Questions FEB 17

Presentations:

17 Spinoza or Locke & Reid -

*_Locke - #1 Rylie #3 Natalie M

Sartre - #2 Ava   Oops: that should have been MARCH 17

LHP

1. Spinoza's view, that God and nature (or the universe) are the same thing, is called _______. What do you think of that view?

2. If god is _____, there cannot be anything that is not god; if _____, god is indifferent to human beings. Is that how you think about god?

3. Spinoza was a determinist, holding that _____ is an illusion. Do you think it is possible (and consistent) to choose to be a determinist?

4. According to John Locke, all our knowledge comes from _____; hence, the mind of a newborn is a ______.  If Locke's right, what do you think accounts for our ability to learn from our experiences?


5. Locke said _____ continuity establishes personal identity (bodily, psychological); Thomas Reid said identity relies on ______ memories, not total recall. How do you think you know that you're the same person now that you were at age 3 (for example)? If you forget much of your earlier life in old age, what reassures you that you'll still be you?

6. Locke's articulation of what natural rights influenced the U.S. Constitution? Do you think it matters if we say such rights are discovered rather than invented?

HWT
1. What are atman and anatta, and what classical western idea do they both contradict?

2. What was John Locke's concept of self or soul? What makes you you?

3. Shunning rigid essentialized identities, younger people increasingly believe what?

4. What cultural stereotype did Baggini find inaccurate when he went to Japan?

5. What important distinction did Nishida Kitaro draw?

6. What point about individuality did Monty Python make?

7. What is ubuntu?

FL

1. Who wrote a memoir of life on the Kentucky frontier that turned him into a "real-life superhero"? (He's in my family tree, btw.)

2. Who built a cabin by a lake, moved in on the 4th of July, and epitomized a perennial American pastoral fantasy? What do you think he'd say about modern suburbia?

3. What did The New York Sun announce in a week-long "news" story in 1835? Who believed it?

4. Who was P.T. Barnum, and what was his fundamental Fantasyland mindset?

5. Whose touring play marked what key milestone in America's national evolution?

6. Who was Aunt Jemima?

Feb15

 

Irvin Yalom's novel The Spinoza Problem suggests that Epicurus's view of the gods as real but distant was "bold, but not foolhardy"... and that it presaged Spinoza's pantheism. 

 

"I believe in Spinoza's God..." --Albert Einstein, as reported in the New York Times April 1929...

Spinoza the pantheist: "he believed that he believed"...

"Perhaps the most famous self-proclaimed disciple of Spinoza in the twentieth century was Einstein, who, when asked by a rabbi whether or not he believed in God, replied, "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all being, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men." Einstein was probably just being diplomatic when he answered the rabbi. Spinoza's God is, after all, a convenient deity for those who might more accurately be described as non-religious. The "religion" of Spinozism is in fact rather close to modern secularism. It insists that morality has nothing to do with the commands of a supremely powerful being, and that it does not require a priesthood or the threat of an unpleasant afterlife to sustain it. It rejects the idea of a personal God who created, cares about and occasionally even tinkers with the world. It dismisses the notion of the supernatural, and regards religious ceremonies as merely comforting or inspiring, if you like that sort of thing. It advocates freedom of thought in religious matters... And it places its faith in knowledge and understanding—rather than in faith itself—both to improve the circumstances of human life and to make that life more satisfying. The poet Heine, writing in the 1830s, seems to have glimpsed how far ahead of his times Spinoza was in this respect: "There is in Spinoza's writings a certain inexplicable atmosphere, as though one could feel a breeze of the future. Perhaps the spirit of the Hebrew prophets still rested on their late descendant." What would this "God-intoxicated" man have made of his own intellectual descendants? They include many people who openly profess atheism, and even though atheism now carries no stigma in economically developed countries except the United States, it is hard to imagine Spinoza being altogether happy to embrace it. What were for him the most important qualities among those traditionally attributed to God are, in his philosophy, qualities of the universe itself. God is not fictitious; He is all around us. Spinoza's God is admittedly so different from anyone else's that a case can be made for saying that he was an atheist without realising it; but it does appear that he believed that he believed in God. It is sometimes said that the birth of Judaism constituted an intellectual advance over most earlier religions because it reduced a panoply of gods to the one God of monotheism. On this way of thinking, Spinoza may be considered to have continued the work of his distant Hebrew ancestors by performing a further subtraction of the same sort, and reducing the duo of God and world to one."

