| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
👣Solvitur ambulando
💭Sapere aude
Thursday, January 20, 2022
Responsibility
Wednesday, January 19, 2022
The adequately examined life
The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is nothing to write home about either.--Daniel Dennett
(https://twitter.com/philosophersmag/status/1483834141938487300?s=02)
(https://twitter.com/philosophersmag/status/1483834141938487300?s=02)
Writing Center
The Margaret H. Ordoubadian University Writing Center (UWC) tutors are ready to serve MTSU writers this semester! The UWC serves all MTSU students and staff, from freshmen to PhD students, on writing from any discipline, and in any genre. We support writers working on D2L discussion posts, PhD dissertations, research posters, and everything in between.
...website... digital class visit, a brief introduction to the UWC
What can students expect? Starting Jan. 18th, students have three opportunities to meet with a trained writing tutor:
Face to Face: students meet with a tutor in the UWC (LIB 362)
Live Chat: students to use their mic and camera and meet tutors in real time to work on a shared document
Document Drop: students upload their text and assignment sheet, identify specific feedback needs, and receive tutor feedback through email
How else can the UWC support your student writers this semester? We also support writers through course-specific or assignment-specific 45-minute writing workshops. The UWC administrative team has worked closely with faculty from diverse programs and departments, such as Biology, Music Publicity, and Professional Studies, to create workshops and writing support for students in those courses. Please head to our new workshop request page to find out what type of workshops we offer, schedule a writing workshop, and steps to co-create a specialized writing workshop.
Wishing everyone a lovely start to the semester.
Erica Cirillo-McCarthy, PhD
Director, The Margaret H. Ordoubadian University Writing Center
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Middle Tennessee State University
615.898.2921
mtsu.edu/writing-center
Preview YouTube video Welcome to the University Writing Center (Fall 2021-Spring 2022)
Welcome to the University Writing Center (Fall 2021-Spring 2022)
...website... digital class visit, a brief introduction to the UWC
What can students expect? Starting Jan. 18th, students have three opportunities to meet with a trained writing tutor:
Face to Face: students meet with a tutor in the UWC (LIB 362)
Live Chat: students to use their mic and camera and meet tutors in real time to work on a shared document
Document Drop: students upload their text and assignment sheet, identify specific feedback needs, and receive tutor feedback through email
How else can the UWC support your student writers this semester? We also support writers through course-specific or assignment-specific 45-minute writing workshops. The UWC administrative team has worked closely with faculty from diverse programs and departments, such as Biology, Music Publicity, and Professional Studies, to create workshops and writing support for students in those courses. Please head to our new workshop request page to find out what type of workshops we offer, schedule a writing workshop, and steps to co-create a specialized writing workshop.
Wishing everyone a lovely start to the semester.
Erica Cirillo-McCarthy, PhD
Director, The Margaret H. Ordoubadian University Writing Center
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Middle Tennessee State University
615.898.2921
mtsu.edu/writing-center
Preview YouTube video Welcome to the University Writing Center (Fall 2021-Spring 2022)
Welcome to the University Writing Center (Fall 2021-Spring 2022)
5 Books
A philosophy starter kit. The Best Philosophy Books for Beginners https://t.co/lvIMVr9JqI
— Five Books (@five_books) January 19, 2022
Plato's man
Plato having defined man to be a two-legged, animal without feathers, Diogenes plucked a cock and brought it into the Academy, and said, 'This is Plato's man.'--Diogenes Laertius
— TPM: The Philosophers Magazine (@philosophersmag) January 19, 2022
Tuesday, January 18, 2022
Opening Day!
LISTEN. Another semester's Opening Day is upon us. Deja Vu all over again. It's cold out there, as they say day after day in Punxsutawney PA. After so many of them, I (like Phil Connors) should be able to get it right.
