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!