Delight Springs

Showing posts sorted by relevance for query opening day. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query opening day. Sort by date Show all posts

Monday, August 24, 2020

Opening Day!

LISTEN. Opening Day will be a little different this year. Okay, a lot different.

2020 has been a year like no other, hasn't it? [LISTEN to my Opening Day intro last January, which now seems a small eternity ago.]

But Opening Days are still a big deal. We get to introduce ourselves, and I get to begin introducing the course. Everybody's still in first place, we've all still got high hopes (I hope).

Here's how I'll introduce myself when our first class of the semester gathers in Zoom-space this afternoon...



If you haven't guessed, from my sporting metaphors, I'm a baseball fan. Raised in the St. Louis area, I went to my first live Cardinals game several stadia ago. I've not got to see them in action much yet in 2020, bunch of them came down with the virus.

My wife and I were in Scottsdale, AZ back in March, enjoying Cactus League Spring Training, when the plug was pulled on this baseball season. The rest of Spring Training was canceled (glad we got to see Murfreesboro TN's favorite millionaire athlete David Price pitch for LA earlier in the week), MLB's Opening Day was delayed ('til late July, it turned out, and that turned out to be too soon). Resumption of our Spring semester was also delayed, and we haven't been in the brick-and-mortar classroom since.

But let's look on the Bright Side. Many of us, thanks to these extreme measures, social distancing, masking etc., have managed to dodge COVID-19. We're healthy enough to carry on by other means. We'll be communicating, in my classes, on this platform and on Zoom. And we'll look forward to the day when we can again share physical space on our currently-lonely campus.

Meanwhile, in spite of everything, it's Opening Day again. As Mr. Cub used to say, let's play two! (He got to play on grass under the big sky at Wrigley Field, before they conformed and added lights and night games, we'll play on Zoom-CoPhi first, then Environmental Ethics). But since I'm a peripatetic, I'll again urge us all to find our own piece of turf and sky each day. I guarantee it will improve your and our experience of the course. As Chris Orlet reminds, in Gymnasiums of the Mind: Solvitur Ambulando, "it is solved by walking"--for pretty much any it.
Nearly every philosopher-poet worth his salt has voiced similar sentiments. Erasmus recommended a little walk before supper and “after supper do the same.” Thomas Hobbes had an inkwell built into his walking stick to more easily jot down his brainstorms during his rambles. Jean- Jacques Rousseau claimed he could only meditate when walking: “When I stop, I cease to think,” he said. “My mind only works with my legs.” Søren Kierkegaard believed he’d walked himself into his best thoughts. In his brief life Henry David Thoreau walked an estimated 250,000 miles, or ten times the circumference of earth. “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,” wrote Thoreau, “unless I spend four hours a day at least – and it is commonly more than that – sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from worldly engagements.” Thoreau’s landlord and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson characterized walking as “gymnastics for the mind.” 
Read the rest, if you're curious about the peripatetic life. It's a short essay, but if you follow the peri-philosophers' footsteps it may just change your life.

Also by way of introducing myself, I suggest you take a look at Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot [video]- he was an early influence on me and my version of Cosmic Philosophy.

And William James's opening lecture on Pragmatism, wherein he insists that we all have a philosophy whether we know it or not.

And my book...

And Brian Cohen...

For the record, here's how things began the last time we commenced a real (on ground, in person) semester:

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Opening Day!

Or Opening Deja-vu, all over again. Like last time, and the time before, and the time before that, but also different. [Fall 2019]

Another fresh start, a blank slate, a return to that form of life we call academia and philosophia. Call it what you will, the first day of a new semester is an always-welcome recurrence I'm happy to affirm. I say yes to the challenge of introducing the next generation to this odd but essential practice of mature reflection on behalf of our adolescent species. The break was actually a little long, in some ways, though the break from that congested commute down I-24 to the 'boro was (as always) a time-giving, anxiety-relieving happy respite.

We'll do our usual Opening Day round of introductions: Who are you? Why are you here? I always encourage students to be creatively and playfully thoughtful with their responses to those questions, and there's usually a small handful of creatively playful responses mixed in with the dull literal Joe ("Just the facts, M'am") Fridays. "I'm Bill, I'm in concrete management, I'm here for the GenEd credit..." Thanks, Bill. Anybody given any thought to who you are independent of your academic and career aspirations, why you're living this life, in this place, with these goals and intentions?