Getting it right is pretty easy, on Opening Day in CoPhi, Atheism, and Bioethics. We just talk about who we are and why we're here, and we prepare to ask and address lots and lots of other questions... (continues)
Public philosophy
Since the millennium, there has been a huge increase in the visibility of philosophy, both online and off. There are, of course, books on philosophy, but also numerous popular live events, courses, podcasts, television and radio programmes, and newspaper columns. Philosophy today is as likely to be found on YouTube as it is in a bookshop or library. Just to mention a few examples of freely accessible online public philosophy initiatives: Michael Sandel's 'Justice' course, the BBC's History of Ideas animations, or the many popular philosophy podcasts, including History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps from Peter Adamson, Philosophy Bites from David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton, and the philosophy episodes of the BBC Radio 4 series In Our Time. This complex and heterogeneous phenomenon is generally called 'public philosophy'. It's philosophy done in public rather than behind the doors of seminar or lecture rooms, or in paywalled academic journals... (continues)
https://psyche.co/ideas/what-public-philosophy-is-and-why-we-need-it-more-than-ever
https://psyche.co/ideas/what-public-philosophy-is-and-why-we-need-it-more-than-ever
Monday, January 17, 2022
Speak up
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
- Martin Luther King Jr. https://t.co/OKIWW6yaol
(https://twitter.com/EthicsInBricks/status/1483114396398374912?s=02)
- Martin Luther King Jr. https://t.co/OKIWW6yaol
(https://twitter.com/EthicsInBricks/status/1483114396398374912?s=02)
Professor MLK, Humanist
MLK’s syllabus was as meat and potatoes as you are going to get for an Ethics and Political Philosophy class pic.twitter.com/KSBj90fh7x
— Jason Stanley (@jasonintrator) January 17, 2022
While Dr. King is largely remembered for his religious faith, he was also one of our foremost philosophers who understood the importance of reason and balance in society.
— American Humanist Association (@americnhumanist) January 17, 2022
Read about King's support of church-state separation: https://t.co/Q0hPElajFY pic.twitter.com/r4lPMZiO9i
Questions Jan 18
Welcome to CoPhi!
One of our daily tasks in class is to ask and address relevant questions: textual questions that may appear on exams, and discussion questions we can talk and post about. I'll post some in advance of each class, and we can add to them when we meet. If we use a question you've suggested, you can "take a base" on the scorecard. (Don't worry, I'll explain what that means.)
Since we've not read any assigned texts yet, today's questions are just for discussion -- they won't be on the first exam.
- Who are you?
- Why are you here?
- What is philosophy?
- Do you have a favorite philosopher?
- Do you have a pithy personal philosophy?
- Your suggestions...
Post your responses to these questions in the comments space under Introductions, below. Remember to include your section # (6 or 9).
Sunday, January 16, 2022
Introductions
Welcome to Intro to Philosophy, which I prefer to call CoPhi. (I'll explain later.)
I'm Dr. Oliver, I've been at MTSU for decades now teaching this course and others on Atheism, Bioethics, Environmental Ethics, Enlightenment, Evolution, Happiness, Rationality,...
My twitter profile identifies me as a peripatetic, a dog person, a baseball fan, and an author. I'm also a dad and a meliorist, among other things. I'll elaborate when we meet.
My initial questions for you: who are you, and why are you here? What's your current understanding of what philosophy is? Do you have a favorite philosopher? Click on "comments" below and introduce yourself. See you soon.
Dr. Oliver
jpo
Friday, January 14, 2022
The power of asking questions
‘Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life’ Bertrand Russell
— Nigel Warburton 🧡 #RejoinEU (@philosophybites) January 14, 2022
Thursday, January 13, 2022
15 Minute Masterclass philosophy videos
We will be releasing new videos in our 15 Minute Masterclass series later this month.
Perfect for A-Level students or anyone looking for an engaging introduction to the main problems of philosophy, the series so far can be browsed for free here:
https://t.co/SzaxBI307N
(https://twitter.com/RIPhilo/status/1481570185375105026?s=02)
Tuesday, January 11, 2022
WJ at 180
It’s the birthday of the man who coined the term “stream of consciousness” and who said that “the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook” — psychologist and philosopher William James (books by this author) (1842), born in New York City to one of the most prominent intellectual families in the history of America. His brother was writer Henry James, his sister was diarist Alice James, his dad was a famous theologian, and his godfather was Ralph Waldo Emerson.
He was tone-deaf, got motion sickness easily, suffered from depression and was suicidal for long intervals, had chronic back pain, recurring digestive ailments, and problems with vision. He told people he had “soul-sickness.”
