Kaag's coming

I'm pleased to report that my nagging persistence has finally payed off: John Kaag has agreed to deliver MTSU's Applied Philosophy Lyceum next Fall. Details to follow. 

Can Claude get religion? Or humanism?

"In a public statement of its intentions for its Claude chatbot, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has said that it wants Claude to be “a genuinely good, wise and virtuous agent.” The company raised the moral stakes this month, when it announcedthat its latest A.I. model, Claude Mythos Preview, poses too great a cybersecurity threat to be widely released. Behind the scenes, Anthropic has been trying to shore up the ethical foundations of its products, working with Catholic clergy and consultingwith other prominent Christians to help foster Claude’s moral and spiritual development.

Anthropic’s intentions are admirable, but the project of drawing on religion to cultivate the ethical behavior of Claude (or any other chatbot) is likely to fail. Not because there isn’t moral wisdom in Scripture, sermons and theological treatises — texts that Claude has undoubtedly already scraped from the web and integrated — but because Claude is missing a crucial mechanism by which religion fosters moral growth: a body.

While Claude might have a mind (of sorts) that can process information, it cannot meditate, fast, prostrate itself in prayer, sing hymns in a congregation or participate in other aspects of the physical life of religion. And this makes all the difference: According to the scientific literature, it’s the practice of religion — not merely the believing in it — that brings about its characteristic benefits.

There is robust data, for example, linking religion to greater health and well-being. But that link is not strong for people who merely identify themselves as believers. It’s only when people also practice a faith — attend weekly services, pray or meditate at home — that religion’s benefits become pronounced: The more people “do” religion, the happier and healthier they tend to be..." nyt

For the record:

We who “do” humanism are generally pretty happy & healthy too, in my experience. 

For humanists the Happy Human is about celebrating being human – celebrating what human beings can do and celebrating our potential for happiness. Humanists believe we have one life and so we should make the most of our lives by trying to be happy and supporting other people to do the same.

William James on selfhood

Dr. Dianda’s Lyceum address was excellent, effectively making the Jamesian point that a complex and multi-relational self is rarely “fractured” beyond repair. https://bsky.app/profile/wjsociety.bsky.social/post/3mjuygvzmjk2b

Introducing Dr. Dianda

(As I'll do later this afternoon.)

Welcome to our Applied Philosophy Lyceum, which we’ve been hosting for 34 years now. Thanks to Dean Lyons and the College of Liberal Arts for their support… and thanks as always to MTSU News for helping us get word of this event out to our campus community. One small correction: we did not “begin as two separate departments”... but we in the now-singular Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies are indeed united in our shared mission to bring the best and brightest public-facing scholars to middle Tennessee for our respective Lyceum and Colloquium events year after year.

(And NOTE, we’ll be doing this again next Friday when we welcome Professor Vanessa Wills from George Washington University. She’ll be talking about love and friendship. But first…)

It is my honor to launch our spring Lyceum season by introducing a speaker I am proud now to have recruited twice: first to serve as Secretary of the William James Society, and now as our speaker this afternoon.

Professor Alexis Dianda received her PhD from The New School for Social Research in 2017. Upon completion of her PhD, she joined Dartmouth College as a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Leslie Center for the Humanities. In 2019, Professor Dianda arrived at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where she teaches for the Department of Philosophy and the Philosophy, Politics, and the Public program.

Professor Dianda’s teaching interests touch upon American philosophy, feminist theory, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophy. She is the author of Varieties of Experience: William James after the linguistic turn (Harvard University Press, 2023), which insists that “lived experience must remain the bedrock of our philosophical reflections.”

Among her courses at Xavier: Ethics as Introduction to Philosophy, Simone de Beauvoir, and Philosophy of Hope.

But why, really, have I been so eager to recruit Professor Dianda? It must be because she says things like: “I’m a crazy dog lady… I grew up with dogs and have always been a dog lover.” (Me too. My dad was a vet.) Her pups, pit bull mixes like one of mine, are called Henry Adams, Tillie Olsen, and Huck Finn.

Plus, she reads Montaigne and Melville. So of course she knows all about “fractured selves,” as we’re about to hear.

Welcome to MTSU, Professor Dianda.

