CoPhi

Sunday, October 11, 2020

Simon Pergande Midterm Essay

Midterm Essay, Simon Pergande, 10/11/20

Sitting at a round marble table coated with linear patterns of black and white squares I sat waiting amidst the loneliness of an abandoned yet magnificent park ground. I turn to see remnants of old swings, benches, and playgrounds stood still, overtaken by natures branches and vines that wrapped around any structure to be found. When I turn back towards the table, Nigel Warburton approaches the table, adjusting his glasses as well as the sleeves of his casual black suit as he crosses his hands with a business tone. Kurt Anderson, with a similar appearance of a black suit adorned with the addition of a striped mahogany tie rapidly approaches the table and joins the table with a quick and hasty manner seeming determined to hop into conversation with quick wit. Finally, Julian Baggini, with a calm and collected self-essence as expressed through his brown jacket and grey button-up breaking the ice with, “Good evening gentlemen”. Everyone acknowledges with a nod. I start off the meeting with a set of two questions for the determined men to reason upon:

(1). "Do you think philosophy can help people learn to respect truth, facts, reality, and one another, and to reject falsehood, superstition, selfishness, polarization, partisanship, and mutual hostility based on differences of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, belief, etc.? If so, how? If not, why not?

(2). “How would you answer William James's "really vital question for us all: What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?"

Kurt Andersen, author of Fantasyland, springs in to answer the question: Philosophy can certainly pull Americans out of the “long temporary detour”; “If we’re on a bender, suffering the effects of guzzling too much fantasy cocktail for too long, if that’s why we’re stumbling, manic and hysterical, mightn’t we somehow sober up and recover?” (FL 11). It can help for sure but with the way that Americans have become ingrained with the idea of post-fact thinking, the challenge is real. Reality is questionable, facts are altered, truth is malleable, selfishness leads to mutual hostility as we have seen progress in America for too long. If we are willing to change for the better, we must turn away from the rising peak of Fantasyland and hope that our nation regains balance and composure (FL 440). To answer William James’s question, we can only hope that life makes itself into a truthful coexistence of humans across all races, sexes, religions, ethnicities, nationalities, and beliefs. If this can happen…the world will truly become less partisan, less polarized, and more balanced.

Julian Baggini, with charm and composure proceeds to answer the question: Philosophy, as old as human civilizations, is the foundation of cultures across the globe. Our philosophies with regards to the world, whether recognized or not, play a significant role in our lives. To respect one another, and to minimize mutual hostility, we must get to know each other. “Getting to know others required avoiding the twin dangers of overestimating either how much we have in common or how much divides us. Our shared humanity and the perennial problems of life mean that we can always learn from and identify with the thoughts and practices of others, no matter how alien they might at first appear.” (HWT 19). What is the world going to be and what will life make of itself? Well, it is hard to say but it is possible to say that world, through more complex interactions that continue evolving, will come to understand others better over time and we may see more positive interactions to come.

Nigel Warburton, author of A Little History of Philosophy, positively chimes in: Philosophy is an amazing basis for the discussions of truth and reality and will bring humans closer together for a discussion as the such that is had at this very marble table. The way that Socrates engaged in conversation with all those who would speak with him, to the way Aristotle wondered about eudaimonia is how we can come closer together. From A Little History of Philosophy, the conclusion statement reads: “Philosophy began with awkward questions and difficult challenges; with gadfly philosophers like Peter Singer around, there is a good chance that the spirit of Socrates will continue to shape its future.” (LH 245). Hopefully the world will be a table of discussion, consisting of multiple people representing a broad range of perspectives, speaking to one another with a fashion that will make the world a place we will all be happy to live in.

And so, the 3 philosophers and I sat at the table chatting away as we enjoyed the peace and serenity of the world around us. A world crawling with life, memory, joy, and humanity.

Nigel Warburton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxssJsm_2so

Kurt Andersen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_lozqi8u4E&t=171s

Julian Baggini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJTpmYsWQSo

Saturday, October 10, 2020

Questions Oct 12-15

Remember: in addition to your regular weekly essay and comments, your midterm blogposts are also due this week.