Philosophers and physicists wonder why there's something rather than nothing, a universe where there might (we suppose) have been nought at all. Beyond that, as William James said, there's a mystery as to the existence of every particular, "this very thing," in its very particularity. Today begins, again, the worthy task of getting more of my young charges to grasp and grapple with (or at least acknowledge and value) that mystery, and grow from the encounter.

Atheism and Philosophy begins again today too. In addition to the usual questions we'll ask: Do you have firm convictions regarding religion, spirituality, an afterlife, a deity...? Do you think religion and science are (or can be) compatible? What sources of meaning and purpose in life do you recognize?

So, shall we hit the ground running? And not say, like that jaded bowl of petunias, "Oh no, not again!"




Or maybe I'll just talk about my dogs again, and my canine philosophy. (Did someone mention Diogenes?)






Monday, January 25, 2021

Opening Day 2021!

 LISTEN. Some more student introductions, on the eve of Opening Day... (I must be crazy to have stacked all my classes this semester on Tuesday/Thursday, from roughly 9 am to 9 pm with just a pair of breaks. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger, though, if Nietzsche was right. He wasn't, but it's a useful fiction.)

My personal philosophy is "Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. But Today is a gift: that is why it's called the Present" as quoted by Master Oogway from the animated film Kung Fu Panda. I think it is really important to live presently and to not let the past and future bring down your day or make you feel anxious or upset.

I love the Panda philosophy, which Older Daughter introduced me to years ago. The idea of doing what you can do today, and then putting it behind you and meeting the next, is greatly appealing. It's a kind of stoicism, isn't it? And it reminds me of that ubiquitous internet quote that Emerson may or may not have actually said or written: “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” 

Presentism has its limits and problems, but there's nothing like a new day (right, John Legend?) to clean your slate (right, John Locke?) and make a dawn in a person. (Right, HDT?) "Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me."
I love political Science and to learn all about the history of democracy in America. This year politically has been a mess and I can’t wait to hear everyone opinion. It is my second semester in MALA and I am still struggling to figure out what to do with it but I’ll get there.
I was a Poli Sci undergrad major for two years, before switching to Philosophy at Mizzou. So, it took me more than your two semesters to figure out what to do with my formal education. The philosophers there seemed to have a better grasp on the core insight that drew me to an interest in politics, Aristotle's: "Man is by nature a political animal," where the political is understood as broadly social and collaborative... hence "democratic"...
I currently live in Johnson City, but I will be moving to _____ very soon with my fiancé... I have decided to take philosophy because I needed a fine arts class and philosophy sounded the most interesting. I am not sure exactly what philosophy means to me, but if I had to say what it meant to me it would be that philosophy is something that is central to who you are as a person. I am not exactly sure what my philosophy would be.
I taught in Johnson City for a year in the early '90s, right before moving back to Nashville and marrying. What pretty country!

We academic philosophers don't normally think of ourselves as in the "fine arts," not at least in the primary sense:
1. "creative art, especially visual art whose products are to be appreciated primarily or solely for their imaginative, aesthetic, or intellectual content."
The secondary meaning comes closer:
2. "an activity requiring great skill or accomplishment."
But I always say, following William James's first Pragmatism lecture, that we're ALL philosophers, skillful or otherwise. "I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds..."

One goal of our course is to all become at least a bit more skillful at articulating our personal philosophies, our sense of what it means to think and act with wisdom. ("Philo" + "sophia" in Greek means the love of wisdom.)

So, here we go again. Opening Day 2021! 

Monday, August 28, 2017

Opening Day!

It's Opening Day of the Fall 2017 semester at our school.  I'll meet two sections of CoPhilosophy this afternoon, commencing once again to try and explain what philosophy is for: it's for getting better at asking questions and entertaining alternative possible answers, for coexisting with those who answer differently, for learning to love thinking for ourselves, for learning how to be happy, for learning how to live and die.... among other things.

 Alain de Botton's School of Life has its critics, but it sure performs a valuable service when it comes to opening a philosophical conversation. That's what our classes are, extended conversations with one another but also with philosophers long past and, we may hope, into a far future.


Our quest is for clarity, in William James's sense when he defined philosophy as an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly, and for sweep:

"...explanation of the universe at large, not description of its details, is what philosophy must aim at; and so it happens that a view of anything is termed philosophic just in proportion as it is broad and connected with other views... any very sweeping view of the world is a philosphy in this sense." Some Problems of Philosophy

We're also in search of mutual understanding and respect, in Spinoza's sense when he said "I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them."