He got an M.D. at Harvard but never practiced medicine; instead, he spent his life in academia at Harvard. There he taught physiology, then anatomy, and then, for many years, psychology and philosophy. Over the years he lectured to many future famous Americans, including Teddy Roosevelt, W.E.B. DuBois, and Gertrude Stein, a favorite of his. On an in-class exam he gave, Gertrude wrote, “Dear Professor James, I am so sorry but I do not feel a bit like writing an examination paper on philosophy today.” He wrote back, “Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly. I often feel like that myself.”
He was an enormously prolific writer. Scholar John McDermott put together a bibliography of William James’ writings that was 47 pages long. His most well-known work is probably the 1,200-page Principles of Psychology, published in 1890 after more than a decade of research and writing. While working on the book he did first-person research on the psychology of mystical experience, and to aid in this he sometimes used narcotics. He said that he could only really understand the German idealist philosopher Hegel when he was under the influence of laughing gas.
He wrote a lot about the psychology of pragmatism. He argued that a person’s beliefs were true if they were useful to that person [no, not quite] and he said, “Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”
He also wrote, “Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”
He hung out with Freud, Jung, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Bertrand Russell, and many other intellectuals. He once said, “Wherever you are, it is your own friends who make your world” and he said, “Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.”
He was tone-deaf, got motion sickness easily, suffered from depression and was suicidal for long intervals, had chronic back pain, recurring digestive ailments, and problems with vision. He told people he had “soul-sickness.”
He got an M.D. at Harvard but never practiced medicine; instead, he spent his life in academia at Harvard. There he taught physiology, then anatomy, and then, for many years, psychology and philosophy. Over the years he lectured to many future famous Americans, including Teddy Roosevelt, W.E.B. DuBois, and Gertrude Stein, a favorite of his. On an in-class exam he gave, Gertrude wrote, “Dear Professor James, I am so sorry but I do not feel a bit like writing an examination paper on philosophy today.” He wrote back, “Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly. I often feel like that myself.”
He was an enormously prolific writer. Scholar John McDermott put together a bibliography of William James’ writings that was 47 pages long. His most well-known work is probably the 1,200-page Principles of Psychology, published in 1890 after more than a decade of research and writing. While working on the book he did first-person research on the psychology of mystical experience, and to aid in this he sometimes used narcotics. He said that he could only really understand the German idealist philosopher Hegel when he was under the influence of laughing gas.
He wrote a lot about the psychology of pragmatism. He argued that a person’s beliefs were true if they were useful to that person [no, not quite] and he said, “Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”
He also wrote, “Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”
He hung out with Freud, Jung, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Bertrand Russell, and many other intellectuals. He once said, “Wherever you are, it is your own friends who make your world” and he said, “Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.”
==
Happy 180th birthday, WJ. Happy 65th, SCR.
The dance of common sense is more supple than most commentators, in and out of academia, trying to grasp what James meant when he said truth is what it is better for us to believe. But I've come to think it best to overlook the flat-footedness of some neo-pragmatists' glibness on this topic. There's far more depth and import in WJ's philosophy than is dreamt in most interpretations of his delineation of what it means for a philosophical view to "work" and successfully guide our experience.
Some of my favorite WJ quotes:
"Keep your health, your splendid health. It's worth all the truths in the firmament."--Letter to Schiller
"Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf." --Will to Believe
"The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights." Pragmatism III
Monday, January 10, 2022
"Interesting"
Who is the most interesting living philosopher?
— Nigel Warburton 🧡 #RejoinEU (@philosophybites) January 10, 2022
Sunday, January 9, 2022
Simone de Beauvoir
It’s the birthday of the novelist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (books by this author), born in Paris, France (1908). She entered the Sorbonne, and it was there that she met another philosophy student, Jean-Paul Sartre. He was five feet tall, had lost his sight in one eye, wore baggy clothes, and seemed to have no interest in hygiene. But he loved to talk and he was both funny and brilliant. Beauvoir later said, “It was the first time in my life that I felt intellectually inferior to anyone else.”
Sartre was equally impressed by Beauvoir’s intellect, especially when she finished her philosophy degree in one year after it had taken Sartre three years to finish his own. She was the youngest person to receive the degree in French history. They fell in love but, instead of getting married, they decided to form a pact. They would both have affairs with other people but they would tell each other everything. That basic arrangement of their relationship would last for the rest of their lives.
