Nothing serious

I can relate.

"Our University moreover inflicts a monstrous amount of routine business on one, faculty meetings and committees of every sort, so that during term-time one can do no continuous reading at all—reading of books, I mean. When vacation comes, my brain is so tired that I can read nothing serious for a month. During the past month I have only read Tolstoy's two great novels, which, strange to say, I had never attacked before. I don't like his fatalism and semi-pessimism, but for infallible veracity concerning human nature, and absolute simplicity of method, he makes all the other writers of novels and plays seem like children."

"The Letters of William James, Vol. II": https://a.co/7orKwS6

Artificial learning

Cautionary warning for my upcoming Philosophy in Recent American Fiction course:

"All I want for Christmas is to have my brain scrubbed of the memory of teaching a university-level literature course where most students used AI to tell them what the books were about and then also used AI to tell me what they thought about the books."

https://www.threads.com/@annasandyelrod/post/DSfpbY_iSuF?xmt=AQF0tMZ1NskaVYuYlU8maJd3ef_ngVHjxLuJ9bGQUAaJ2UyhV1ab79qOALAYfukA4ftq8Xa5&slof=1

Resentment vs. Happiness

"...In an inevitably plural society, one of the things a person growing up needs to acquire is skin thickness. So I don't think encouraging people to resent everything they think is a moral mistake made by everybody else is a good way to prepare yourself for a happy life. I have not myself very often experienced people complaining about this sort of thing, but I don't like it when they do. If I'm teaching a course on race and racism, it's a bit weird that I'm not allowed to mention the N-word.

At the beginning of most of my classes, I tell students that if someone says something that upsets you, assume they didn't mean to. Let's start with that. Evidence can mount up that that's not what's going on. But that should be our presumption in a college classroom..."

Kwame Anthony Appiah on Identity in an Age of Essentialism
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-professor-of-pluralism?bc_nonce=hpau1vwvsvdpy3tcevyy7a&cid=reg_wall_signup

Schopenhauer

"Nietzsche considered him one of his most important teachers, and Freud, astonishingly, thought him one of the half-dozen greatest individuals who had ever lived. One of the few professional philosophers to treat him as more than a crank was Wittgenstein, who perhaps saw in his work an anti-philosophy akin to his own."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n22/terry-eagleton/pregnant-with-monsters

"Staying Informed and Not Overwhelmed in 2026"

NYTimes: We are asking readers to share their tips for coping with the news.

I avoid it on waking (I wake early, before dawn). I do pick up my phone or tablet, but I go straight to the Bluesky app's "beach sunrises" tab and take in a few beautiful images... then maybe read an inspiring Maria Popova "Marginalian" post, or the like... then pick up a book and read for 30 minutes... then write in my journal... then walk the dogs. THEN I'm almost ready to confront the NYT, BBC, New Yorker, Harper's, et al. When I get to school (I teach Philosophy at Middle Tennessee State University) I open class with a glance at onthisday.com (because students don't know much about history) and only then at the NYT website. I do not face the news alone and by myself. We discuss it.

Commencement address

I've heard some unimpressive ones over the years at my school, and anticipate another this afternoon. To compensate:

Tim Minchin - 9 Life Lessons

https://youtu.be/FJ__a4qVE_g?si=5Wz6_4xEJ0OtiE4M

Read the whole thing here. Sure beats the "eat more fiber" debacle of '21.

Exit line

What a lovely end-of-semester gift from a student in Philosophy of Happiness. Volume II includes the transcendent 1910 letter to Henry Adams I sent them off with: " I am so happy...I can stand it no longer!"

 https://bsky.app/profile/osopher.bsky.social/post/3m7rz2pr6ok2c

If I retire in May '27 and this was the last time I will have taught PHIL of Happiness, it'll leave a warm and lasting impression. Good times, happy memories.

Passing the torch

A good coda for a semester, a generation, and a career, from a former teacher and true patriot committed to what he calls the long game. 

The great responsibility of adulthood, as Hannah Arendt said, is to love the world enough to want to try and save it... or at least not contribute to its ruin.