And we're also after kindness, in Kurt Vonnegut's sense when he welcomed babies to planet Earth and informed them of its one indispensable rule:
"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."
Ultimately of course, in philosophy we're searching for wisdom. We like it, we love it, we need a lot more of it,  philo-sophia...


It’s one of the grandest and oddest words out there, so lofty, it doesn’t sound like something one could ever consciously strive to be – unlike say, being cultured, or kind. Others could perhaps compliment you on being it, but it wouldn’t be something you could yourself ever announce you had become... SoL
And so we begin. Put on your philosophy goggles, everyone. You don't want to look directly at the Form of the Good (aka the sun) without 'em. No one's exempt from the laws of nature.


Opening Day this year is also Freedom Day.
On this day in 1963, more than 200,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, now known as the March on Washington. The march was the brainchild of civil rights activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who once said, "We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers." They worked diligently for nearly two years, convincing members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to put aside their differences and participate...There was no violence. There was not one single arrest. Marchers linked hands, they sang, and they chanted all the way from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, where the 16th speaker of the day, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., began what would become one of the greatest speeches in history with, "I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation." WA
And it's the poet Goethe's birthday (1749). He said "A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days." Not so. I can stand ordinary days just fine, so long as the occasional exception is peppered in from time to time. Days like today.



Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Opening Day, part 2

LISTEN. Opening Day on Zoom was indeed different, and a bit rushed. I didn't get around to saying everything I'd intended. Congress-people read things into the record all the time, why can't I? So, for the record (and since today is still Opening Day, for the students who'll be Zooming with me at 2 pm)...

I'll explain why I call the Intro to Philosophy course CoPhilosophy: because we're all in it together, and because I agree with William James's collaborative approach: "The pluralistic form takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of, being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of co..."

And, we'll remind ourselves that there should be far more to a university education than just a quick crash-course in vocational credentialing. Higher education is supposed to equip us to become good people leading good lives, not just good consumers earning good salaries. It's supposed to make us successful in the fullest sense, not in the constricted way James ridiculed in a wonderfully acidic epistle to H.G. Wells: “The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease."

Our goal, simply put, is success at school as the first step on the road to non-squalid success in life. That's what college is for.

One clear mark of our success in CoPhilosophy will be the enhanced ability to perceive and consider alternative points of view, to sustain amicably constructive conversation in the face of dissent. To that end, and now that "an Authorized Employee may carry a concealed handgun on MTSU property," I'm in the market for one of these:
Image result for hhgtg pov gun
POV gun

(But, too bad I'm not teaching on MTSU property this semester.)

And... [from January 2016]

What is college for?

Isn't that a good question to ask, on the first day of the Spring semester? And to keep on asking, alongside "What is philosophy for?" It deserves more than the ritual lip-service we tend to give it at term's beginning, before settling into autopilot.

A college course ought to be an adventure, not just another hurdle on the way to a life of rote, routine, and repetition. One of our goals, in my classes - two CoPhilosophy (Intro) classes this semester, Atheism, & Bioethics, all on Tuesday/Thursday - is to arrive at the last day of class with a sense of having only begun an exciting lifelong journey, not wanting it to end. Older Daughter says she had a class like that last semester, and it was exceptional. It ought to be the rule.

One theme I'm going to push in all my classes this time is summed up in a statement of Spinoza's. “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” That's marvelous, and though it didn't prevent his own scorn and excommunication it suggests the wisdom of a John Rawls-ian kind of veil. We should always approach our studies as though we didn't already know what we think we know. We should seek to understand not just the position we've defended in the past, but also the positions we'll end up rejecting in the future.

That's not easy, particularly where passions run deep. Atheism, for instance. I won't ask anyone to suffer total amnesia as to their previous conclusions about the (non-) existence of god(s), but I willl ask them to pursue Spinozistic understanding of others' conclusions in a Rawlsian spirit of fairness.

I'll also ask them to adopt a suitable humility, if not quite Socratic then at least Einsteinian and Saganesque:  “One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we have.”

We should always be willing to listen to those who are willing to listen to us. That's the simple condition of collaborative co-philosophizing.