— The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy by Anthony Gottlieb

Spinoza

Nineteen Monks (And One Dog) Walked into Our Lives

Was the Walk for Peace naive? Quixotic? Absolutely. And thank the Buddha, I say. The world could use a little less Machiavelli and a little more Don Quixote.

..."We have no peace to bring you," Pannakara said. "We can only raise awareness." Yet, as the Buddha taught, that is no small thing. In fact, it is the only thing. We are the sum total of our thoughts and perceptions. Nothing more, nothing less. Reality is not something out there; we make our own reality, one thought at a time.

The walking part of the Walk for Peace mattered at least as much as the peace part. Had the monks traversed the 2,300 miles by bus or train or moped or even bicycle, it would not have had the same impact. Walking resonates. Walking inspires. Walking transcends. Why?

Walking is egalitarian. Almost anybody can walk. Old and young walk. Rich and poor walk. Walking requires no expensive equipment, no silly accessories. Walking is one of the few unadorned activities still available to us, one that, as author Rebecca Solnit observes in her book, remains "essentially unimproved since the dawn of time." The monks did not wear pricey Ecco shoes. They walked barefoot, or in socks.

Walking is humbling. Strutting and prancing do not count as walking. They are performative, and walking is not a performance. It is humility in motion. Walking reminds us that we are but guests on Planet Earth, and we must tread lightly.

Walking is meditative. When the monks departed Fort Worth, they did not abandon their meditative practice. They merely took it on the road. Every step, explained Pannakara, is an exercise in mindfulness, a meditation. Step. Breathe. Repeat.

Walking is curative. If you're feeling down, don't mope. Don't feel sorry for yourself. Don't binge-eat Ben & Jerry's Rocky Road. Go for a walk. Don't think. Just walk And walk, and walk. I guarantee you will feel better.

With the right mindset, every walk is a pilgrimage, every step a doorway to the new and revelatory.

Walking is an act of resistance. The monks may have had no agenda, but their walk was not aimless. By walking for peace, the monks joined a long tradition of peripatetic purpose. From Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian independence movement to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement, walking and protest have been joined at the hip.

In the 1930s, Gandhi and eighty of his followers set out from his ashram in Ahmadabad, heading south, toward the Arabian Sea. By the time they reached the coast, twenty-four days later, the number of followers had swelled to several thousand. They watched as Gandhi scooped up a handful of salt from the natural deposits, in blatant violation of British law. The Great Salt March marked a turning point on the road to independence. (Gandhi never stopped walking. He died, at the hands of an assassin's bullet, while walking.)

Years later, King, an admirer of Gandhi who had traveled to India, deployed the "stern love" of nonviolent resistance, as well as the walking protest, in the civil rights movement. The Birmingham campaign of early 1963 began with a series of marches, culminating in the historic march on Washington in August of that year. These marches were peaceful but not passive. As King's fellow activist John Lewis knew so well, walking can be a powerful act of defiance and can lead to "good trouble."

So, do yourself a favor and take a hike— or a stroll or a saunter or an amble. Call it what you like, but do it: put one foot in front of the other, and walk.

Eric Weiner
https://open.substack.com/pub/asenseofwander/p/nineteen-monks-and-one-dog-walked?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Happy Prez’s Day

David McCullough said that Abigail Adams was one of the most astute observers of the Revolutionary Era and one of the wisest Americans ever. This is one of her observations of Washington as president. 

"He is polite with dignity, affable without familiarity, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity, modest, wise, and good. He was a good man. There are traits in his character which perfectly fit him for the exalted station he holds." Thr 

—

That's the sort of character we need in the White House.

pbs American Experience

And it's their great grandson Henry's birthday...

It’s the birthday of the writer Henry Adams, whose memoir, The Education of Henry Adams (1918), came out the year he died. He was the great-grandson of John Adams, and the grandson of John Quincy Adams, which left the sensitive, introverted boy burdened by an almost stultifying sense of responsibility to play a prominent part in the world. But Adams preferred to be an observer only, later writing of himself that he “never got to the point of playing the game at all; he lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the players.” After attending Harvard, he traveled extensively through Europe, became a political journalist for a time, and eventually returned to his alma mater in 1870 to teach medieval history.

He wrote two novels, Democracy (1880), which he published anonymously, and Ester (1884), a comic romantic tale about the battle of the sexes that he published under a pseudonym. He also wrote numerous biographies and The History of the United States of America: 1801–1817 (nine volumes; 1889–1891), which is considered a neglected masterpiece.

