Questions SEP 24

Spinoza, Locke, & Reid-LHP 13-14. Rec: FL 15-16. HWT 16-17.... 

SEP 24

• Spinoza - #H1 Christian; #H2 Aidan Taylor; #H3 Evan B.
• Something in FL 15-16 or HWT 16-17 - #H2 Maria Lassiter
• Something in QE Part II - Is Democracy Possible - #H3 Floris O.

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

Peace Corps

On this day in 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed legislation creating the Peace Corps, an agency aimed at fostering mutual understanding between Americans and people around the world.

Conceived as a Cold War initiative, the agency would outlast its original context, providing help to those in need globally and offering an opportunity to improve mutual understanding between Americans and those in other countries.

https://bit.ly/2HbaABJ

Looking for a Superhero? Check the Public Library.

… You know something is wrong in America when beloved schoolteachers and librarians become the target of hate groups, and the attacks' effect on Ms. Jones was profound. She couldn't sleep. She couldn't eat. Her hair fell out in clumps. When the abuse didn't stop, she decided to fight back, suing her tormentors for defamation — these legal efforts are ongoing — and cofounding an advocacy group called Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship.

Across the country, Republicans have shown no sign of abandoning the culture war over gender- and racially-inclusive books. It's an election year, and such efforts rarely make front-page news anymore, but book bans are alive and well. According to PEN America, a free-speech organization, more books were banned during the fall semester of 2023 than in the entire previous academic year. The American Library Association reports that book bans in public libraries rose 92 percent in 2023 over the previous year — a year that was itself marked by accelerating bans...

Margaret Renkl

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/opinion/book-bans-librarians.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ngrp=mnp&pvid=2792883B-9CAE-4B23-A7AD-14E8385B8F58

Why Is Trump Spreading Rumors About Haitian Immigrants? Rousseau Knows.

… Inequality wasn't new to the 18th century. It had been a central attribute of the feudal world. But its ability to survive feudalism's decline during the Enlightenment was alarming, and it became increasingly important for Rousseau to understand the techniques by which it was maintained.

One tool that sustained inequality, Rousseau observed, was divisiveness. It is, he observed, in conditions of extreme inequality that cynical leaders would foment "everything that might weaken men united in society, by promoting dissension among them" and sowing the "seeds of real division." Those in power accomplish this, he speculated, by fostering a "mutual hatred and distrust, by setting the rights and interests of one against those of another."

In a world where a few have much and the many have comparatively little, political leaders seek to distract the people from the fact of their meager wealth and status. They can achieve this by pitting the relatively poor against one another. So long as the poor come to see other segments of their economic class as "the problem," the position of the rich and powerful is secure.

The rhetoric of division is, for Rousseau, a tool of distraction. This is why he elsewhere cautioned the people against being "seduced by private interests which some few skillful men succeed by their reputation and eloquence to substitute for the people's own interest." Namely, he worried about the talents of skillful demagogues.…

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/opinion/trump-springfield-haitian-immigrants.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ngrp=mnp&pvid=B8752CEA-4AA8-45B7-88C0-D76FB5A77D42

And still, we can’t change our ROTC building

Clingman's Dome the highest point in Tennessee to have its name changed back to Kuwohi the original Cherokee name.

https://www.wkrn.com/news/clingmans-dome-name-change-proposal-approved-kuwohi-name-restored-to-smokies-mountain/?

Epicurean (et al) podcast

Epicurus's Letter to Menoeceus

On death, the gods, pleasure, pain, and free will

MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI

SEP 20, 2024

The Practical Wisdom podcast I produce is not for the faint of heart. Each series of episodes presents a deep dive into a single text from the Greco-Roman wisdom tradition. From time to time, as in the case of this post, it may helpful to pause and collect together all the entries referring to the same piece of classical writing, so that listeners can go back to them at their leisure, listen to them in sequence, and gain a broader appreciation of what they are about.

Today I submit to you a collection of links to my commentary of Epicurus’s famous letter to Menoeceus, in which the founder of the most famous hedonist school of philosophy explains the basics of his doctrines.

Epicurus touches on a wide variety of subjects, including why we should study philosophy, the nature of death and of the gods, the distinctions among different kinds of pleasure, the relationship between pleasure and pain, misconceptions about Epicureanism, determinism, and the notion of free will.

The translation I used is the one by George K. Strodach, published in Being Happy, Penguin, 2020. Here are the links to the pertinent episodes:

1. Why we should study philosophy

2. On death and the gods

3. The three kinds of pleasures

4. Pleasure vs pain

5. Why Epicureanism is not the philosophy of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll

6. On determinism and free will

https://thephilosophygarden.substack.com/p/epicuruss-letter-to-menoeceus?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1074027&post_id=148164923&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=35ogp&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

George

On this day in 1796, President George Washington's farewell address was printed in the Daily American Advertiser as an open letter to American citizens. The most famous of all his "speeches," it was never actually spoken; a week after its publication in this Philadelphia newspaper, it was reprinted in papers all over the country.

The address was a collaborative effort that took Washington months to finalize, incorporating the notes that James Madison had prepared four years prior when Washington intended to retire after his first term, as well as numerous edits from Alexander Hamilton and a critique from John Jay. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay were accustomed to writing collectively; together they had published the Federalist Papers, 85 newspaper articles published throughout the 13 states to introduce and explain their proposal for a Constitution.