Image result for bat and ball

I tend to treat Opening Day of the academic season much as I treat its April counterpart in baseball, as a lighthearted and festive occasion to wax just a bit silly on a subject I care deeply and seriously about. But setting aside Douglas Adams' philosophical whale and Monty Python's Argument Clinic for a moment,  I want to think a bit this morning about that question. It's the title of chapter five of William Deresiewicz's controversial book Excellent Sheep, and it's really the main subject of that book (which generated most of its heat with a critique of elite education, but whose message applies to us public land-grant educators and our students as well). Some of its more trenchant observations:
“College, after all, as those who like to denigrate it often say, is "not the real world." But that is precisely its strength. College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.”
“Life is more than a job; jobs are more than a paycheck; and a country is more than its wealth. Education is more than the acquisition of marketable skills, and you are more than your ability to contribute to your employer’s bottom line or the nation’s GDP, no matter what the rhetoric of politicians or executives would have you think. To ask what college is for is to ask what life is for, what society is for—what people are for. Do students ever hear this? What they hear is a constant drumbeat, in the public discourse, that seeks to march them in the opposite direction. When policy makers talk about higher education, from the president all the way down, they talk exclusively in terms of math and science. Journalists and pundits—some of whom were humanities majors and none of whom are nurses or engineers—never tire of lecturing the young about the necessity of thinking prudently when choosing a course of study, the naïveté of wanting to learn things just because you’re curious about them.” 
“You’re told that you’re supposed to go to college, but you’re also told that you are being self-indulgent if you actually want to get an education. As opposed to what? Going into consulting isn’t self-indulgent? Going into finance isn’t self-indulgent? Going into law, like most of the people who do, in order to make yourself rich, isn’t self-indulgent? It’s not okay to study history, because what good does that really do anyone, but it is okay to work for a hedge fund. It’s selfish to pursue your passion, unless it’s also going to make you a lot of money, in which case it isn’t selfish at all.” 
“What’s the return on investment of college? What’s the return on investment of having children, spending time with friends, listening to music, reading a book? The things that are most worth doing are worth doing for their own sake. Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state. What’s at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human.” 
“In 1971, 73 percent of incoming freshmen said that it is essential or very important to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life,” 37 percent to be “very well-off financially” (not well-off, note, but very well-off). By 2011, the numbers were almost reversed, 47 percent and 80 percent, respectively. For well over thirty years, we’ve been loudly announcing that happiness is money, with a side order of fameNo wonder students have come to believe that college is all about getting a job.” 
"The idea that we should take the first four years of young adulthood and devote them to career preparation alone, neglecting every other part of life, is nothing short of an obscenity. If that's what people had you do, then you were robbed. And if you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning - the same beliefs, the same values, the same desires, the same goals for the same reasons - then you did it wrong. Go back and do it again.”  
Every teacher and student, not just the ivies, should read Excellent Sheep, and then its sequel "How College Sold Its Soul to the Market":
As college is increasingly understood in terms of jobs and careers, and jobs and careers increasingly mean business, especially entrepreneurship, students have developed a parallel curriculum for themselves, a parallel college, where they can get the skills they think they really need. Those extracurriculars that students are deserting the classroom for are less and less what Pinker derides as “recreational” and more and more oriented toward future employment: entrepreneurial endeavors, nonprofit ventures, volunteerism. The big thing now on campuses — or rather, off them — is internships.
All this explains a new kind of unhappiness I sense among professors. There are a lot of things about being an academic that basically suck: the committee work, the petty politics, the endless slog for tenure and promotion, the relentless status competition. What makes it all worthwhile, for many people, is the vigorous intellectual dialogue you get to have with vibrant young minds. That kind of contact is becoming unusual. Not because students are dumber than they used to be, but because so few of them approach their studies with a sense of intellectual mission. College is a way, learning is a way, of getting somewhere else. Students will come to your office — rushing in from one activity, rushing off to the next — to find out what they need to do to get a better grade. Very few will seek you out to talk about ideas in an open-ended way. Many professors still do care deeply about thinking and learning. But they often find that they’re the only ones.
Too bleak for Opening Day? (And the anniversary of Vesuvius, and the baptismal day of Mr. Keating's favorite poet? WA) Maybe it's not too late for some of us to retain or regain our souls, to gather some rosebuds and make much of our brief time together before the volcano blows. Hope springs eternal, in the beginning.