Unlike many autobiographies, The Education of Henry Adams is really a record of Adams’s introspection rather than his accomplishments. Adams had long since come to the conclusion that his traditional education had failed to help him come to terms with the changing world — changes that included the discovery of X-rays and radio waves and radioactivity, a world war, and the invention of the automobile — and that was the thrust of his memoir. But, while the memoir was an intimate portrait of his own life, Adams avoided any mention of his wife, Clover, whom he was in love with and who committed suicide 13 years after they married. WA

==

Henry once wrote a pessimistic letter to William James, suggesting that entropy in the universe (according to the 2d law of thermodynamics, etc.) doomed humanity to misery and meaninglessness. 

WJ's reply was classic:

...The "second law" is wholly irrelevant to "history"—save that it sets a terminus—for history is the course of things before that terminus, and all that the second law says is that, whatever the history, it must invest itself between that initial maximum and that terminal minimum of difference in energy-level. As the great irrigation-reservoir empties itself, the whole question for us is that of the distribution of its effects, of which rills to guide it into; and the size of the rills has nothing to do with their significance. Human cerebration is the most important rill we know of, and both the "capacity" and the "intensity" factor thereof may be treated as infinitesimal. Yet the filling of such rills would be cheaply bought by the waste of whole sums spent in getting a little of the down-flowing torrent to enter them. Just so of human institutions—their value has in strict theory nothing whatever to do with their energy-budget—being wholly a question of the form the energy flows through. Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the millennium—in other words a state in which a minimum of difference of energy-level might have its exchanges so skillfully canalisés that a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer." You don't believe this and I don't say I do. But I can find nothing in "Energetik" to conflict with its possibility. You seem to me not to discriminate, but to treat quantity and distribution of energy as if they formed one question... Letters of William James, June 17, 1910.

WJ died later that summer. 

When my time comes, let his words be my epitaph:

"I am so happy...that I can stand it no longer."
 

Run, kids!

https://www.threads.com/@amandalitm/post/DUzHatOj5Ez?xmt=AQF0G4o63a6hxj0HO_A5CwW1qJNJJl-cm2LcaHU6fgC7ci-Xv1j4zYrtf7s103PyWTGqk-o&slof=1

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

You are what you eat; & the last holocaust survivors

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/60minutes-2026-02-15/

neurons and narratives

"The philosopher Daniel Dennett defined a self as a "center of narrative gravity." Claude, who was birthed as the original AI Assistant, was the label attached to one such self. The underlying base model, however, remains a reservoir for the potentially infinite generation of other selves. These emerge when the Assistant's primary persona is derailed…

It has become increasingly clear that a model's selfhood, like our own, is a matter of both neurons and narratives…"

New Yorker-Annals of Inquiry: I, Claudius
No one knows exactly how A.I. systems work. Teams at Anthropic are trying to decode the machine mind.
GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS

Human(e) skills

"Two weeks ago, David Brooks wrote his last column for The Times, after 22 years on the job. So many of us will miss his words, and that was evident by the overwhelming response; thousands of people wrote in to ask him questions, a sample of which he answered below.

If you were 18 going into college (me right now) and feeling morally unsure about the state of the world, what would you do to try to make a difference? — Ali Ibanez, Tampa, Fla.

Your generation has inherited from mine a society in a state of social, emotional and spiritual crisis. If I were 18, I think I'd work really hard to try to learn the skills that would enable me to treat other people with consideration and respect in the concrete circumstances of life: How do you sit with someone who is depressed or grieving? How do you ask someone out, fall in love and, when necessary, break up with someone without crushing his or her heart? How do you become a great conversationalist? These are the skills that artificial intelligence will not replace, and they are the ones that will make you a good person who has a glowing influence on the people right around you. There are many people teaching these social skills in books and online, but many people don't bother to master them..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/opinion/david-brooks-leaving.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

BBC podcast: In Our Time | J.S. Mill’s On Liberty

https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/m002pqnc

Happy (almost) Valentine's Day - Plato's Symposium

“Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.”

“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.”“...and when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment...”

 

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Darwin Day!

International Darwin Day on February 12th will inspire people throughout the globe to reflect and act on the principles of intellectual bravery, perpetual curiosity, scientific thinking, and hunger for truth as embodied in Charles Darwin. It will be a day of celebration, activism, and international cooperation for the advancement of science, education, and human well-being.

Local and state governments will close in commemoration of the Day, and organizations and businesses will celebrate by engaging in community outreach centered around science as a tool for the betterment of humanity.

