Questions APR 8

1

• Something from Why Grow Up (WGU) thru p.165. #5 Nadia B.  #6 Jessica Law #7 Alex P
• John Kaag, Sick Souls Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life (SSHM), Prologue. #5 Hoang T. #6 Emmanuel J. #7 Jonathan D.
• Fantasyland (FL) 40 When the GOP Went Off the Rails
• William James (WJ), Is Life Worth Living? (1897) - in Be Not Afraid: in the Words of William James (BNA, on reserve) #5 Sophia E. #6 Aubree J. #7 Lorelei

3

• WGU -p.166-192. #5 Marshay Jones. #6 Kirsten H. #7 Autumn C,
• SSHM ch1 Determinism and Despair, & WJ, The Dilemma of Determinism (1897) - in BNA, on reserve #5 Ben S. #6 Patrick S. #7 Maddison C.
• Kieran Setiya, Life is Hard Intro-1 Infirmity (on reserve) #5 Larry L. #6 Josh S. #7 Aedan D.

8

WGU -thru p. 193-234 #5 Cameron W. #6 Joey F. #7 Nick L. 

SSHM ch2 Freedom and Life #5 Abby W. #6 Taniya B #7 Lindsey F. 

WJ, The Moral Equivalent of War (1903) - in BNA, on reserve #5 Ethan K. #6 Adam S. #7 Sidney S.

Setiya 2 Loneliness #5 Brady M

WGU

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?

SSHM

1. "Anhedonia" is what?

2. What was Renouvier's definition of free will?

3. Renouvier said an individual's will could break what?

4. What must one frequently do, according to James, to establish reciprocity in a relationship?

5. "Looking on the bright side," though often not objectively warranted, is nonetheless what?

6. Why did James think most of his contemporaries would not have preferred to "expunge" the Civil War?

7. Readiness for war is the essence of what, according to General Lea?

8. James says he devoutly believes in what, and in a future that has outlawed what?

9. Non-military conscription of our "gilded youth" would do what for them, according to James?

==

LH

1. What sort of childhood did Kieran Setiya have? Can you relate?
2. What was KS's response to the pandemic? What was yours?
3. What did Aristotle and Hume say about friendship?
4. What is the impact of social isolation on health?
5. What does KS say about Descartes, Hegel, Sartre, and Wittgenstein?
6. KS is unsure about which view of Aristotle's?
7. What "dual propensity" did Kant say belongs to human nature?
8. What is KS's picture of friendship?
9. What is the path to strong relationships?

Discussion Questions

• Is suffering the rule, not the exception, in the human condition? 43
• Can facing death provide an impetus to live? 46
• Why do you think so many who attempt and fail suicide say they experienced immediate regret for the attempt? 47
• What has believing in free will enabled you to do, that you couldn't or wouldn't have done otherwise? 
• Are you ever unsettled by a "psychological upturn"? 51
• Do you consider yourself fully "embodied"? 54
• Do you find anything about war "ideal, sacred, spiritual" etc.?
• Can sports function as a moral equivalent of war, at least to the extent of channeling our martial imupulses into benign forms of expression on playing fields, in harmless competition? Or do sports intensify and exacerbate the aggressive side of human nature?
• Are most politicians "pliant" like McKinley, easily "swept away" by war fever?
• Do we glorify war and millitarism excessively, in this culture? 
• "Patriotism no one thinks discreditable" (1284). True? Should we sharply distinguish patriotism from nationalism?
• What do you think of James's references to our "feminism" as a mark of weakness or lack of hardihood? 1285-6
• Instead of an army enlisted "against Nature," do you think we can muster an army in defense of nature and against anthropogenic environmental destruction?

==

FL

1. What gives Andersen "the heebie-jeebies"?

2.  What does Disneyfication denote?

3.  A third of people at theme parks are what?

4. Andersen thinks we've become more like what?

5. Andersen argues that Americans are not just exceptionally religious, but that what?

DQ

• Should we be worried or excited (both, neither?) about the future impact of "augmented reality" technologies? 395
• Does the prevalence of adults infatuated with the world of Disney indicate an increasingly infantilized public (in Susan Neiman's sense of the tern)?
• What do you think of Rhonda Byrne's Secret advice? 408

LISTEN (11.9.21). "The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party," begins James's "Moral Equivalent of War." This is no idle metaphysical dispute about squirrels and trees, it's ultimately about our collective decision as to what sort of species we intend to become. It's predicated on the very possibility of  deciding anything, of choosing and enacting one identity and way of being in the world over another. Can we be more pacifistic and mutually supportive, less belligerent and violent? Can we pull together and work cooperatively in some grand common cause that dwarfs our differences? Go to Mars and beyond with Elon, maybe? 

It's Carl Sagan's birthday today, he'd remind us that while Mars is a nice place to visit we wouldn't probably want to live there. Here, on this "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam," is where we must make our stand. Here, on the PBD. The only home we've ever known.