Oct 12/13
LH

What do you think of James's squirrel story? Do you agree with his point? 165
Have you ever resolved an argument by getting everyone to clarify what they actually meant?
Do you think Peirce's definition of truth is a good one? 166 If not, how would you define it?
Was Bertrand Russell right about James's theory of truth? 168
If true ideas "work," do they need to work for everyone? What if they only work for one person? Is "true for me" an oxymoron or a contradiction in terms?
Was Richard Rorty right about how to think about the relation between words and the world? 169
What did Nietzsche mean by "God is dead"?
Was Nietzsche right about "Christian values"? 173
Is the idea of an "Ubermensch" compatible with democracy, in light of what Nigel finds "a bit worrying"? 174
Do we have to choose between the ideas of Nietzsche and Kant? 175
Is Freud's "unconscious" real? Did he in fact "discover" it, or invent the idea of it? Is it a useful concept? 177
Is psychoanalysis the only or the best "talking cure"? 178
Was Freud unhealthily obsessed with sex and sexual imagery? 179
Was Freud right about why (some) people believe in God? 180
Was Karl Popper's criticism of Freudian psychoanalysis good? 181

What do you think of "the takeaway"? 190
Would you have voted to give Charles Tart tenure? 195
Are "ecstatic spiritualism" and "fundamentalist evangelical holy-rolling Christianity" drug-substitutes? 199
Is the time ripe for another conspiratorial/apocalyptic bestseller like The Late, Great Planet Earth? 206
Is there currently a religious leader with the "moderate" reputation of the late Billy Graham, deserved or not?207

HWT

Do we need heroes? Saviors? 268 Who are yours?
In The Second Mountain, the sequel to The Road to Character (269), David Brooks says when he wrote The Road to Character "I was still enclosed in the prison of individualism... I no longer believe that character formation is mostly an individual task... I now think good character is a by-product of giving yourself away." Do you think MLK Jr., Gandhi, Mandela, and other heroic icons, did that? What does it mean to build your character by "giving yourself away"?
Must a "gentleman" be "a member of the ruling upper classes"?
Is it better toi be a gentleman (gentleperson) or an exemplary person?
Must you choose between persons and "positions"? 270
Should prominent scholars be active public figures, and vice versa? 271
Why do so many American politicians try so hard not to appear to be "intellectuals" but rather "populists"?
Corrupt politicians are tolerated in China if they get things done. 272 Is that now true in America as well?
Are Nordic nations now the most admired societies today? 274
Is there anything more important than being honorable? 278
Are riches and honor currently shameful in America, or should they be?
What does "liberation" mean to you? How does it relate to "pleasure in this life"? 283
What does it mean to be "free from your body while still alive"? 284
Can you be "indifferent to wealth" without rejecting it? 287
Should you be "a friend of the world"? 288

Robert Richardson's terrific James biography... Richardson speaking at the 2010 Chocorua James conference (YouTube)... Peirce's pragmatic maxim (in Richardson)... The pragmatic attitude (in Menand's Metaphysical Club... James on The Sentiment of Rationality and The Dilemma of Determinism...John Kaag, Hiking With Nietzsche (Longreads book excerpt)... Falling Out With Superman (nyt-on Nietzsche)... a skeptical critique of Freud... Story Corps at Thanksgiving... Should frats be scrapped?

Falling Out With Superman

stumbled upon Friedrich Nietzsche when I was 17, following the usual trail of existential candies -- Camus, Sartre, Beckett -- that unsuspecting teenagers find in the woods. The effect was more like a drug than a philosophy. I was whirled upward -- or was it downward? -- into a one-man universe, a secret cult demanding that you put a gun to the head of your dearest habits and beliefs. That intoxicating whiff of half-conscious madness; that casually hair-raising evisceration of everything moral, responsible and parentally approved -- these waves overwhelmed my adolescent dinghy. And even more than by his ideas -- many of which I didn't understand at all, but some of which I perhaps grasped better then than I do now -- I was seduced by his prose. At the end of his sentences you could hear an electric crack, like the whip of a steel blade being tested in the air. He might have been the Devil, but he had better lines than God.