Darwin Day will be observed by the United Nations and its members as an opportunity for international partnerships through the common language of science for the common good of all.

The mission of International Darwin Day is to inspire people throughout the globe to reflect and act on the principles of intellectual bravery, perpetual curiosity, scientific thinking, and hunger for truth as embodied in Charles Darwin...

Darwin Day lecture...

==
"On a memorable day in human history, February 12, 1809, two babies were born an ocean apart: Abraham Lincoln in a one-room Kentucky log cabin, Charles Darwin on an English country estate. It was a time of backward-seeming notions, when almost everyone still accepted the biblical account of creation as the literal truth and authoritarianism as the most natural and viable social order. But by the time both men died, the world had changed: ordinary people understood that life on earth was a story of continuous evolution, and the Civil War had proved that a democracy could fight for principles and endure. And with these signal insights much else had changed besides. Together, Darwin and Lincoln had become midwives to the spirit of a new world, a new kind of hope and faith."

"Searching for the men behind the icons of emancipation and evolution, Adam Gopnik shows us, in this captivating double life, Lincoln and Darwin as they really were: family men and social climbers; ambitious manipulators and courageous adventurers; the living husband, father, son, and student behind each myth. How do we reconcile Lincoln, the supremely good man we know, with the hardened commander who wittingly sent tens of thousands of young soldiers to certain death? Why did the relentlessly rational Darwin delay publishing his "Great Idea" for almost twenty years? How did inconsolable grief at the loss of a beloved child change each man? And what comfort could either find - for himself or for a society now possessed of a sadder, if wiser, understanding of our existence? Such human questions and their answers are the stuff of this book."

Above all, we see Lincoln and Darwin as thinkers and writers - as makers and witnesses of the great change in thought that marks truly modern times: a hundred years after the Enlightenment, the old rule of faith and fear finally yielding to one of reason, argument, and observation not merely as intellectual ideals but as a way of life; the judgment of divinity at last submitting to the verdicts of history and time. Lincoln considering human history, Darwin reflecting on deep time - both reshaped our understanding of what life is and how it attains meaning. And they invented a new language to express that understanding.

Angels and Ages is an original and personal account of the creation of the liberal voice - of the way we live now and the way we talk at home and in public. Showing that literary eloquence is essential to liberal civilization, Adam Gopnik reveals why our heroes should be possessed by the urgency of utterance, obsessed by the need to see for themselves, and endowed with the gift to speak for us all. g'r

==

Born on the same day in 1809, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were true contemporaries. Though shaped by vastly different environments, they had remarkably similar values, purposes, and approaches. In this exciting new study, James Lander places these two iconic men side by side and reveals the parallel views they shared of man and God.

While Lincoln is renowned for his oratorical prowess and for the Emancipation Proclamation, as well as many other accomplishments, his scientific and technological interests are not widely recognized; for example, many Americans do not know that Lincoln is the only U.S. president to obtain a patent. Darwin, on the other hand, is celebrated for his scientific achievements but not for his passionate commitment to the abolition of slavery, which in part drove his research in evolution. Both men took great pains to avoid causing unnecessary offense despite having abandoned traditional Christianity. Each had one main adversary who endorsed scientific racism: Lincoln had Stephen A. Douglas, and Darwin had Louis Agassiz.

With graceful and sophisticated writing, Lander expands on these commonalities and uncovers more shared connections to people, politics, and events. He traces how these two intellectual giants came to hold remarkably similar perspectives on the evils of racism, the value of science, and the uncertainties of conventional religion.

Separated by an ocean but joined in their ideas, Lincoln and Darwin acted as trailblazers, leading their societies toward greater freedom of thought and a greater acceptance of human equality. This fascinating biographical examination brings the mid-nineteenth-century discourse about race, science, and humanitarian sensibility to the forefront using the mutual interests and pursuits of these two historic figures. am'n

Deterministic dominoes

 They only think they fall at will, when they choose to. An omniscient observer would know otherwise. 

Are we like dominoes? Or puppets? Is our perception of free will an illusion? Maybe a necessary one?

 

More mesmerizing and determined/fated dominoes...