"It is far too easy to attribute failure to a generation, way too simplistic to blame those with the power to change society for the better who did not exercise such power. Most of the people I have worked with did the best they could under circumstances over which they felt little control. But the stark reality—as I have traced it in these pages and lived it over the past seventy-eight years—is that the richest and most powerful nation in modern history, the America that emerged victorious from World War II and whose democracy was a beacon for much of the rest of the world, is now coming up short. Trump and Trumpism are consequences, not causes. As I hope I've made clear, the causes have been growing for more than forty years. We could have addressed them. We did not. The responsibility to remedy this—to restore genuine opportunity, strengthen democracy, and contain the bullies—now falls to those who come after us. They include my wonderful, brilliant students."— Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America by Robert B. Reich

Making of hell a heaven

Late in my professorial career, I keep discovering philosophers I'd never heard of. Is this guy any relation to Fred?

"…[John] Macmurray devotes as much space to spelling out an alternative to the egocentric bias of Western philosophy as he does to arguing against its theoretical bias. Regarding the theoretical bias, he concludes that 'I do' is more foundational than 'I think'. Regarding the egocentric bias, he argues that the fundamental unit of personal reality is not 'I', but 'you-and-I'. We can note a connection by observing that 'I do' implies a 'you' interacting with an 'I', but Macmurray's two criticisms remain distinct. Macmurray didn't argue for the importance of positive personal relationships, he started from it, observing that the most valued thing in our lives is the relationships central to them, giving our lives meaning. Sartre said "Hell is other people": Macmurray could equally have said "Heaven is other people." Both are true, but Macmurray is more inclined to dwell on the positive…"

Jeanne Warren
Philosophy Now
Oct/Nov '25

Standing tall in the ER

Thanks, Bob Reich, for being such good company in the ER last night, and delivering such timely thoughts on teaching, learning, retiring, aging, living…

"…Teaching is not about conveying facts or thoughts or even theories. It's about conveying energy and excitement. If my students wanted to know what I think about something, they could read my books. What I could give them in the classroom was my enthusiasm, curiosity, and enjoyment about the subject we were learning about. Rather than use our classroom time together to lecture, I wanted to grab their interest, stir their own excitement. I had to figuratively grab them by the shoulders and shake them, laugh with them, run up and down the aisles of the classroom, asking them questions, keeping them surprised and engaged. 

If I couldn't touch their emotions, I couldn't get them to think hard. Touching their emotions meant connecting with them. Telling stories that illustrated the points I wanted them to understand. Having them tell their own stories. Using humor—not telling jokes but punctuating our lessons with self-deprecating stories drawn from my life (some of which I've shared with you in these pages) and with gentle digs at conventional wisdom. 

When they laughed, they opened themselves up to being receptive to the more serious things we talked about. Laughter made even the largest classes intimate. We were all sharing in the joy of being together. Every class was different. Each had its own personality. Every semester was like meeting a new person, gradually getting to know them, coming to understand what made them tick, how they thought, what they considered interesting or alarming or amazing or funny…"

— Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America by Robert B. Reich

Animal planet

 I love it when students share photos of their pets, gives me an excuse to share mine.

In response to Sophie's pooch pics, and Amanda's cartoon

 That's Angel (no longer with us, except in spirit) next to a sign at Brook Hollow Baptist Church that says: "Regular walking can strengthen your heart and improve your general health. Walk and enjoy yourself as you enhance the quality of your life." And so we have, my pooch pals and me, in this neighborhood since '96.

Nell and Pita, members of our family since '18

Queenie & me, c.1959

Zeus (not immortal, but enduring in memory)

The true joy in life

I keep encountering this wonderful George Bernard Shaw monologue on the internet, actually a hybrid of his 1903 play Man and Superman and one of his speeches. Its repeated meming evidently is due to Jeff Goldblum's impressive recitation from memory. Definitely worth remembering and repeating.

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

At your age I looked for hardship, danger, horror, and death, that I might feel the life in me more intensely. I did not let the fear of death govern my life; and my reward was, I had my life. You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life; and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live…

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy…

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

Life is no "brief candle" for me.

It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

George Bernard Shaw

Remember, in December

Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil moods over one's way of looking at the Kosmos.
—William James, age 26, to his S.A.D. friend Tom.

https://substack.com/@philoliver/note/c-183010341?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

https://gemini.google.com/share/4591a5943906