I was sold. Like those German soldiers in World War I who were found dead with copies of ''Thus Spake Zarathustra'' in their pockets, I hauled my tattered purple-covered copy of the Viking Portable Nietzsche with me everywhere. It was with me when I dropped out of college after a semester to go work in a shipyard, with me years later when, sitting on a knoll on a tiny island off Vancouver, I decided to wake up from my dream of total escape and go back to school. I read him to elevate myself, to punish myself, to remind myself of the promises I had broken. He was the closest thing I had to a church.

Eventually, I stopped going to church. There were various reasons for this, some of them good and some of them not; I couldn't sort out which was which then, and can't now. Maybe it was just satiation. The philosopher John Searle once told me that reading Nietzsche was like drinking cognac -- a sip was good, but you didn't want to drink the whole bottle. I'd been pounding Nietzsche by the case.

So I left Nietzsche alone on his mountaintop. But as every lapsed believer knows, you never wholly escape the church. Nietzsche had come to stand for something absolute and pure, like gilded Byzantium or Ahab's whale; he represented what I imagined I might have been. He had become a permanent horizon.

Oddly, during this long, strange love affair, I avoided learning much about Nietzsche's life. Maybe this was because I had turned him into a shrine -- after all, totems have no history. I knew only the superficials: that he was a desperately lonely man, poor and largely unread, plagued by bad health, who went mad at the age of 44.

Then, last summer, I planned a trip to Switzerland. As a highlight, I decided to visit Sils-Maria -- the small village near St. Moritz where Nietzsche spent seven summers and wrote many of his masterpieces. The tourist soon won out over the iconoclast: now that I was going to stand where the Master stood, I couldn't pretend I didn't care about how he lived, what people he liked, what he wore. So I immersed myself in various biographical accounts: ''Nietzsche in Turin,'' Lesley Chamberlain's psychologically penetrating book about the philosopher's final year; Ronald Hayman's challenging ''Nietzsche: A Critical Life''; and a book that only a Nietzsche cultist would consume, ''The Good European: Nietzsche's Work Sites in Word and Image.''

It wasn't the grand narrative of his life but the details that stayed with me. The joke photograph in which he and his friend Paul Ree posed in a cart over which Lou Salome, the 21-year-old woman with whom he was timidly, desperately in love, held a whip. Nietzsche in the Caligari-shadowed last days of his sanity, once again turning himself into a character in an unhappy novel, lamenting that a journey was ''perhaps the most unfortunate I have made'' simply because he had climbed aboard the wrong train. The fact that he liked ''Tom Sawyer.'' The solicitude of an old female friend who tried to buck him up but was unable to teach him not to let everything wound him. The visitor who simply reported how much he liked Herr Nietzsche, the lonely, earnest professor with the bad eyes.

This wasn't the Nietzsche I remembered. The philosopher I had worshiped was an uncanny hybrid, simultaneously a terrifying Old Testament prophet and a 19th-century free spirit. To be sure, much of Nietzsche -- maybe the best of him -- was as lucid, critical and quick-footed as Stendhal. Yet it was the monstrous doctrines at the heart of his thought -- the Overman, the Eternal Recurrence -- that had drawn me; they hypnotized me because I couldn't figure out whether they were coming from man or some frightening gospel. Now that I understood how much of Nietzsche's work was an attempt to turn his personal torment into something lasting, I realized that perhaps those enigmatic pronouncements were best seen not as antitruths handed down from on high, but as words he whispered to himself, beacons he lighted in the darkness to cheer himself up. What was great in Nietzsche was not, I began to see, his holiness, maybe not even his wisdom. It was his courage.

Then I went to Sils.

