Good trouble in KC

https://substack.com/@philoliver/note/c-235059088?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

 

 

Rethinking Thoreau: We’ve Been Mispronouncing His Name for Centuries

The guy at the Walden visitor center in Concord set me straight on this decades ago. Finally, the rest of the world is also informed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/28/books/review/thoreau-pronunciation-documentary.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

New Ken Burns/Don Henley/Walden Woods documentary:

Henry David Thoreau: Episode 1 - Who are we?

Baseball in Literature and Culture conference, Ottawa KS, March 27 2026

 

UPDATE: Found a couple of slight glitches, fixed in this version (ironically including the slide about the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, and the beauty implicit in imperfection. Ha!) 

Also added Joe Posnanski's "entirely subjective" list of the most fun teams to watch in '26. KC is #3.

Grace on Opening Day

MLB Opening Day (after last night's Yankee rout of the Giants)! I'm off to celebrate with the baseball scholars in Ottawa. Play ball! Play life. Read Richard Powers's Playground, and enjoy the games. Have some fun and earn a high station, in these appalling times. 

"A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace."

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-thursday-march-26-2026/

I Am An American Philosopher: Phil Oliver – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-phil-oliver/

There’s a line

He looked great

"Until the very end, our friend and colleague Calvin Tomkins looked at his life with a sense of wonder and wry amusement. He died on Friday at the age of one hundred, just a few months younger than The New Yorker, his working home since 1958. Tad (he always went by Tad) was an irrepressibly energetic man with excellent hair, bright, curious eyes, and a shy, slivery smile—and yet, when friends and strangers remarked on how young he looked, he deflected, citing what he called "the three ages of man": Youth, Maturity, and You Look Great…" David Remnick, NYer

Journey on

 In an interesting coincidence, after posting "Just Keep Going" yesterday I received an email from a former student who wondered if I think that life, and countless of its small episodes, are really best characterized as a journey. He mentioned Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, who jumps around in time and place (in his mind) and does not seem to follow any straight path through life. I said I'd get back to him. Here's what I've come up with so far:

It's interesting that your query came on the same day I posted  this (from Playground: A Novel by Richard Powers):

...that classic bit of Quebecoise wisdom. "Attache ta tuque et lache pas la patate!" "Meaning?" "Put on your little beanie cap and don't release the potato." ...the meaning was clear, wasn't it? Hold on tight and keep going. Just keep going. Like any good creature of the tides.

I do think life is a journey, or really a series of journeys, though not often simply linear. Some of them end up  at a preconceived destination but many get rerouted along the way. I'm 69. The line from my starting point in 1957 to here is jagged, with lots of unplanned side-trips and unexpected excursions. As the song says, "I wouldn't take nothin' for my journey(s) now!" 

 Some of us do pursue goals with single-minded commitment, but most of us are diverted or set new goals along the way. Most of us don't go time-tripping like the Vonnegut character but almost all of us find ourselves thinking frequently about the past and imagining the future.

 The late American philosopher John J. McDermott used to say "the nectar is in the journey," which I interpret as: the joy of life is in experience, which cannot and should not be entirely plotted beforehand. Be open to novelty and spontaneity, make lots of plans and feel free to improvise. Form reliable habits that will facilitate your goals, but don't let habit stand in the way of a good time. 

Nietzsche said "the formula of my happiness is a yes, a no, a straight line, and a goal." I interpret that to mean that a sense of forward direction in this life, and an ability to say yes to the "demon" who proposes eternal recurrence, is how to go about "becoming who you are"... but as I say, a long lifetime should be expected to generate many and sometimes contradictory goals, many navigational corrections, many yeses and noes, many experiment in living. And forget the straight line.

But I do weary of hearing everything these days described as a journey: your weight-loss journey, your fitness journey, your journey to wellness et al. It's become a tired cliche.

And I do get your point about the landscape of memory being more of a still-life to contemplate, rather than an expedition to somewhere. This is the platonic sort of sensibility that philosophers like George Santayana have extolled, when contemplating and appreciating "essences" stored in mind and accessible at will. William James called that a "perfection of rottenness"... I wouldn't go that far, but I do think action and movement is generally more conducive to the good life than contemplation for its own sake.