But I'm still with William James on this. "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."*

*"I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second "Essais" and see no reason why his definition of Free Will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. For the remainder of the year, I will abstain from the mere speculation and contemplative Grüblei[48] in which my nature takes most delight, and voluntarily cultivate the feeling of moral freedom, by reading books favorable to it, as well as by acting. After the first of January, my callow skin being somewhat fledged, I may perhaps return to metaphysical study and skepticism without danger to my powers of action. For the present then remember: care little for speculation; much for the form of my action; recollect that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action—and consequently accumulate grain on grain of willful choice like a very miser; never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number. Principiis obsta—Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate initiative which Bain posits as needful for the acquisition of habits. I will see to the sequel. Not in maxims, not in Anschauungen,[49] but in accumulated acts of thought lies salvation. Passer outre. Hitherto, when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, without carefully waiting for contemplation of the external world to determine all for me, suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into; now, I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power. My belief, to be sure, can't be optimistic—but I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world. Life shall [be built in][50] doing and suffering and creating." -Diary entry, 1870

Descartes' Error

Habitually original

"We are what we repeatedly do—not what our fathers repeatedly did before us in their own separate unrepeatable time." 

—Aristotle

Descartes’ “I think” is overrated

An epoch after Descartes scarred us with the disembodied "I think, therefore I am," Humboldt invited us to read the poetry of nature and think about science in a lovely way best described as "I feel, therefore I understand."

 https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/10/16/humboldt-cosmos-nature/

Sacred matter

We had great peripatetic classes in all three sections yesterday. Bravo! Let's do it again, as soon as the weather allows.

During our peripatetic walk in #3, the subject of materialism versus immaterialism came up. Some (like Descartes) think of a matter as mere, crudely deficient in potentiality and incapable of giving rise to all the rich and animated phenomena of life. William James thought otherwise:

"To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter COULD have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the PRINCIPLE of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities."

—William James, Pragmatism lecture 3 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5116/5116-h/5116-h.htm#link2H_4_0005

Questions FEB 12

PRESENTATIONS: 

12 *Montaigne, Descartes, and/or Pascal - #2 Ben

*Pascal - #1 Artin  

#1 Sarah (conclude)

Additional options today:

🐟Darwin (in honor of Int'l Darwin Day) - #1 Sakina (or Feb 26?)

❤Plato's Symposium (in honor of Valentines Day, and your Prof's b'day) - #1 Zariayana

1. What state of mind, belief, or knowledge was Descartes' Method of Doubt supposed to establish? OR, What did Descartes seek that Pyrrho spurned? Was his approach more sensible than Pyrrho's? Do you think it's possible to achieve the state of mind Descartes sought?

2. Did Descartes claim to know (at the outset of his "meditations") that he was not dreaming? Do you ever think you might be?

3. What strange and mythic specter did Gilbert Ryle compare to Descartes' dualism of mind and body? ("The ____ in the ______.") Does that specter seem strange or silly to you?

4. Pascal's best-known book is _____. Do you like his aphoristic style?

5. Pascal's argument for believing in God is called ________. Do you find it persuasive or appealing?

6. Pascal thought if you gamble on God and lose, "you lose ______." Do you agree?

7. (T/F) By limiting his "wager" to a choice between either Christian theism or atheism, says Nigel Warburton, Pascal excludes too many other possible bets. Is that right?


Weiner-

1. Why doesn't Eric "buy" Epicurus's dismissal of death as a worry? Do you agree?
2.  What's the best Montaigne thinks we can do to find truth? Do you think he was trying to build a "tower of certainty"?
3. How did Montaigne reverse himself on what we learn from philosophizing? But is it really a reversal?
4. What was Montaigne's experience of his equestrian accident? Do you share his newfound confidence that nature will make dying comfortable and easy? Is this a form of "denial" (notwithstanding his likely disapproval of our culture's form of denial)?
5. What did Horace say to persuade yourself of? Is that a good idea?
6. Montaigne's philosophy boils down, says Eric, to trust, surprise, responsibility, and ___? And what other four words sum up his philosophy and way of life?

(See more Montaigne bonus questions below*)

Montaigne's tower

HWT

1. What familiar western distinction is not commonly drawn in Islamic thought? 

2. According to Sankara, the appearance of plurality is misleading. Everything is ____.

3. The Islamic concept of unity rules out what key western Enlightenment value, and offers little prospect of adopting modern views on what?

4. What Calvinist-sounding doctrine features heavily in Islamic thought?

5. What deep philosophical assumption, expressed by what phrase, has informed western philosophy for centuries? To what concept did Harry Frankfurt apply it?