Sils-Maria is a bland one-horse resort village under spectacular mountains between two crystalline lakes. Terminally respectable Swiss burghers polish their vacation homes; tourists (''They climb mountains like animals, stupid and sweating,'' Nietzsche wrote) fill the hotels. The Nietzsche-Haus stands near the center. In his day it was a tea and spice shop whose owner rented an upstairs room to Nietzsche; now it is a museum. In front of the tidy white-and-green building stands a sculpture of a large black eagle -- one of the companions that consoled Zarathustra in his last loneliness. On a gray afternoon I pulled open the door and climbed the stairs to his room.

No one was there. I looked in. A small, low-ceilinged room, walls of knotty pine. A lumpy-looking bed. A small table with a green silk cover. A washbasin. A single window, looking out onto a patch of the forest.

We go to literary shrines to touch things. We run our fingers along the writing table, we furtively step over the red velvet rope and finger the water jug by the edge of the bed. Yet to feel the pedestal is to call the very idea of the pedestal into question. Which is why there is something comic in all pilgrimages: while Don Quixote holds loftily forth, Sancho Panza steals the ashtray.

But as I ran my fingertips along the knotty pine, it all rose up: the indelible words that had been created here; the misery of the man who had shivered out his life in this room; and all the years I had spent charting my course by a dream. Standing outside in the hallway, I was surprised to find myself beginning to weep, like the most breast-heaving pilgrim.

A familiar voice, very old and once sacred to me, protested. I could not pity Nietzsche. It was a betrayal of everything he had believed. He had railed against pity. Compassion was for the hearth-huddlers, the followers, those who lacked the strength to turn themselves into ''dancing stars.'' The last temptation of the higher man, Nietzsche had taught, was pity; on its far side was a roaring, Dionysian, inhuman laughter.

I could recite this chapter and verse, but I had never been able to live it. It was the most alien and terrifying of Nietzsche's teachings. Still, long reverence pulled me up short. Here, of all places, I must feel no pity.

But my heart won the war. Maybe it was resignation -- the final acceptance that I was not going to forge myself into a new shape. Maybe it was weariness with a doctrine, with all doctrines, that sounded delirious but that couldn't be used. Whatever it was, I stopped fighting. Yes, part of Nietzsche would always stand far above the tree line, and I would treasure that iciness. But I had to walk on the paths where I could go.

Still confused, I stood in the doorway. And then, as a gift, the following words came into my head, words spoken by Zarathustra to his disciples, disciples that Nietzsche himself never had. ''You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you. You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? . . . Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.''

I took a last look at the room. Then I walked out the door.

NYT... Gary Kamiya is executive editor of the online magazine Salon.com.

Hiking With Nietzsche

by John Kaag (excerpt)

I often tell my students that philosophy saved my life. And it’s true. But on that first trip to Sils-Maria—on my way to Piz Corvatsch—it nearly killed me. It was 1999, and I was in the process of writing a thesis about genius, insanity, and aesthetic experience in the writings of Nietzsche and his American contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson. On the sheltered brink of my twenties, I’d rarely ventured beyond the invisible walls of central Pennsylvania, so my adviser pulled some administrative strings and found a way for me to escape. At the end of my junior year he handed me an unmarked envelope—inside was a check for three thousand dollars. “You should go to Basel,” he suggested, probably knowing full well that I wouldn’t stay there.

Basel was a turning point, a pivot between Nietzsche’s early conventional life as a scholar and his increasingly erratic existence as Europe’s philosopher-poet. He had come to the city in 1869 as the youngest tenured faculty member at the University of Basel. In the ensuing years he would write his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in which he argued that the allure of tragedy was its ability to harmonize the two competing urges of being human: the desire for order and the strange but undeniable longing for chaos. When I arrived in Basel, still a teenager, I couldn’t help thinking that the first of these drives—an obsessive craving for stability and reason that Nietzsche termed “the Apollonian”—had gotten the better of modern society.