Now only eight years old, the Constitution was in danger, Washington feared, of falling prey to the whims of popular sentiment. In 6,086 words, his address seeks to encourage the nation to respect and maintain the Constitution, warning that a party system — not yet the governmental standard operating procedure — would reduce the nation to infighting. He urged Americans to relinquish their personal or geographical interests for the good of the national interest, warning that "designing men" would try to distract them from their larger common views by highlighting their smaller, local differences. "You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection," he wrote.

Washington also feared interference by foreign governments…

https://thewritersalmanac.substack.com/p/the-writers-almanac-from-thursday-433?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&r=35ogp

Mike Pence & James Buchanan

 

The former vice-president did his Constitutional duty on Jan.6, 2021. That makes him a dutiful public servant, not--surely--a "hero"... unless it's become heroic not to participate in anti-democratic insurrection.

He regards James Buchanan as a hero. One of our past campus speakers viewed the namesake of our top Honors Scholarship very differently:

==

Democracy in chains

Hobbes and Machiavelli were not friends of democracy.

Neither was the MTSU alum who is celebrated on our campus with a commemorative plaque, a reading room in the library, and an honors fellowship in his name: James M. Buchanan.

His story, and the threat to American democracy it represents, is dramatically told in Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains, the kindle version of which is currently on sale for $1.99. Everyone connected with MTSU needs to know the story, and the origins of the Political Economy Research Institute on our campus.

 

"James M. Buchanan, economist and author, received the 1986 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Grandson of a former governor, he attended Middle Tennessee State Teachers College, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Chicago. Buchanan's emphasis on applying market principles to political choice led to the founding of the subdiscipline of Public Choice, recognized throughout the world. Since 1983, Buchanan has been associated with George Mason University." Marker

bust

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America
Nancy MacLean

Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.

In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.

Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy.

Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.

• “To Buchanan, what others described as taxation to advance social justice or the common good was nothing more than a modern version of mob attempts to take by force what the takers had no moral right to: the fruits of another person’s efforts. In his mind, to protect wealth was to protect the individual against a form of legally sanctioned gangsterism.”
• “[James M. Buchanan] directed hostility toward college students, public employees, recipients of any kind of government assistance, and liberal intellectuals. His intellectual lineage went back to such bitter establishment opponents of Populism as the social Darwinists Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. The battle between "the oppressed and their oppressors," as one People's Party publication had termed it in 1892, was redefined in his milieu: "the working masses who produce" became businessmen, and "the favored parasites who prey and fatten on the toil of others" became those who gained anything from government without paying proportional income taxes. "The mighty struggle" became one to hamstring the people who refused to stop making claims on government.”
• “The same cannot be said of James Buchanan. His impact is still being felt today. For it was Buchanan who guided Pinochet’s team [in Chile] in how to arrange things so that even when the country finally returned to representative institutions, its capitalist class would be all but permanently entrenched in power.”
• “Buchanan carried the anti-organized-labor message into his classes, teaching his students that the Wagner Act had licensed “union monopolies” that distorted the wage structure. He used an example involving the state’s labor market, blaming the United Mine Workers of America for the rising unemployment of coal valleys.”
• “Buchanan took pride in what he called his academic entrepreneurship. Contributions from corporations such as General Electric and several oil companies and right-wing individuals flowed in, as anti–New Deal foundations provided funds to lure promising graduate students. Before long, the cofounders of the center were able to seize an opportunity to prove their enterprise’s value to the Byrd Organization on the issue that mattered most to its stalwarts in these years: the future of the public schools.”
• “Democracy,” the towering African American historian John Hope Franklin observed in the midst of World War II, “is essentially an act of faith.” When that faith is willfully exterminated, we should not be surprised that we reap the whirlwind. The public choice way of thinking, one sage critic warned at the time James Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, is not simply “descriptively inaccurate”—indeed, “a terrible caricature” of how the political process works.”
• “But take a longer view—follow the story forward to the second decade of the twenty-first century—and a different picture emerges, one that is both a testament to Buchanan’s intellectual powers and, at the same time, the utterly chilling story of the ideological origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance. For what becomes clear as the story moves forward decade by decade is that a quest that began as a quiet attempt to prevent the state of Virginia from having to meet national democratic standards of fair treatment and equal protection under the law would, some sixty years later, become the veritable opposite of itself: a stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and the national levels, back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation.”
• “Privately, Gordon Tullock and Jim Buchanan discussed the social control function of denying a liberal arts education to young people from lower-income families who had not saved to pay for it. “We may be producing a positively dangerous class situation,” Tullock said, by educating so many working-class youth who would probably not make it into management but might make trouble, having had their sights raised.” ― Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

Scottie Pippen, Epicurean

"As you get older, you'll realize that a $30,000 watch and a $30 watch both tell the same time. A Gucci wallet and a Target wallet hold the same amount of money. A $10,000,000 house and a $100,000 house host the same loneliness. A Ford will also drive you as far as a Bentley. True happiness is not found in materialistic things, it comes from the love and laughter found with each other. Stay humble… the holes dug for us in the ground are all the same size."

— Scottie Pippen

https://www.threads.net/@dukekwondc/post/DACstlWOa5j/?xmt=AQGz6kA2J7Wvj0S688SZ3uAVcotjiGlYHv9ZSs3LKwnGsw

Questions SEP 19

Midterm report presentations begin today: 

• #H1 Coven Gallers
• Something in QE Part I - What does it mean to be human? - #H2 Maheswari Ramesh; #H3 Braden Clapper
• Marcus Aurelius - #H2 Aidin Card

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... 

We had a serious and sober conversation in Environmental Ethics yesterday 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