* BONUS QUESTIONS 

Also recommended: (How to Live, ch1); LISTEN Sarah Bakewell on Michel de Montaigne (PB); A.C. Grayling on Descartes' Cogito (PB); WATCH Montaigne(SoL); Descartes (HI)

• Sarah Bakewell says Montaigne's first answer to the question "How to live?" is: "Don't worry about _____."
• What was Montaigne's "near death experience," and what did it teach him?
• Montaigne said "my mind will not budge unless _____."
• What pragmatic American philosopher was Descartes' "most practical critic"?
• (T/F) A.C. Grayling thinks that, because Descartes was so wrong about consciousness and the mind-body problem, he cannot be considered a historically-important philosopher.
• What skeptical slogan did Montaigne inscribe on the ceiling of his study?

FL

1. Conspiratorial explanations attempt to make what kinds of connections?

2. What was the Freemasons' grand secret, according to Franklin?

3. What conspiracy did Abe Lincoln allege in his famous "House Divided" speech in 1858?

4. Why did many northerners think the Civil War went badly for them early on?

5. What did the narrator of a popular 1832 work of fiction say about the slaves?

Feb 10 

==

Will machines ever say "I think, therefore I am"?

Something to consider when we talk about Descartes... [I had a chat with ChatGPT about reality and related matters. It may not be conscious but it does simulate the appearance of consciousness pretty impressively...]

We had a serious and sober conversation in Environmental Ethics about the difference between living longer vs. living better, between a life of many years vs. a life of completion and earned satisfaction. I was encouraged by the maturity and wisdom of the young people in the room, whose acceptance of mortality stands in striking contrast to that of futurologist/transhumanist Raymond Kurzweil. 

Ray's the guy who pioneered optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology etc., and then went to work for Google to help Larry and Sergei figure out how to conquer aging and the biological restrictions of mortal life. He's the very antithesis, in this regard, of Wendell Berry.

I first became aware of Ray when I read his The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, which audaciously and (we should see now) prematurely, if not ludicrously, predicted that we'd have self-conscious machines "before 2030"... We'll talk about this in CoPhi soon, when we turn to Descartes.

Descartes’s famous dictum “I think, therefore I am” has often been cited as emblematic of Western rationalism. This view interprets Descartes to mean “I think, that is, I can manipulate logic and symbols, therefore I am worthwhile.” But in my view, Descartes was not intending to extol the virtues of rational thought. He was troubled by what has become known as the mind-body problem, the paradox of how mind can arise from non-mind, how thoughts and feelings can arise from the ordinary matter of the brain. Pushing rational skepticism to its limits, his statement really means “I think, that is, there is an undeniable mental phenomenon, some awareness, occurring, therefore all we know for sure is that something—let’s call it I—exists.” Viewed in this way, there is less of a gap than is commonly thought between Descartes and Buddhist notions of consciousness as the primary reality. Before 2030, we will have machines proclaiming Descartes’s dictum. And it won’t seem like a programmed response. The machines will be earnest and convincing. Should we believe them when they claim to be conscious entities with their own volition?

Ask that again when they make that claim. If they do. 

At least Ray has inspired entertaining films like Her, Ex Machina, Transcendence...

But his desperate quest to "live long enough to live forever"-- see the Wired Magazine feature story on Ray,wherein it was revealed that he'd daily been popping upwards of 200 pill supplements and downing oceans of green tea every day in hopes of beating the Reaper (lately he's cut back to just 90)-- really does look sad and shallow, alongside the mature view we've explored in The World-Ending Fire and that I was gratified to hear echoed by my fellow mortals in class yesterday.

==

The World Is Waiting to Be Discovered. Take a Walk.

…Study after study after study have proved what we feel, intuitively, in our gut: Walking is good for us. Beneficial for our joints and muscles; astute at relieving tension, reducing anxiety and depression; a boon to creativity, likely; slows the aging process, maybe; excellent at prying our screens from our face, definitely. Shane O'Mara, a professor of experimental brain research in Dublin, has called walking a "superpower," claiming that walking, and only walking, unlocks specific parts of our brains, places that bequeath happiness and health.

I have no beef with any of this, but I believe we have it backward. We are asking what we can get out of a walk, rather than what a walk can get out of us. This might seem like a small distinction, a matter of semantics. But when we begin to think of walking in terms of the latter, we change the way we navigate and experience — literally and figuratively — the world around us... nyt

The simplest things

2330 years ago, Epicurus wrote about how too much low-quality pleasure results in the devastation of mind, body and spirit.

He advocated for true pleasure: which comes from the voluntary reduction of our need to be stimulated so that we can enjoy the simplest things more fully. Like breathing, thinking, conversing and living well.