The train station in Basel is a model of Swiss precision—beautiful people in beautiful clothes glide through a grand atrium to meet trains that never fail to run on time. Across the street stands a massive cylindrical skyscraper, home to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the most powerful financial institution in the world. I exited the station and ate my breakfast outside the bank as a throng of well-suited Apollos vanished inside on their way to work. “The educated classes,” Nietzsche explained, “are being swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy.” The prospects for life in modern capitalist society were lucrative but nonetheless bleak: “The world has never been so worldly, never poorer in love and goodness.” (continues)

Old post-

Peirce & James, LISTEN: Robert Talisse on Pragmatism (PB)... Podcast... Also see "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" and "Sentiment of Rationality/Dilemma of Determinism"

The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise.

Oct 14/15

NO ZOOM MEETING TODAY, focus on your midterm blog post and weekly essay/comments

#WorldMentalHealthDay

It's #WorldMentalHealthDay. To raise awareness of mental health issues around the world and mobilize efforts in support of mental health, we turn to the words of William James. https://t.co/mgIMrB4dIR
(https://twitter.com/PrincetonUPress/status/1314887997234569217?s=02)

Schopenhauer

C. S. Peirce Retweeted

Five Books

@five_books

22h

"I don't think there's much optimism in Schopenhauer. He’s a pessimist through and through" @dbatherwoods
 of @philoswarwick
 recommends books to learn more about the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer:

Five Books: The best books on Arthur Schopenhauer, recommended by David Bather Woods

The best books on Schopenhauer, the pessmistic German philosopher who influeneced both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, recommended by David Bather Woods

fivebooks.com

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Our presumption

Resentment vs. Happiness "...In an inevitably plural society, one of the things a person growing up needs to acquire is skin thickness. So I don't think encouraging people to resent everything they think is a moral mistake made by everybody else is a good way to prepare yourself for a happy life... At the beginning of most of my classes, I tell students that if someone says something that upsets you, assume they didn't mean to. Let's start with that. Evidence can mount up that that's not what's going on. But that should be our presumption in a college classroom..." Kwame Anthony Appiah on Identity in an Age of Essentialism (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2025)

On 3-day reserve in the Walker Library, at the circulation desk

Be Not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James-companion anthology to Sick Souls Healthy Minds by John Kaag - because William James can save your life, or at least ameliorate it.
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 the World Thinks (HWT) by Julian Baggini - because Western philosophy is not the whole story.
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.
How to Think Like Socrates, by Donald J. Robertson - because he was, as the Monty Python song says, "a lovely little thinker..."
Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help by Kieran Setiya - because we'll all eventually be challenged by something hard.
More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker - "Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs. In More Everything Forever, science journalist Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass."
Night Vision: seeing ourselves through dark moods, by Mariana Allesandri - because all is not sunshine and light.
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.
Starry Messenger: cosmic perspectives on civilization, by Neil deGrasse Tyson - because we are cosmopolitans, citizens of the cosmos.
The Philosopher Queens: the lives and legacies of philosophy's unsung women, by Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting - because women have always philosophized too.
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.
William James by Philip Davis - "This book is about William James's life-writing, writing for the sake of existence, that puts together a mix of literature, psychology, philosophy, and biography in the search for purpose and human flourishing, in place of formal religion. It includes James' interest in his brother's novels and in Shakespearean drama, as well as Thomas Hardy's pessimistic challenge to James. Davis is a reader of literature who feels that readers of novels and poems also need the help of psychology and philosophy, to get the thinking out, to make it into a working part of a life. His book is for readers, especially readers of literature, seeking to create, like William James, a literary way of thinking outside the realm of literature."