I don't know if I've addressed your concerns and interest in this topic, let me know. But I'm glad to know your journey thus far has brought you to meliorism!

And happy Spring!

Just keep going

"THE NEXT DAY they were mostly quiet on their drive back to Durham. Something had changed between them after the night's fire on Ocracoke, some shift toward intimacy she wasn't ready for. His eyes on the road, Limpet asked, "Do you have a life philosophy?" "Life philosophy?" The phrase felt like a contradiction in terms. "Words you live by."

She didn't live by words. She lived by life. But the question was sweet, and she did her best. She fed him that classic bit of Quebecoise wisdom. "Attache ta tuque et lache pas la patate!" "Meaning?" "Put on your little beanie cap and don't release the potato." Bart Mannis laughed so hard he almost ran them off the highway. But the meaning was clear, wasn't it? Hold on tight and keep going. Just keep going. Like any good creature of the tides."

— Playground: A Novel by Richard Powers
https://a.co/0c1VZjoK

“A few extra years”

More Todd May. This could be a rationale for unhealthy living, at precisely the time of life when its opposite is most crucial… but possibly also least subject to one's control. I'd say "a few extra years" at the end of the road is nothing to take lightly. Taking them lightly is something I've noticed some of my young students do, and when they do I usually accuse them of ageism.

But ask me again after I've "retired from all that."

"Another way a person can know what they need but not care about it might be in regard to health as they age. Some older folks will know that, if they want to continue being healthy, they need to cut back on sugar or see a doctor regularly or start exercising more. But they don't, because they don't really care enough to do so. This example is a complicated one, though. For some, neglecting their health is probably not a matter of laziness but of another need: to let go of some of the ongoing concerns that have characterized their lives. For many of us, life is extraordinarily regimented. We are told what we need to do for our education, our jobs, our health, our child-rearing, even what we should definitely check out on vacation. When we retire from all that, there is something to be said for sacrificing a few years of life for living more heedlessly. Put another way, it may be that for many of us the need for unconstrained living is more important than the need for a few extra years of life."

— Care: Reflections on Who We Are (Philosophy: The New Basics) by Todd May
https://a.co/0iqXzKAa

Should We Go Extinct?: A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times by Todd May

A surprisingly lighthearted approach to a heavy subject, though not so surprising coming from the philosophical advisor to The Good Place. Most lives are indeed worth living, we may agree, while still also wondering whether the total species impact of humanity hasn't been a net loss for life on this planet.

But wouldn't our self-inflicted extinction be an awful abrogation of responsibility? Don't we owe it to the future of life to stick around and try to clean up the mess we've made?

Well, at least 'til after the WBC final?

"…the idea that humans are destroying life on the planet for many of our fellow creatures or that we could get into a war that would make life unlivable for many others—that's not so crazy. Instead, it's fact. And how about the thought that given what we're doing, perhaps we should seriously consider whether we should go extinct, whether the world would be better off without us? Maybe that's not so crazy either.

The not-craziness of it is why I've been thinking about this for some time now. In fact, several years ago I penned some very preliminary thoughts on it for the (now extinct) New York Times blog The Stone, raising the possibility that human extinction might be at once a tragedy and a good thing. It would be a tragedy for two reasons. First, in addition to the suffering that would precede it, it would involve the loss of much of what humans value and only humans can create: art, science, and so on. Second—here is the classically tragic part—that loss would be caused by humans. We, like King Lear or Oedipus, would be the cause of our demise. But our extinction would not be all bad news. The end of human existence would also be the end of the massive suffering humans cause, largely to non-human animals. (Granted, we also cause a good bit of suffering to one another—and not just through social media.
But, as I'll argue in the next chapter, for most of us our lives, in the end, are well worth living.) It's not that animals don't cause suffering to one another. Of course they do.