In light of our long human history of mutual- and self-destruction, the substitution for war of constructive and non-rapacious energies directed to the public good ought to be an easier sell. Those who love the Peace Corps and its cousin public service organizations are legion, and I'm always happy to welcome their representatives to my classroom. Did that just last year... (continues)

==

The Moral Equivalent of War

by William James

This essay, based on a speech delivered at Stanford University in 1906, is the origin of the idea of organized national service. The line of descent runs directly from this address to the depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps to the Peace Corps, VISTA, and AmeriCorps. Though some phrases grate upon modern ears, particularly the assumption that only males can perform such service, several racially-biased comments, and the notion that the main form of service should be viewed as a "warfare against nature," it still sounds a rallying cry for service in the interests of the individual and the nation.

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade. There is something highly paradoxical in the modern man's relation to war. Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now (were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing, in cold blood, to start another civil war now to gain another similar possession, and not one man or woman would vote for the proposition. In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible... (continues)

==

War

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 

Some reject the very idea of the “morality of war”.[1] Of those, some deny that morality applies at all once the guns strike up; for others, no plausible moral theory could license the exceptional horrors of war. The first group are sometimes called realists. The second group are pacifists. The task of just war theory is to seek a middle path between them: to justify at least some wars, but also to limit them (Ramsey 1961). Although realism undoubtedly has its adherents, few philosophers find it compelling.[2] The real challenge to just war theory comes from pacifism. And we should remember, from the outset, that this challenge is real. The justified war might well be a chimera.

However, this entry explores the middle path between realism and pacifism. It begins by outlining the central substantive divide in contemporary just war theory, before introducing the methodological schisms underpinning that debate. It then discusses the moral evaluation of wars as a whole, and of individual acts within war (traditionally, though somewhat misleadingly, called jus ad bellum and jus in bello respectively)... (continues)

==

==

...war poetry... Top 10 War Poems... Poems Against War... Teddy Roosevelt on "The Strenuous Life"...

  

Their own lives

 We had an interesting discussion of Enlightenment empiricist David Hume's skeptical view of miracles (and everything else) yesterday in #5. 

Four months before he died in 1776, Hume penned a remarkable autobiographical essay he called My Own Life:

IIT is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity; therefore, I shall be short. It may be thought an instance of vanity that I pretend at all to write my life; but this Narrative shall contain little more than the History of my Writings; as, indeed, almost all my life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations. The first success of most of my writings was not such as to be an object of vanity... (continues)

==

Hume's exit inspired neurologist Oliver Sacks to write in a similar vein, under the same title, shortly before his death in 2015:

A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. The radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye. But though ocular melanomas metastasize in perhaps 50 percent of cases, given the particulars of my own case, the likelihood was much smaller. I am among the unlucky ones.

I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”

“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.” (continues)

==

Hume's and Sacks's graceful and grateful exits cause some religious people great consternation, wondering how nonbelievers face the prospect of permanent annihilation in such good spirits. James Boswell, for instance, came away from his last encounter with Hume in a state of puzzlement that "disturbed [him] for some time." What he failed to grasp was the gratitude that so many nonreligious people feel for the exquisite "privilege  and adventure" of having got to live at all.

Sacks concluded: 

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

 

Mea culpa

Sorry for briefly losing my equanimity this morning, section #5. The combination of Ronald Reagan's reprehensible endorsement of a bigoted theocrat's statement about his daughters being better dead than non-believers,  AND a student's statement that he'd vote for Trump again, even as our democracy crumbles before our eyes, was too much. But I value stoic composure as a pedagogic ideal. I'll do better. jpo

Bonkers

"… "Never before has an hour of Presidential rhetoric cost so many people so much," former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers posted. "The best estimate of the loss from tariff policy is now [close] to $30 trillion or $300,000 per family of four." 

"The Trump Tariff Tax is the largest peacetime tax hike in U.S. history," posted former vice president Mike Pence.

Trump claims he is imposing "reciprocal tariffs" and says they are about half of what other countries levy on U.S. goods. In fact, the numbers he is using for his claim that other countries are imposing high tariffs on U.S. goods are bonkers. Economist Paul Krugman points out that the European Union places tariffs of less than 3% on average on U.S. goods, while Trump maintained its tariffs are 39%..."

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/april-2-2025-wednesday?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Lyceum Apr 11

 APPLIED PHILOSOPHY LYCEUM

Hosted by the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies

CULTURAL RACISM

 

Linda Alcoff, Ph.D.

Professor of Philosophy 

Hunter College and the Graduate Center,  

City University of New York 

Friday, April 11, 2025 • 5 p.m.  

College of Education, Room 164 

Linda Alcoff will define what cultural racism is and argue that it is central to understanding racism today, though it has receded into the background. Biological claims about race that justified racial rankings have long been disproved, and such approaches also lost influence after World War II because of their association with Nazism. But racism simply shifted to the terrain of culture, in which cultures are taken to be just as unchanging as biological races once were. Culture is used to explain differences in economic development, to justify disparities in global power, and to limit migration.