Also recommended for report topics (but not currently on library reserve)

Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist, by David Bather Woods
How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind, by Regan Petaluna
John Lachs's Practical Philosophy, ed. by Skowronski - about my Vanderbilt mentor (& including an essay by me)
Kant: A Revolution in Thinking, by Marcus Willaschek
Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation, by Brenda Wineapple. About the Scopes Trial in Dayton TN, 1925.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes, by Anthony Gottlieb
Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth, by Jennifer Banks, Jen Jayden, et al
On Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurt
On Truth, by Harry Frankfurt
On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder
Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, by Agnes Callard (our Spring '25 Lyceum guest)
Science and Human Affairs from the Viewpoint of Biology, by Winterton C. Curtis (my first landlord)
Stoic Pragmatism, by John Lachs
The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy
The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance
The Fragility of Goodness, by Martha Nussbaum
The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt
The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir
The Varieties of Experience: William James After the Linguistic Turn, by Alexis Dianda (our Spring '26 Lyceum guest). About the philosophical importance of experience, even when philosophers cannot put it into words.
Thinking in Transit: Explorations of Life in Motion, by Ed Casey and Megan Craig. About the value of philosophy that literally moves, co-authored by our Fall '25 Lyceum guest Megan Craig
Walking: A History, by Rebecca Solnit
Why Plato Matters Now, by Angie Hobbs
William James, M.D., by Emma Sutton
William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert Richardson
Writings of William James (WJ) -- James's work is in the public domain, & free on the Internet... but if you'd prefer a handsome keepers' edition in book format I recommend the Library of America's two volumes.

eTexts at the library

…Based on our search, the following eBooks are available to your students: A little history of philosophy- https://ezproxy.mtsu.edu/login?url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctt5vkvxd ... Sick souls, healthy minds : how William James can save your life-https://ezproxy.mtsu.edu/login?url=https://muse.jhu.edu/book/73048 … To see more about the library's effort to support students and faculty in offering affordable course materials, please check out our web page and newaffordable course materials search. And if you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me.- Suzanne Mangrum, MLS Acquisitions Librarian James E. Walker Library

The Philosophy of Well-Being

MALA 6010 Spring 2026-The Connection Between Liberal Arts and Well-Being... Block 3 (Feb 26 & Mar 5)-Phil Oliver, The Philosophy of Well-Being: Philosophers since antiquity have concerned themselves with the pursuit of happiness and human flourishing, which (along with physical and mental health) substantially comprise "well-being" as most of us conceive it. William James said "If we were to ask the question: What is human life's chief concern? one of the answers we should receive would be: It is happiness. How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most people at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure." And he once advised an ailing friend: "Keep your health, your splendid health. It is better than all the truths under the firmament." In this block we'll discuss what philosophers like James have said about well-being as our chief concern. https://cophilosophy2.blogspot.com/2026/01/mala-6010-spring-2026.html

JPO bio

The author of "William James's Springs of Delight: The Return to Life, (VU Press, 2001) " Phil Oliver specializes in the American philosophical tradition with supporting interests in applied ethics (particularly Bioethics and Environmental Ethics), Anglo-American literature, history, humanism, naturalism, science and exploration, peripatetic ("walking & talking") philosophy, baseball, cycling, swimming, the pursuit of happiness, and the perpetual dawn of day. One of his favorite MTSU courses is The Philosophy of Happiness. He is academic advisor for minors in American Culture (American Studies), and a founding board member and current President of the William James Society (wjsociety.org). You can follow him on Bluesky (@osopher.bsky.social), Substack (philoliver.substack.com) and on his blogsite Up@dawn (jposopher.blogspot.com) but of course, as Immanuel Kant and Monty Python's Brian Cohen agreed: You don't have to follow anybody. "Sapere aude," have the courage to think for yourself. But not BY yourself. Good philosophy collaborates and converses.