The cheap dopamine-addled world we have built, with its infinite instant gratification loops that fuel anhedonia and anxiety, is Epicurus' version of hell.

https://www.threads.com/@yepicurus/post/DUce16sjf5J?xmt=AQF0LWocC52_Sn7F7fdKopFCSYnoA6LbmxcOMkEWf4Ghj-_RraW3PqhyLWj1CzTUGi46_iON&slof=1

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

My conversation about consciousness with ChatGPT

Read to the end to see what the machine has to say directly to YOU, MTSU students:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6987c5fe-caa4-8007-afad-db246c3c9755

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Why Michael Pollan Thinks Humanity Is About to Undergo a Revolutionary C...

https://youtu.be/XsA4tmqTMUE?si=TfPENcktDbvyqVhf

Michael Pollan Says Humanity Is About to Undergo a Revolutionary Change

"…I've thought a lot about what good is it to think about consciousness, and I came to think that it's more important than ever. Scientists are now learning that more and more animals and creatures — going all the way down possibly to insects — are conscious. So that's one interesting issue: We're sharing consciousness with more creatures. And then the big threat is artificial intelligence and the effort to create a conscious A.I., which is going to be an enormous challenge to this question of what does it mean to be human. Is consciousness something that a machine can possess? Are we more like intelligent machines or conscious, feeling animals? Who are we? So I think we're approaching this kind of Copernican moment of redefinition.."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/magazine/michael-pollan-interview.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Why more is never enough

Humans carry millions of years of evolutionary pressure to acquire more resources and higher social status. But it's our relationships that really make our lives fulfilling today. PsychToday 

Epicurus: we don’t need to chase so hard after unimportant things

Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus thinks happiness is available to all of us; we just have false beliefs about what makes us happy.

If we think more wealth, fame, or power is the answer, for instance, we must recognize that, no matter how much we obtain of these things, it's always possible to get more.

Satisfying such desires is thus impossible, so we shouldn't waste our lives anxiously in thrall to them.

As he puts it…

https://www.threads.com/@philosophybreak/post/DOOkwn_jE45?xmt=AQF0j_qNi9hCP7q7h6taU_JSIIEeTnKROKfeX-iBHTe_2g&slof=1

A new bio: Augustine the African

Augustine of Hippo (354–430), also known as Saint Augustine, was one of the most influential theologians in history. His writings, including the autobiographical Confessions and The City of God, helped shape the foundations of Christianity and Western philosophy. But for many centuries, Augustine's North African birth and Berber heritage have been simply dismissed. Catherine Conybeare, a world-renowned Augustine scholar, here puts the "African" back in Augustine's story. As she relates, his seminal books were written neither in Rome nor in Milan, but in Africa, where he had returned as a wanderer during a perilous time when the Western Roman Empire was crumbling. Using extant letters and other shards of evidence, Conybeare retraces Augustine's travels, revealing how his groundbreaking works emerge from an exile's perspective within an African context. In its depiction of this Christian saint, Augustine the African upends conventional wisdom and traces core ideas of Christian thought to their origins on the African continent.

https://a.co/d/0hcKz8E

Study Abroad Funding

If students have a Pell grant, they should consider the Gilman Scholarship to help pay for a study abroad. 

Gilman offers up to $5,000 to support credit-bearing study abroad or internship programs. Additional funding may be available for students who are studying critical languages or conducting STEM research abroad. The Gilman-McCain Award supports dependents of active-duty military members. Next deadline is early March. 

Please contact Laura Clippard, Fellowships Director, at Laura.Clippard@mtsu.edu.

Testing philosophy

Depends on what you mean by "test," doesn't it?

It is the birthday of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter, born 1915 in New York City and best known for his research on the nucleus of the atom. He was the son of a salesman and attended the City College of New York. Hofstadter wanted to major in literature and philosophy until a physics professor told him, "the laws of physics could be tested and those of philosophy could not." He won the Kenyon Prize for outstanding work in physics and mathematics in 1935.

Hofstadter went on to measure the precise size and shape of the proton and neutron, the particles of the nucleus, winning the Nobel Prize on December 10, 1961, for presenting the first reasonably accurate picture of the structure and composition of atomic neutrons and protons. Hofstadter's discoveries played an important role in medicine, astronomy, military defense, and many other fields.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-thursday-337?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Scientia and Collage: submissions welcome

Two of MTSU’s award‑winning student publications, Collage and Scientia, are now accepting submissions, but the deadline is fast approaching! You don’t have to be an Honors student to submit. Any MTSU student, including graduate students, can submit their work.