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. 

Questions like: What is philosophy? What is wisdom? What is the status and importance of truth (and facts, and reality) in our country and our world? How does the world think? Why do so many of us think it's okay to believe whatever we feel like believing? Why do so many have so cavalier a disregard for the health and well-being of our peers? Why do so many choose to live in Fantasyland?

And is it true, as an old prof of mine liked to quote Martin Heidegger, that "only a god can save us now?" 

Or was Carl Sagan right: there's no sign that help is coming from any external quarter to save us from ourselves?

I choose, as a humanist and meliorist, to look on the bright side. Let's co-philosophize and see if we can't improve our situation. Or at least do no harm.

I'll leave it there, for now. I don't want to presume that any of us has all the time in the world.

Monday, August 27, 2018

Opening Day!


Back from a wonderful weekend meetup in Chattanooga with old Grad School pals who descended on the Gig City from all directions - not quite Seven States, but next year we'll add Carolina to Tennessee, Alabama, and Virginia. It was the perfect transition from summer to the first day of fall semester today. I can now heartily recommend The Honest Pint, The Hair of the Dog, and the Pucketts breakfast buffet. The Lookouts fell dramatically to the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp. But really, it is only a game.

Today I'm meeting a section of Honors Intro ("CoPhilosophy") and Environmental Ethics. Much to talk about, to bemoan, to hope we'll soon overcome.

Opening Day every semester is still special, after all these years. Fresh starts and new beginnings never get old.

But the old ones were good. Maybe it's time to bring back the argument clinic, or the whale...



It is important to note that suddenly, and against all probability, a sperm whale had been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet. And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with suddenly not being a whale any more. This is what it thought as it fell. 

Ahhhh!!!! What's happening? Excuse me! Who am I? Hello? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? What is this 'I' that I want to know what it is? Calm down, get a grip now ... ooh! This is an interesting sensation... ANGLE: From below. The whale is wriggling a bit. Oh! This is an interesting sensation, what is it? It's a sort of... yawning, tingling sensation in ... well I suppose I'd better start finding names for things if I want to make any headway in what for the sake of what I shall call an argument I shall call the world, so let's call it my stomach! Good. Ooooh! It's getting quite strong now. And hey,what's this whistling roaring sound going past what I'm suddenly going to call my head? Perhaps I can call that ... wind! Is that a good name? It'll do. Perhaps I can give it a better name later when I've found out what it's for! It must be very important because there certainly seems to be an awful lot of it. Hey! What's this thing ... this ... let's call it a tail - yeah! Tail! The whale thrashes its tail. Between the camera and the whale drops the bowl of petunias. It falls from sight. Hey! I can really thrash it about pretty good, can't I? Wow! Wow! Doesn't seem to achieve much but I'll probably find out what it's for later on. How. Have I built up a coherent picture of things yet? No. Never mind. Hey, this is really exciting, so much to find out about, ao much to look forward to, I'm quite dizzy with anticipation ... Or is it the wind? There really is an awful lot of that now, isn't there? It's eye tries to look down. Camera pulls back from the whale, abandoning it ... And hey! What's this thing coming suddenly coming towards me very fast, so big and flat and round it needs a big wide-sounding name like ... ow ... ound...round ... ground! That's it, ground! I wonder if it'll be friends with me?

Unlike the philosophical whale, we'll hit the ground running!

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

Opening Day!

LISTEN. Hooray hooray, it's another Opening Day!

Our Spring '23 semester commences today. I'm on from (practically) dawn 'til bedtime, with three sections of CoPhi commencing early, Experience ending late in the evening, and that long commute I so enjoy not making during the breaks bookending it all. 

I've posted my introductions and look forward to meeting a fresh crop of students, most of whom won't get my ancient cultural references to (for instance) Monty Python... but they're all individuals anyway, I'll point out.

Experience is different, it's a Master of Liberal Arts class composed of students spanning the post-grad demographic and thus meets late to accommodate those who work regular day jobs. Once in a while one or two of them are older even than I, and I'm old enough to have seen more than a few friends and colleagues hang it up already. 

I'm not ready to retire though, and when eventually I do I'll sure miss Opening Day. I'll miss getting to know the new kids, and I'll miss holding them captive to hear messages like this one from a peer in Dallas:

"… Universities are factories of human knowledge. They're also monuments to individual ignorance. We know an incredible amount, but I know only a tiny bit. College puts students in classrooms with researchers who are acutely aware of all they don't know. Professors have a reputation for arrogance, but a humble awareness of the limits of knowledge is their first step toward discovering a little more.