Cosmic philosophy

"…Let's consider our "cosmic address." It starts small—your house, your city, your country. But zoom out: you're on Earth, orbiting a modest star, tucked into a spiral arm of the Milky Way, itself just one galaxy among billions in a universe that's still expanding. This perspective isn't meant to make us feel insignificant. Instead, it offers context and a sense of unity. Every atom in your body was forged in the core of ancient stars. Our planet—our home—is both fragile and extraordinary. It's the only place we know of, so far, where the universe has become conscious of itself..." Neil deGrasse Tyson

The View from Above

"You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."—Edgar D. Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, quoted in "Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization" by Neil deGrasse Tyson https://a.co/by8i9Dw

Philosophy tutor & Writing Center

FALL '25. Tutoring for philosophy this semester will be provided by Caleb Chapman (cs5i@mtmail.mtsu.edu), in the library. MWF 11:30. ... WRITING CENTER: The Margaret H. Ordoubadian University Writing Center is located in LIB 362 and online at www.mtsu.edu/writing-center. Here, students can receive valuable (and FREE!) one-to-one assistance in person or online on writing projects for any course. Please make your appointment by stopping by LIB 362, calling 615-904-8237, or visiting the UWC website. Visit early and often! https://www.mtsu.edu/writing-center/

'To learn to philosophise is to learn to die’

What is the balance between suffering and enjoyment in human existence? From the Buddha to Schopenhauer the answer is that the former far outweighs the latter. Reflection and experience together suggest that they have a point. Relationships can bring both suffering and its alleviations, but most relationships must anyway end in suffering – for in any pair of humans, one is likely to die first, or fall out of love and leave – and indeed, with the frailties of age and the decay brought by disease, with the loss of things valued (loved ones and old friends who pass away, capacities such as walking in the country one can no longer do) the typical human life ends in privations that, unless accepted with grace, courage and wisdom, are forms of suffering. To acquire the courage and wisdom needed to face them is to do philosophy, which is why the ancients said, ‘To learn to philosophise is to learn to die’. -A.C. Grayling

Gymnasiums of the Mind

"Followers of the Greek Aristotle were known as peripatetics because they passed their days strolling and mind-wrestling through the groves of the Academe. The Romans’ equally high opinion of walking was summed up pithily in the Latin proverb: “It is solved by walking.” Nearly every philosopher-poet worth his salt has voiced similar sentiments. Erasmus recommended a little walk before supper and “after supper do the same.” Thomas Hobbes had an inkwell built into his walking stick to more easily jot down his brainstorms during his rambles. Jean- Jacques Rousseau claimed he could only meditate when walking: “When I stop, I cease to think,” he said. “My mind only works with my legs.” Søren Kierkegaard believed he’d walked himself into his best thoughts. In his brief life Henry David Thoreau walked an estimated 250,000 miles, or ten times the circumference of earth. “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,” wrote Thoreau, “unless I spend four hours a day at least – and it is commonly more than that – sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from worldly engagements.” Thoreau’s landlord and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson characterized walking as “gymnastics for the mind...” Christopher Orlet, Philosophy Now https://philosophynow.org/issues/44/The_Gymnasiums_of_the_Mind

Admirable profession

"...Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable that we know so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live..."

"I went to the woods because...

I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion... "

"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there...

Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now... I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours..."

Where he lived, and what he lived for

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business."

Vote!

"The 2024 election is going to be decided by people under 30, who have the most at stake, and they need to register to vote in order to make a difference. That’s the answer, simple democracy." -GK... Please visit TennVoterLookup if you would like to check your Tennessee registration status or check RockTheVote.org. TN residents can update or change their information on the TN Government's website. If you're currently registered in another county it may be easier for you to vote here. Register in Rutherford County: https://www.mtsu.edu/amerdem/register-to-vote.php

Thinking is a social activity

"We do not (on Justice Holmes's reasoning) permit the free expression of ideas because some individual may have the right one. No individual alone can have the right one. We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need. Thinking is a social activity. I tolerate your thought because it is part of my thought—even when my thought defines itself in opposition to yours." — The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand https://a.co/8qI6C9a

A proper education

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.” ― Wendell Berry

The college project

“The American college may be considered a continuation, at the human level, of the self-education process of the earth itself: universe education, earth education, and human education are stages of development in a single unbroken process...The entire college project can be seen as that of enabling the student to understand the immense story of the universe and the role of the student in creating the next phase of the story.” --Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth

Planting seeds

One thing is certain: if our educational system does not honestly and explicitly promote the central tenet of science—that nothing is sacred—then we encourage myth and prejudice to endure. We need to equip our children with tools to avoid the mistakes of the past while constructing a better, and more sustainable, world for themselves and future generations. We won’t do that by dodging inevitable and important questions about facts and faith. Instead of punting on those questions, we owe it to the next generation to plant the seeds of doubt." Lawrence M. Krauss, "Teaching Doubt"-The New Yorker

Enlightened thoughts

“Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world.”

