics-LHP 4-5. Weiner 6, 12. Rec: FL 7-8. HWT 6-8. Select midterm report presentation topic & date: indicate your 1st and 2d choices for date and topic in the comments space below Midterm Report Presentations...
Permanent Link to this Comic: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/133
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Philosophers in this comic: Epictetus. In The Enchiridion Epictetus gives the advice that in order to avoid suffering, we should not become too attached to particular things, so that when they inevitably end we are not caused undue harm. He starts with the fairly straightforward example of a cup that we like breaking:
With regard to whatever objects give you delight, are useful, or are deeply loved, remember to tell yourself of what general nature they are, beginning from the most insignificant things. If, for example, you are fond of a specific ceramic cup, remind yourself that it is only ceramic cups in general of which you are fond. Then, if it breaks, you will not be disturbed.
He then proceeds immediately to what seems a quite more drastic example:
If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies.
Some may find that living in such a way is strange, to say the least.
Permanent Link to this Comic: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/264
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Stoicism Man...The Next Great Stoic competition... Stoic apathy
Over the years I've made a few slideshows (see "Oliver's slideshows" in the sidebar). Here's one:
The etymology of “tetrapharmakos” is quite simple: “tetra” means “four” and “pharmakos” means “remedy” or “medicine.” They are both Greek words.
Originally, the term refers to a compound of four actual drugs: wax, tallow, pitch, and resin. Later, it’s used metaphorically by Philodemus, one of Epicurus’ disciples, to refer to the core principles of happiness in Epicureanism, since both of them function as a “cure” and are four in number.
Philodemus put together the tetrapharmakos from fragments of his master’s teachings, and summarized them into four points:
if you've got a library card (or student ID). Remember, on Thursday (4th) we meet in the library: 264A or 272, top of the stairs to the left (look for the sign).
There are several ways to access The New York Times:
Related info:
If you need further assistance, please Ask Us!
https://libanswers.mtsu.edu/faq/90420
1. How did the most extreme skeptics (or sceptics, if you prefer the British spelling) differ from Plato and Aristotle? What was their main teaching? Do you think they were "Socratic" in this regard?
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Pyrrho was the starting-point for a philosophical movement known as Pyrrhonism that flourished beginning several centuries after his own time. This later Pyrrhonism was one of the two major traditions of sceptical thought in the Greco-Roman world (the other being located in Plato’s Academy during much of the Hellenistic period). Perhaps the central question about Pyrrho is whether or to what extent he himself was a sceptic in the later Pyrrhonist mold. The later Pyrrhonists claimed inspiration from him; and, as we shall see, there is undeniably some basis for this. But it does not follow that Pyrrho’s philosophy was identical to that of this later movement, or even that the later Pyrrhonists thought that it was identical; the claims of indebtedness that are expressed by or attributed to members of the later Pyrrhonist tradition are broad and general in character (and in Sextus Empiricus’ case notably cautious—see Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.7), and do not in themselves point to any particular reconstruction of Pyrrho’s thought. It is necessary, therefore, to focus on the meager evidence bearing explicitly upon Pyrrho’s own ideas and attitudes. How we read this evidence will also, of course, affect our conception of Pyrrho’s relations with his own philosophical contemporaries and predecessors... (Stanford Encyclopedia, continues)
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"Pyrrho ignored all the apparent dangers of the world because he questioned whether they really were dangers, ‘avoiding nothing and taking no precautions, facing everything as it came, wagons, precipices, dogs’. Luckily he was always accompanied by friends who could not quite manage the same enviable lack of concern and so took care of him, pulling him out of the way of oncoming traffic and so on. They must have had a hard job of it, because ‘often . . . he would leave his home and, telling no one, would go roaming about with whomsoever he chanced to meet’.
Two centuries after Pyrrho’s death, one of his defenders tossed aside these tales and claimed that ‘although he practised philosophy on the principles of suspension of judgement, he did not act carelessly in the details of everyday life’. This must be right. Pyrrho may have been magnificently imperturbable—Epicurus was said to have admired him on this account, and another fan marvelled at the way he had apparently ‘unloosed the shackles of every deception and persuasion’. But he was surely not an idiot. He apparently lived to be nearly ninety, which would have been unlikely if the stories of his recklessness had been true."
"The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance by Anthony Gottlieb -- a very good history of western philosophy.
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A character in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, identified as The Ruler of the Universe, has been called a solipsist. I think he sounds more like a Pyrrhonian skeptic... "I say what it occurs to me to say when I hear people say things. More I cannot say..."
Remember, you don't have to respond directly to my questions (but some of them will be on the exam, so you should in anyt case look for the texts that address them. If you can come up with relevant comments on your own, or additional discussion questions, please do.
Aristotle's "happiness" is flourishing, a life of virtuous rationality or eudaimonia. He differed sharply from his teacher Plato. See Existential Comics, for instance...
Aristotle-LHP 2. Rec: FL 3-4. HWT Sections 1-3
In CoPhi it's time again for Aristotle. A couple of years ago I talked about him in the Honors Fall Lecture Series [slideshow*]... and noticed some affinity between Aristotle and Socrates, maybe more than between Socrates and his supposed devotee Plato... (continues)
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LHP 2
"...in order to feel social anxiety, you have to believe that other people’s negative opinions of you are worth getting upset about, that it’s really bad if they dislike you and really important to win their approval. Even people who suffer from severe social anxiety disorder (social phobia) tend to feel “normal” when speaking to children or to their close friends about trivial matters, with a few exceptions. Nevertheless, they feel highly anxious when talking to people they think are very important about subjects they think are very important. If your fundamental worldview, by contrast, assumes that your status in the eyes of others is of negligible importance, then it follows that you should be beyond the reach of social anxiety."
How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius by Donald J. Robertson