They didn’t even live together, but every evening they would meet in a café and show each other what they were working on. They each edited the other’s work and they gave each other ideas and together they helped formulate the school of philosophy known as existentialism, which was the idea that human beings should consider themselves completely free to define their own existence, without regard to religion, culture, or society.
Sartre wrote his book Being and Nothingness (1943) about the new philosophy, and Beauvoir followed with a book of ethics based on the same ideas called The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). But one of her most famous books was inspired by an offhand comment Sartre made one day. They were talking about the differences in the ways men and women were treated, and Beauvoir claimed that she’d never been adversely affected by this treatment. Sartre said, “All the same, you weren’t brought up the same way a boy would have been; you should look into it further.”
So Beauvoir did look into it. She spent weeks at the National Library in Paris researching the way women had been treated throughout history. The result was her book The Second Sex (1949), in which she wrote, “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” It was one of the first comprehensive arguments that the difference between the sexes was the result of culture, not nature, and it helped found the modern feminist movement.
Beauvoir went on to write many more books, including several volumes of autobiography, such as Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), about her childhood, and The Prime of Life (1960), which tells the story of her relationship with Sartre and the years they spent together during World War II.
Simone de Beauvoir said, “The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.” WA
Sartre was equally impressed by Beauvoir’s intellect, especially when she finished her philosophy degree in one year after it had taken Sartre three years to finish his own. She was the youngest person to receive the degree in French history. They fell in love but, instead of getting married, they decided to form a pact. They would both have affairs with other people but they would tell each other everything. That basic arrangement of their relationship would last for the rest of their lives.
They didn’t even live together, but every evening they would meet in a café and show each other what they were working on. They each edited the other’s work and they gave each other ideas and together they helped formulate the school of philosophy known as existentialism, which was the idea that human beings should consider themselves completely free to define their own existence, without regard to religion, culture, or society.
Sartre wrote his book Being and Nothingness (1943) about the new philosophy, and Beauvoir followed with a book of ethics based on the same ideas called The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). But one of her most famous books was inspired by an offhand comment Sartre made one day. They were talking about the differences in the ways men and women were treated, and Beauvoir claimed that she’d never been adversely affected by this treatment. Sartre said, “All the same, you weren’t brought up the same way a boy would have been; you should look into it further.”
So Beauvoir did look into it. She spent weeks at the National Library in Paris researching the way women had been treated throughout history. The result was her book The Second Sex (1949), in which she wrote, “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” It was one of the first comprehensive arguments that the difference between the sexes was the result of culture, not nature, and it helped found the modern feminist movement.
Beauvoir went on to write many more books, including several volumes of autobiography, such as Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), about her childhood, and The Prime of Life (1960), which tells the story of her relationship with Sartre and the years they spent together during World War II.
Simone de Beauvoir said, “The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.” WA
Saturday, January 8, 2022
Kwasi Wiredu
Kwasi Wiredu, one of the greatest of African philosophers, has died at the age of 90. If you don't know about him, you should. He was an unbelievably decent man; I know because he was my first departmental Chair. Do read:
https://t.co/plVOUMkE9o
(https://twitter.com/KAnthonyAppiah/status/1479907725505089543?s=02)
https://t.co/plVOUMkE9o
(https://twitter.com/KAnthonyAppiah/status/1479907725505089543?s=02)
Thursday, January 6, 2022
ungrading & unteaching
Hmm...
Tim Gill (@timgill924) tweeted at 8:42 AM on Wed, Jan 05, 2022:
I'm not only 'ungrading' this semester. I'm 'unteaching' too. The students are choosing the readings for the class and teaching via group presentations each session. I'm just doing administrative work *for* them, like submitting the grades. I want this to be THEIR classroom.
(https://twitter.com/timgill924/status/1478738799198883850?s=02)
Tuesday, January 4, 2022
TEXTS Spring 2022
REQUIRED for Spring 2022:
- Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life (SS) by John Kaag
- Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age (WGU) by Susan Neiman
- How the World Thinks by Julian Baggini (HWT)
RECOMMENDED:
- A Little History of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton (LH)-see link to etext in sidebar
- Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen (FL)
- William James, to be announced... see syllabus
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)