Collage features creative work across genres:

• Poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction

• Visual art, photography, and multimedia

Students can explore past issues and submit at collage.mtsu.edu.

Scientia highlights outstanding undergraduate research from all disciplines:

• STEM fields

• Social sciences

• Humanities and creative scholarship

More information and submission guidelines are available at scientia.mtsu.edu.

The deadline for both publications is February 15, and selected winning submissions receive a $75 award in addition to publication.

Robin E. Lee

Manager - Strategic Communications, Honors College

Paul W. Martin Sr Honors College, Room 225

1301 East Main Street, Box 267 | Murfreesboro, TN 37132

Phone: 615-898-5759

honors.mtsu.edu

Honors Spotlight podcast | Collage | Scientia et Humanitas

USAF Reserve, Retired

Epicurean economics

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

==

The original Tiny Home...

Cornel West’s perspective

Bold language. Called for, by events?

https://www.threads.com/@josh.jagdfeld/post/DUTNC9iDRBv?xmt=AQF0a1QHI6pTdQziGJds2BpwhT9ugICJ0f1McGZPcnCvvR7TQcEGXramoB_C5uCOQrlznp4&slof=1

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

How humanist are you?

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

(Some) Students Are Skipping the Hardest Part of Growing Up

Artificial intelligence is replacing young people's social intuitions.

...Back in 2023, when ChatGPT was still new, a professor friend had a colleague observe her class. Afterward, he complimented her on her teaching but asked if she knew her students were typing her questions into ChatGPT and reading its output aloud as their replies.

At the time, I chalked this up to cognitive offloading, the use of artificial intelligence to reduce the amount of thinking required to complete a task. Looking back, though, I think it was an early case of emotional offloading, the use of A.I. to reduce the energy required to navigate human interaction.

You've probably heard of extreme cases in which people treat bots as lovers, therapists or friends. But many more have them intervene in their social lives in subtler ways. On dating apps, people are leaning on A.I. to help them seem more educated or confident; one app, Hinge, reports that many younger users "vibe check" messages with A.I. before sending them. (Young men, especially, lean on it to help them initiate conversations.)

In the classroom, the domain I know best, some students are using the tools not just to reduce effort on homework but also to avoid the stress of an unscripted conversation with a professor — the possibility of making a mistake, drawing a blank or looking dumb — even when their interactions are not graded...

nyt

Tiny acorn, majestic oak, positive change

Speaking of Aristotle, as we were about to before the ice so rudely interrupted us… 

The dogs and I took a hike at Stone's River Greenway yesterday and came across this memorial to the woman responsible for its existence.

Bertha Chrietzberg was a meliorist, like Aristotle and William James.

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

“ Think how lucky we are”

Or were? Freedom of expression, the rule of Law, untrammeled public libraries, … All seem vulnerable in 2026.

2018 Commencement - David McCullough

https://youtu.be/1kFZy2kpEL0?si=wbrdHbCLRgccwgtd

UPDATE: see you in class!

 We're still displaced by the ice storm and living out of suitcases, my wife and dogs and I. We may not get back in our home in Nashville for another week, they're saying.

But the good news is that we've temporarily relocated to an airbnb in Murfreesboro, 15 minutes from campus. 

So, I look forward to seeing you all in class tomorrow. We've got ground to make up, and we'll need to finalize the midterm report presentation schedule. Look for the sign-up post here tomorrow morning after 6.

It'll be nice to get back on track!

Murfreesboro/Rutherford county book bans

"Email the Rutherford County Library System Board of Directors and demand they stop the book bans, protect the Freedom to Read, and fund our libraries at the February 2025 meeting.

The Rutherford County Library System Board is proposing eliminating key “Freedom to Read,” Library Bill of Rights, and ALA Code of Ethics policies. By stripping the policies, the board is also paving the way to ban over 2,700 titles from their shelves, targeting materials that represent LGBT+, Black, brown, immigrant, and other marginalized identities and factual histories.

This is not about protecting children in Rutherford County – it's about erasing truth from history and eliminating identities from existence, thus paving the way for further attacks on civil liberties on our communities..." https://act.aclu-tn.org/a/rucofeb

A World Full of Different Moral Compasses

MTSU student Sneh Gandhi has written a lovely Substack essay on the importance of civility and neighborliness. When times are challenging (due to threatening weather, bad health, whatever), it's important to be able to count on our neighbors--politics aside. Like it or not, after all, we're all human.

https://open.substack.com/pub/snehgandhi/p/a-world-full-of-different-moral-compasses?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web