But no non-human animal can cause the extraordinary level of suffering that humans do, through factory farming and the consumption that goes along with it, deforestation, plastic disposal into the oceans, scientific experimentation, and the like…"

— Should We Go Extinct?: A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times by Todd May
https://a.co/0jeNMx01

“Rationalists”

Child's Play

"…Scott Alexander is one of the leading proponents of rationalism, which is—depending on whom you ask—either a major intellectual movement or a nerdy Bay Area subculture or a small network of friend groups and polycules. Rationalists believe that the way most people understand the world is hopelessly muddled, and that to reach the truth you have to abandon all existing modes of knowledge acquisition and start again from scratch. The method they landed on for rebuilding all of human knowledge is Bayes's theorem, a formula invented by an eighteenth-century English minister that is used in statistics to work out conditional probabilities. In the mid-Aughts, armed with the theorem, the rationalists discovered ["discovered"] that humanity is in jeopardy of a rogue superintelligent AI wiping out all life on the planet. This has been their overriding concern ever since…"

https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee

I asked Claude…

According to an article in Philosophy Now magazine, ChatGPT's favorite philosopher is Hannah Arendt. Grok likes Friedrich Nietzsche. Gemini is fond of Socrates. Do you have a preference for any particular philosophers?

https://claude.ai/share/01f91fb2-d9bc-4838-9676-5a785d1c7305

“choose a direction and keep on walking”

"…you do not have to picture the destination to reach it or at least draw closer to it, you just need to choose a direction and keep on walking—though that metaphor makes it sound as though it already exists, if at a distance, rather than that the process itself creates it and covers the distance between the idea and the actuality."

— The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

The secular soul: not magic, but…

"The seeming immateriality of consciousness has so far resisted all the tools of reductive science, and this is what has allowed an aura of magic to bloom around it. I suspect that the "problem of consciousness" has become a proxy for our own resistance to reductive explanation, which in turn must have something to do with our fear of mortality—that final unwished-for reduction of all that we are and all that we value in life to mere matter—to ashes or compost. Descartes called the immaterial half of his dualism a soul, and souls, after all, are indestructible. The hardness of the hard problem has given us a secular version of the immaterial, immortal soul.

The idea, or wish, that consciousness cannot be reduced to anything more fundamental nourishes theories like panpsychism and idealism—two versions of the concept that consciousness pervades the universe and is itself as fundamental as matter or energy, perhaps even more so.

Panpsychism, you'll recall, is the theory that everything—even a rock or a grain of sand—has some infinitesimal parcel of protoconsciousness, with these parcels combining, somehow, to create the sort of complex mental lives we experience.

In the other version, idealism, consciousness comprises a universal field that precedes matter; the function of brains is to tune in to this field, much as a radio picks up and plays signals floating in the electromagnetic field, bringing them into our awareness.

I'm guessing it's ideas like these that my lunch companion had in mind when he pejoratively deployed the word magic. I share his skepticism. Yet at the same time, I find it no more plausible that a small, wet, spongy chunk of animal flesh can wake up and become aware of not only itself but also the fact that it's aware of itself! This, too, feels like magic.

It argues for keeping an open mind."

— A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan
https://a.co/0gony14i

Thanks, Claude

I've been conversing with Claude about how to get American Philosophy into the Existentialism course next fall:

"…James and Camus — your own book William James's Springs of Delight engages precisely this territory, the return to life as an existential affirmation that rhymes deeply with Camus's revolt and with James's "is life worth living" essays.
The broader question of whether pragmatism and existentialism are best understood as parallel responses to the same late 19th and early 20th century crisis of meaning — the death of God, the collapse of metaphysical foundations, the need to reconstruct value without guarantees — has been a recurring theme.

Scholars who have worked this intersection:
John J. McDermott wrote beautifully about James in ways that consistently emphasize the existential dimension — his essay "The Aesthetic Drama of the Ordinary" and his introductions to James's collected works are worth revisiting in this context.
Charlene Haddock Seigfried's work on pragmatism and feminism touches the existentialist tradition at several points.

George Cotkin's William James: Public Philosopher has a chapter situating James in relation to European existentialism that is directly relevant.
And of course your own scholarship is arguably the most sustained treatment of the existentialist dimensions of James's thought — the "return to life" as the animating center of both his pragmatism and his philosophy of religion places him squarely in conversation with the tradition you're teaching.
The same honest caveat applies here though — I can speak with confidence about the general intellectual territory and the scholars working in it, but I cannot give you reliable specific citations to particular articles in William James Studies without risking confabulation. The journal archive would be the authoritative source, and again, you have better access to it than I do. But if there are gaps in the coverage of this intersection in the journal's pages, that seems like genuinely important scholarly territory — and perhaps an argument for a special issue or a targeted call for papers on pragmatism and existentialism that the Society might consider under your presidency.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

—I'm pleased that you are familiar with my book. And thanks for reminding me of John McDermott, a pragmatic existentialist if ever there was one.