To overcome careerism and knowingness and instill in students a desire to learn, schools and parents need to convince students (and perhaps themselves) that college has more to offer than job training. You're a worker for only part of your life; you're a human being, a creature with a powerful brain, throughout it…" --Jonathan Malesic

So that's our first lesson: be human and stay that way, in school and ever after. Learning is a lifelong affair. We're not here merely to acquire marketable skills, we're here to learn to love to learn and grow and live well with all kinds of others. We're here to learn to flourish, to seek the habits of character that contribute to genuinely good lives. Socrates and Aristotle will back me up on that, very shortly.

First, though, I'll ask Who are you? Why are you here? (etc.), for as Marcus the Stoic said,

"A person who doesn't know what the universe is, doesn't know where they are. A person who doesn't know their purpose in life doesn't know who they are or what the universe is. A person who doesn't know any one of these things doesn't know why they are here. So what to make of people who seek or avoid the praise of those who have no knowledge of where or who they are?"—MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 8.52"

What I say of such people is that they need to study a little philosophy, to acquire a little humility and a noble curiosity. They need to address those questions and a whole lot more. I'll try to help.

Monday, August 26, 2019

Opening Day Fall 2019

Deja vu, all over again (but did you really say that, Yogi Berra? "I didn't say most of the things I said."): It's Opening Day! I get to introduce myself (and my dogs) to a batch of new students, and they get to reciprocate.
 [LISTEN... 2016...2013-"You don't have to follow me"... What college is for... Success at school vs. success in life]
And who said history doesn't repeat, but it definitely rhymes? Mark Twain? (When in doubt, attribute random witticisms to him.)

Whoever said whatever, history definitely does rhyme, and it echoes, on the first day of each new semester. I love Opening Day, when we're all still working with a clean slate and nobody's in the proverbial cellar. Yet.

I've been on an Alan Watts kick lately, for reasons somewhat obscure to myself. He said "you have no source," we're all source material, we're "IT"... but that doesn't mean we don't each have a series of starts. Ready, set, Goo (as in "Prickles & Goo")... [Alan Watts in "Her"... MALA report]

On an episode of Madam Secretary last season, Blake told his friend (who got booted from his government job because his girlfriend was apparently spying on the State Department) he ought to go into teaching. "You're just saying that because I like to rant." Well, that's one reason to do this job. I confess to the occasional rant, though I prefer to call it a spontaneous and impassioned moment of inspired righteous eloquence. You'll be the judges, at evaluation time.

Another and better reason to teach is because that's the best possible way to learn. My students have always taught me more than I taught them, as much when in error as not. The entire process of preparing to teach, class after class, is an education in itself.

So, Fall '19 co-philosophers, welcome! I look forward to learning from you. I'll try to hold the rants in check, and we'll hit the ground more softly than that benighted whale in Douglas Adams' odd guide to life, the universe, and everything. You didn't come here for an argument [yes they did/no they didn't], but you'll get that and more. ("You see," Alan says, "I'm a philosopher, and if you don't argue with me I don't know what I think. So if we argue, I say 'Thank you,' because owing to the courtesy of your taking a different point of view, I understand what I mean.")

And maybe we'll get just a little wiser.

If we don't get stuck.

Monday, August 23, 2021

Opening Day

LISTEN. Here we go, our first proper Opening Day since January 2020 and first class in an actual classroom in almost eighteen months. 

Not quite proper, since we'll be masked and worried about variant strains. Hope we're not setting ourselves up for another round of lock-down. For today at least, let's assume not. But let's not be reckless.

So the commute is back. Can't say I'm thrilled about that, but the road trip to Alabama to meet my old pals and take in a minor league baseball game Saturday night was a good road test and a nice transition. (A Trash Panda, btw, is an angel-in-training.)

I have two sections of Honors Intro ("CoPhi") today, and another tomorrow. Happiness too. Live and in person. Hope it's like riding a bike (which I'm not yet supposed to do, per surgeons' instructions--that'll make traversing campus expeditiously between consecutive classes a bit of a challenge, but with ambulatory competence now restored by said surgeons I'm ready).

