A virtual farewell

 Just for fun I asked ChatGPT to draft a farewell message. It's pretty good (thanks, I'd say with all due humility, to the quality of the prompts I gave it):

As our season of CoPhilosophy comes to a close, I hope you’ll allow yourselves a brief pause before rushing headlong into whatever waits outside this room. Look back at the ground you’ve covered. You began with Warburton’s Little History of Philosophy, that brisk walk through centuries of ideas—proof that the great questions don’t belong to specialists alone but to anyone brave enough to face them squarely. Neiman’s Why Grow Up? pushed you to think about adulthood not as resignation but as responsibility, as a refusal to hand your mind over to easy consolations. And Kaag, in Sick Souls, Healthy Minds, brought William James down from the high shelf and into the grit of lived experience, reminding you that philosophy is at its best when it remembers the stakes: how one keeps going, how one holds on.

Then there was Weiner’s Socrates Express urging you to treat philosophy as a way of traveling through the world—curious, unhurried, willing to be changed by what you meet. Around all of this swirled the recommended texts: Setiya’s sober counsel for hard times; Richardson’s luminous portraits of thinkers clawing their way back from grief; Tyson’s cosmic lens widening your field of vision; Buxton & Whiting’s Philosopher Queens recovering voices too long ignored; Baggini’s How the World Thinks reminding you there is no single center to human wisdom; Andersen’s Fantasyland warning how easily a culture can slip into magical thinking when it forgets to check its own stories.

Each of these works nudged you toward the same essential truth: philosophy is not a museum of old answers but a practice of living questions. It’s a social undertaking, as James insisted—a philosophy of co. You think better in dialogue. You see further when someone else is looking with you. And you grow wiser when you let your convictions stay permeable, provisional, open to revision.

Einstein once said that the important thing is never to stop questioning. Benjamin Paul Blood—through James’s delightfully odd affection for him—reminded us that “nothing has concluded, that we may conclude.” Take that seriously. Let it unsettle you in the right way. Let it keep you from shutting the book too soon on yourself or anyone else.

For those who struggle with social anxiety, hear Eleanor Roosevelt one more time: you wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you understood how seldom they do. That’s not dismissal—it’s liberation. You have more room than you imagine. Use it well.

As you step away from this course, hold fast to the habits we practiced: ask more questions than you answer; listen more than you speak; resist the urge to seal the world into neat compartments; be skeptical, but never cynical; be hopeful, but never complacent. Wisdom grows in that tension.

And if this semester cracked the door open for you—even a little—I hope you’ll walk through it next Fall and join me for Existentialism. It’s another chance to wander these questions together, to sharpen your sense of what it means to be a self in a restless world.

For now, though: stay curious, stay courageous, stay open. Nothing has concluded. And that’s the best news you’ll hear today.

I'll just add: don't fear Artificial Intelligence, make it work for you as a tool and not a replacement. You still have the responsibility and the joy of thinking for--but not by--yourself. 

So go ahead and talk to AI, about your schoolwork or whatever, but be entirely transparent: clearly identify which statements are your own and which are AI's, and always corroborate its accurate information while calling out the hallucinations. Interact with it, don't passively absorb it.

I can't repeat Susan Neiman's message often enough: to be enlightened and grown up is to think for yourself, and to want to. Hannah Arendt was right: to be grown up is to love the world enough to take responsibility for it. It's what good parents do (and every responsible adult is a parent to the next generation, whether there are children under their roof or not).

So remember: no single stage of life is necessarily the best or worst. Be responsible, be happy, be good, enjoy your life, and share the joy.

Have a good break, and a good next semester. Maybe I'll see you next Fall in Existentialism.

Later. Au revoir.

jpo