The principal antidote to cultural racism is a more accurate understanding of cultures as hybrid and inherently dynamic. As a corrective, Alcoff develops the concept of “transculturation” from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. This helps us to foreground the colonial context of cultural ranking systems and offset the tendencies toward reification and determinism.

While transculturation often emerged from colonial practices including enslavement, the fact remains that mythic narratives of Western self-creation are simply false. A more accurate understanding of the formation of cultures will disabuse us of ranking and demand a re-understanding of the formation of racial groups as well.

This event is free and open to the public.

A reception will follow.

Peter Singer & his AI chatbot

…Today, while we have made significant strides in recognising gender equality, we also see growing recognition of animal rights, such as laws against cruelty and exploitation. What was once dismissed as laughable—the idea that animals deserve moral consideration—is now widely accepted.

This brought our conversation to a contemporary question: with the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, could similar arguments apply to AI? I asked Prof. Singer: based on this logic, shouldn't moral consideration also be extended to AI if it exhibits sentience? Prof.'s response was thought-provoking. He explained that if AI were to develop genuine consciousness—not merely imitating it—it would indeed warrant moral consideration and rights. He emphasised that sentience, or the capacity to experience suffering and pleasure, is the key factor. If AI systems eventually demonstrate true sentience, we would have a moral obligation to treat them accordingly, just as we do with sentient animals.

This possibility raises profound questions about the future of ethics. How would we recognise true consciousness in AI? What responsibilities would we have toward such entities? And how might our understanding of moral consideration evolve further? The boundaries of ethical reasoning are never fixed—they expand as we deepen our understanding of the world and the beings within it.

Later, after our breakfast and during the car ride back (thanks to Bro. Jono!), I thought of putting AI to the test. Because I just learnt from Prof. about an AI chatbot modelled after him (freely accessible online) at

https://www.petersinger.ai

I decided to ask the chatbot the same question posed to Prof. ("What is wisdom?"), compare its response with his actual reply, and share it with him on the spot!
(Continues)

==

And I asked Scarlett about Peter Singer's chatbot, and other things...

The Benefits of Plant-Based Nutrition

"Though protein is typically associated with animal foods in the U.S., predominantly plant-based and entirely plant-based diets easily meet or exceed recommended protein intake…"

American College of Lifestyle Medicine

https://lifestylemedicine.org/articles/benefits-plant-based-nutrition/

Questions FEB 3

• 1

  • Something from Why Grow Up (WGU) thru p.165. #5 Nadia B.  #6 Jessica Law #7 Alex P
  • John Kaag, Sick Souls Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life (SSHM), Prologue. #5 Hoang T. #6 Emmanuel J. #7 Jonathan D.
  • Fantasyland (FL) 40 When the GOP Went Off the Rails
  • William James (WJ), Is Life Worth Living? (1897) - in Be Not Afraid: in the Words of William James (BNA, on reserve) #5 Sophia E. #6 Aubree J. #7 Lorelei

  
  

  3

  • WGU -p.166-192. #5 Marshay Jones. #6 Kirsten H. #7 Autumn C,
  • SSHM ch1 Determinism and Despair, & WJ, The Dilemma of Determinism (1897) - in BNA, on reserve #5 Ben S. #6 Patrick S. #7 Maddison C.
  • Kieran Setiya, Life is Hard Intro-1 Infirmity (on reserve) #5 Larry L. #6 Josh S. #7 Aedan D.

 

WGU -192

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?

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?

SSHM ch1

1. Calvinism set out, for Henry James Sr., what impossible task?

2. Kaag thinks the Civil War gave WJ his first intimation that what?

3. WJ's entire life had been premised on what expectation?

4. What did WJ say (in 1906, to H.G. Wells) about "SUCCESS"?

5. What Stoic hope did young WJ share with his friend Tom Ward?

6. What thought seeded "the dilemma of determinism" for WJ?

7. As WJ explicated determinism in 1884, the future has no what?

8. WJ found what in Huxley's evolutionary materialism alarming?

9. Determinism has antipathy to the idea of what?

10. To the "sick soul," what seems blind and shallow?

==

Setiya Intro, ch1

1. What reminder does Kieran Setiya say he needed when he was younger? What kind of philosophy did his teachers say he needed? (pref) What has he experienced since age 27?

2. What is moral philosophy about?

3. Does Setiya think "everything happens for a reason"? What were Job's friends wrong about?

4. What did Nietzsche say about happiness and the English?

5. Who is Susan Gubar?

6. To whom should disability matter?

7. What's the difference between disease and illness?

8. What does Setiya think Aristotle gets wrong?

9. Who are Setiya's heroes? 

10. What does Setiya say about Marx's vision of communist society?

11. What was Harriet Johnson's reply to Peter Singer?

12. What did Setiya appreciate about his fifth urologist?

13. What, contrary to Descartes, does pain teach us about our bodies?

FL 41-42
1. What became of the 1998 study that promoted the false belief that vaccines cause autism?

2. How many people refusing vaccines can lead to the collapse of herd immunity?

3. What do experts say about most mass killers?

4. Who wrote a "demented" letter on behalf of gun rights in 1995?