To study philosophy is to learn to die, said Montaigne (following Socrates and the Stoics and others) in one of his gloomier-sounding essays. But of course that's just the flip-side of learning to live. The passing of one of our great musicians, Tom T. Hall, reminds us that the end of a good life is always occasion to celebrate  the privilege and opportunity of living. “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born," as Richard Dawkins so aptly said.

I always look for some light way of conveying a serious philosophical point or two on opening day. This time I think I'll bring Data and his daughter into our opening conversation. Philosophy begins in wonder, whether you're a carbon-based biological life form or a reflective positronic AI trying to puzzle out your purpose.

I'll also wonder aloud with them what our purpose is: what's the point of human school?

A smartly written recent essay proclaims that "universities are not for producing better citizens…they are not for producing happier human beings.” But I say we can try. We certainly need better and happier citizens.

Our main mission though, surely, remains the purveying of that old Enlightenment ideal we talked about this summer: Sapere aude, as Kant put it. Learn to think (not just opine, not just feel) for yourself, as I prefer to put it.

The best way to learn that lesson, since thinking for yourself is not the same as thinking by yourself, is through amicable collaboration. CoPhilosophizing is my shorthand for that. And William James's. "The pluralistic form takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of, being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of 'co'..."

I think we'll find it much easier to be a collaborative plurality in the classroom than we did in those little Zoom rectangles.



Thursday, August 26, 2021

"I'll be hanging in a classroom one day..."

On Opening Day in Happiness class Tuesday I referenced Opening Day in 2019, and Woody Allen's film Manhattan. Here's what I posted the next day, back then. Other side of COVID seems like more than just two years ago, doesn't it?

Originally published Aug. 30, 2019:

LISTEN. A  student introduced himself yesterday, in Philosophy of Happiness, as "the oldest guy in the room." Sometimes, when people say that, they mean they're 3d year students, twenty or so. This guy really was of my generation, even a little older. A "me generation" product of the 1970s, he called himself, before going on to credit Woody Allen with drawing him to philosophy.

I can't count how many times, over the years, I've referenced scenes and lines from Annie Hall, Manhattan, Sleeper, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Midnight in Paris, et al,  to blank stares of non-recognition. Those who've heard of Woody at all know him simply as one more old guy accused of sexual misconduct, with a sordid intra-family twist.

I can't defend Woody's morals, and of the worst accusations fervently hope he's not guilty as charged. I do know that, like our "non-traditional" classmate, Woody's film work was a big positive influence in my life.

The Woody scenes from Manhattan we referenced in class:


An idea for a short story about, um, people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these real, unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves cos it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about... the universe. Let's... Well, it has to be optimistic. Well, all right, why is life worth living? That's a very good question. Well, there are certain things, I guess, that make it worthwhile. Like what?
OK... for me... 
Ooh, I would say Groucho Marx, to name one thing. And Willie Mays. And... the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony. And... Louis Armstrong's recording of Potato Head BluesSwedish movies, naturally. Sentimental Education by Flaubert. Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra. Those incredible apples and pears by Cezanne. The crabs at Sam Wo's. Tracy's face...

You know, someday we're gonna be like him. And he was probably one of the beautiful people, dancing and playing tennis. And now look. This is what happens to us. You know, it's important to have some kind of personal integrity. I'll be hanging in a classroom one day and I wanna make sure when I thin out that I'm... well thought of...

Tuesday, August 29, 2023

Opening Day, Fall semester '23

Yet another one! I always love the first class of the semester, almost as much as I love the first game of the baseball season. No errors have yet been committed, no losses registered, no rainouts or cancellations.

I always try to find something a little different to say on Opening Day, while recalling some favorite lines from before. This time I note what Robert Frost said about education...

And what the late Gary Gutting of Notre Dame said in response to the question What is college for?

Colleges and universities have no point if we do not value the knowledge and understanding to which their faculties are dedicated.

This has important consequences for how we regard what goes on in college classrooms.  Teachers need to see themselves as, first of all, intellectuals, dedicated to understanding poetry, history, human psychology, physics, biology — or whatever is the focus of their discipline.  But they also need to realize that this dedication expresses not just their idiosyncratic interest in certain questions but a conviction that those questions have general human significance, even apart from immediately practical applications.  This is why a discipline requires not just research but also teaching.  Non-experts need access to what experts have learned, and experts need to make sure that their research remains in contact with general human concerns. The classroom is the primary locus of such contact.