“A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you’re committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.”

“Freedom cannot simply mean doing whatever strikes you at the moment: that way you're a slave to any whim or passing fancy. Real freedom involves control over your life as a whole, learning to make plans and promises and decisions, to take responsibility for your actions' consequences.”

“Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way that it should be, while never losing sight of the way that it is, is what being a grown-up comes to.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

The thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment saw an urgent need for a secular foundation for morality, because they were haunted by a historical memory of centuries of religious carnage: the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, the European wars of religion. They laid that foundation in what we now call humanism, which privileges the well-being of individual men, women, and children over the glory of the tribe, race, nation, or religion. It is individuals, not groups, who are sentient—who feel pleasure and pain, fulfillment and anguish. Whether it is framed as the goal of providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number or as a categorical imperative to treat people as ends rather than means, it was the universal capacity of a person to suffer and flourish, they said, that called on our moral concern.”

“The Enlightenment thus translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’—thereby heralding a new praxis of personal and social adjustment.”

“The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers.”― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“We must cultivate our garden.”

“Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.” Voltaire

“Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company and reflection must finish him.”

“To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.” ― John Locke

“One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.”

“I pretend not to teach, but to inquire; and therefore cannot but confess here again,–that external and internal sensation are the only passages I can find of knowledge to the understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this DARK ROOM. For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without: which, would they but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man, in reference to all objects of sight, and the ideas of them.”

― John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.”

“Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

“It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

Religion. Your reason is now mature enough to examine this object. In the first place, divest yourself of all bias in favor of novelty & singularity of opinion... shake off all the fears & servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear... ...Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you... In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it... [Jefferson, Letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, advising him in matters of religion, 1787]”

“The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.”― Albert Einstein

“There is strong shadow where there is much light.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen

“How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?”
― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

“Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life.”
― William Blake

“To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

“We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clicks into place. One immediately sees how many previously puzzling facts are neatly explained by the new hypothesis. One could kick oneself for not having the idea earlier, it now seems so obvious. Yet before, everything was in a fog.”
― Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit

“I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
==

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American life is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

“We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

“If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

==
On the other hand, eastern enlightenment...

“Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen.”
― Bodhidharma, The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma

How to add links, embed videos etc.

Videos: in Blogger, after clicking on "New Post"-- 1. Copy the URL of the video you want to share. 2. Click on "More options" on the far right of the toolbar above, then Insert Video icon (3d from left) 3. Select YouTube 5. Select Search 6. Paste the URL & Select it == To insert links: 1. Highlight a word or phrase in your text 2. Click on the link icon 3. Paste the URL address of the site or passage you want to link to == To insert graphics, either just copy-&-paste... OR, click on the "insert image" icon (to the right of the link icon, to the left of the "insert video" icon) and select the appropriate option == To embed Google Books pages: 1. Find the book you want to embed. 2. Select Preview 3. Select (click on) the page you want to embed. 4. Click More Actions (the three vertical dots in the upper right) 5. Select Embed (unless you just want to link the page) 6. Copy the code 7. In edit mode on blogger, select the pen icon in the upper left and click on HTML view 8. Paste the code == Familiarize yourself with the edit icons in the drop-down menu (link, insert image, insert video, etc.) Always make sure, after you Publish, that the formatting is correct on the blogsite. If not, click More options (the three horizontal dots in the upper right) and then Clear Formatting on the far right (the T with a diagonal slash).