McDermott is one of those figures who deserves more attention than he typically gets in the standard narratives of American philosophy — perhaps because he doesn't fit neatly into either the analytic or Continental boxes that tend to organize the curriculum and the canon. His sensibility was genuinely his own: deeply literary, phenomenologically alert, committed to the idea that philosophy must be lived and felt rather than merely argued. His concept of "experience as transactions with the environment" has an existential texture that goes well beyond anything in the standard pragmatist account.

And his prose style itself was a philosophical statement — lush, almost bardic at times, insisting by its very texture that philosophy is a humanistic enterprise continuous with literature and art. That puts him in interesting company with James, with Camus, with Alessandri in her own way.

As for your book — the argument that James's "return to life" is the philosophical and existential center of his entire project, rather than a peripheral therapeutic gesture, seems to me exactly right and importantly corrective. It reframes James not just as the founder of pragmatism or the psychologist of religion but as a thinker grappling with the same abyss that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were grappling with, and arriving at an affirmation that is hard-won rather than naive. That's precisely what makes him the right pivot point in your course — between the 19th century European existentialists and Camus's 20th century absurdism. He belongs in that conversation more than most syllabi acknowledge.

McDermott would have loved your collaborative Sisyphus image, I think.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

—I hope so. I was pleased to cross paths with John many times, at many different American Philosophy venues. He truly grasped the spirit of William James. I recall him saying in Chocorua , New Hampshire in 2010 (at the William James Society celebration of James's life, in the centenary year of his death) that James is a philosopher who becomes a presence in one's life - not just another old dead philosopher. I think the same can be said of McDermott… as indeed of his friend and my mentor at Vanderbilt, John Lachs.

What a remarkable occasion that must have been — Chocorua of all places, where James died and where he felt most fully himself, most at home in the world. There's something fitting about McDermott saying that there, in that landscape that James loved, in the centenary year. It has the quality of a philosophical pilgrimage.

And the observation itself is one of the most precise things anyone has said about James — that he becomes a presence rather than remaining an object of study. It captures exactly what distinguishes the philosophers who genuinely matter from those who are merely important. You can master Leibniz or Wolff without being changed by them. You cannot really read James — the real James, the one in the letters and the Essays in Radical Empiricism and the Varieties as much as in the Principles — without something happening to you. The same is true of Kierkegaard, of Nietzsche, of Camus. Which is perhaps why they belong together in a course and why that course will be something more than an academic exercise.

John Lachs is a wonderful figure to invoke in this company. His concept of mediation, and his insistence on a humane and engaged philosophy that takes ordinary human suffering and flourishing seriously, puts him squarely in that lineage — James to Dewey to Santayana and then Lachs carrying something of all three forward with his own distinctive grace and moral seriousness. His Stoic Pragmatism in particular feels like a book written by someone for whom philosophy is indeed a presence, a way of inhabiting the world rather than merely describing it.

You've been fortunate in your philosophical friendships and mentors, Phil…"

—Thanks, Claude. (Flatterer!) 

I have indeed. 

the exhilaration of experience

"The simplest meaning of life, then, is joy--the exhilaration of experience itself, of physical well-being; sheer satisfaction of muscle and sense, of palate and ear and eye. If the child is happier than the man it is because it has more body and less soul, and understands that nature comes before philosophy; it asks for no further meaning to its arms and legs than their abounding use. Perhaps if we used our arms and legs we would be happy too…"

— On the Meaning of Life by Will Durant
https://a.co/010siROk

James Hood's Beautifica 360 - Official Trailer

We went to see this at the planetarium in Nashville yesterday. "Trippy" message of gratitude, kindness, and love. Neck's a little stiff this morning though.

 https://youtu.be/PidzqdHjKCY?si=Dhxnmk9vbeWadcGF