Students, in turn, need to recognize that their college education is above all a matter of opening themselves up to new dimensions of knowledge and understanding.  Teaching is not a matter of (as we too often say) “ making a subject (poetry, physics, philosophy) interesting” to students but of students coming to see how such subjects are intrinsically interesting.  It is more a matter of students moving beyond their interests than of teachers fitting their subjects to interests that students already have.   Good teaching does not make a course’s subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests — and so makes them more interesting.

Students readily accept the alleged wisdom that their most important learning at college takes place outside the classroom.  Many faculty members — thinking of their labs, libraries or studies — would agree.  But the truth is that, for both students and faculty members, the classroom is precisely where the most important learning occursGary Gutting, The Stone 12.14.11

Last time, Jan '23... 

"… Universities are factories of human knowledge. They're also monuments to individual ignorance. We know an incredible amount, but I know only a tiny bit. College puts students in classrooms with researchers who are acutely aware of all they don't know. Professors have a reputation for arrogance, but a humble awareness of the limits of knowledge is their first step toward discovering a little more.

To overcome careerism and knowingness and instill in students a desire to learn, schools and parents need to convince students (and perhaps themselves) that college has more to offer than job training. You're a worker for only part of your life; you're a human being, a creature with a powerful brain, throughout it…" --Jonathan Malesic
The time before, Aug '22...

A new dawn is breaking on us CoPhilosophers... "Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled, per fas aut nefas, to try to impart to you some news of the situation..." --WJ, Pragmatism
What I mean when I call myself an Epicurean happiness philosopher...

Epictetus's Opening Day meditation: "Only begin"...

Every semester should begin with eagerness and zest...

A big message we'll ponder this semester, espoused one way or another by all true philosophers, is: think for yourself... but not by yourself. We're here to collaborate, communicate, talk and listen. We're all individuals...

And we're all a lot like Douglas Adams's* whale...

So, shall we hit the ground running? And not say, like that jaded bowl of petunias, "Oh no, not again!"


*Also, speaking of HHGTG: "42" is not the answer to the ultimate question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. But it is the uniform number of a great and courageous athlete. Extra credit to the first student in each section who can name him. 

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Opening Day!

It's Opening Day of the Spring 2018 semester at our school. [UPDATE: Opening Day has been postponed by weather.]

I'm glad we call it Spring and not Winter, though I do try to appreciate George Santayana's observation that "to be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring." But spring and summer are still what will pull me through, following Thoreau: "A healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter, summer is in his heart."

I'll meet two sections of CoPhilosophy today, commencing once again to try and explain what philosophy is for: it's for getting better at asking questions and entertaining alternative possible answers, for coexisting with those who answer differently, for learning to love thinking for ourselves, for learning how to be happy, for learning how to live and die.... among other things.

Alain de Botton's School of Life has its critics, but it sure performs a valuable service when it comes to opening a philosophical conversation. That's what our classes are, extended conversations with one another but also with philosophers long past and, we may hope, into a far future.

Our quest is for clarity, in William James's sense when he defined philosophy as an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly, and for sweep:

"...explanation of the universe at large, not description of its details, is what philosophy must aim at; and so it happens that a view of anything is termed philosophic just in proportion as it is broad and connected with other views... any very sweeping view of the world is a philosphy in this sense." Some Problems of Philosophy


We're also in search of mutual understanding and respect, in Spinoza's sense when he said "I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them."

And we're also after kindness, in Kurt Vonnegut's sense when he welcomed babies to planet Earth and informed them of its one indispensable rule:

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

Ultimately of course, in philosophy - philo-sophia - we're searching for wisdom.

"It’s one of the grandest and oddest words out there, so lofty, it doesn’t sound like something one could ever consciously strive to be – unlike say, being cultured, or kind. Others could perhaps compliment you on being it, but it wouldn’t be something you could yourself ever announce you had become..." SoL


This semester we acknowledge the particular duress lately suffered by our grand old standby philosophical abstractions "truth, reality, fact," et al, by taking up Kurt Anderson's Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. This moment may have blindsided many, but we might have seen it coming. Maybe, with the right vision, we can see how to get past it.

And so we begin. Put on your philosophy goggles, everyone. You don't want to look directly at the Form of the Good (aka the sun) without 'em. No one's exempt from the laws of nature.

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