“American philosophers are philosophers in the business of offering a vision of America: its people, its principles, its ideals. In this way, the Americanness of American philosophy is, I think, bound to a distinctive impulse toward national self-creation. American philosophers, in other words, are those who take America, the concept, the country, the people, as their object of conceptual and critical inquiry.” Alexis Dianda*

What does American philosophy mean to you?

This is a really difficult question. I usually give two different answers depending on the context. The first is to say that American philosophers share a certain set of philosophical assumptions: they’re pluralists, fallibilists, anti-foundationalists, and anti-representationalists. These features do cover whole swaths of American philosophical thought, and they’re helpful for thinking about pragmatism in particular, which is what most people think American philosophy is. But appealing to these philosophical commitments doesn’t really go very far toward explaining why we exclude from the category people like Derrida or Foucault. And it also doesn’t help us understand why we include (or want to include) people like Santayana, Cooper, Cavell, or Du Bois... (continues)

*Alexis Dianda is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Xavier University. She is the author of The Varieties of Experience: William James After the Linguistic Turn (Harvard, 2023) as well as articles and chapters on the work of James and Richard Rorty. Her other research and teaching interests include feminist theory and nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophy.

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-alexis-dianda/

Existentialism is not a philosophy

Made my flyer for the fall existentialism course yesterday. Should have put this on it. “Existentialism is not a philosophy but a label for several widely different revolts against traditional philosophy. Most of the living “existentialists” have repudiated this label, and a bewildered outsider might well conclude that the only thing they have in common is a marked aversion for each other. To add to the confusion, many writers of the past have frequently been hailed as members of this movement, and it is extremely doubtful whether they would have appreciated the company to which they are consigned. In view of this, it might be argued that the label “existentialism” ought to be abandoned altogether.” — Existentialism From Dostoevsky To Sartre by Walter Kaufmann https://a.co/0hJm9sln

Special

NYTimes: Artemis II Crew Reunites With Families and Fellow NASA Astronauts

“This was not easy, being 200,000 plus miles away from home,” he said. “Before you launch, it feels like it’s the greatest dream on Earth, and when you’re out there, you just want to get back to your families and your friends."

He added that “It’s a special thing to be a human, and it’s a special thing to be on planet Earth…”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/science/nasa-artemis-moon-astronauts-houston.html?smid=nytcore-ios-sharee

MTSU’s April 17 Applied Philosophy Lyceum speaker to explore the ‘fractured self’

Some fractured facts in this story: we did not begin as "two separate departments," the Dept of Philosophy added Religious Studies to its title and mission a few years ago. Previously, there was no Department of Religious Studies at MTSU. Their speaker series is called a Colloquium, not a Lyceum, a name which has its specific roots in the ancient Athenian school of Aristotle called the Lyceum.

But we're grateful for the publicity. All good. Looking forward to the event.

https://mtsunews.com/dianda-philosophy-lyceum-dianda-2026/

Lyceum Apr 17

Sisyphus descending

Claude summarizes our conversation

The Jamesian Thread
Throughout the conversation we kept returning to James — his defense of experience against capital-P Philosophy, his insistence that religious experience has cash value even if its metaphysical claims are doubtful, and his sociable pluralism as a model for taking believers seriously without validating supernaturalism. Your own position as a "Jamesian pragmatic pluralist" — secular, humanist, yet genuinely respectful of others' experience — emerged as a principled and difficult stance that avoids both dismissal and condescension.

Secular Grace
The conversation closed on the idea that the fully inhabited secular life has its own raptures — what we called "secular grace." The Jamesian affirmation of existence differs from Nietzsche's in being constitutively social and democratically available: not heroic solitary amor fati but a shared, relational yes-saying. Sisyphus, in James's version, would compare notes with someone on the way back down. All of which, you noted, nicely foreshadows your fall existentialism course.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

https://claude.ai/share/d8099634-f9a2-4f24-9a28-804b3bc4a745

Back in the saddle

I'd gotten out of the habit of recreational (as opposed to campus commuter) biking, in the winter months. But I had good rides in Warner Park Monday and to Centennial yesterday. Felt good and right. Must keep pedaling, nothing on solid earth feels so much like flying (and freedom) as rolling on air-on two wheels, under one's own motive force of propulsion. It's fun, it's fitness-inducing, and in Michael Pollan's phrase (mentioned to Ezra Klein)  it's excellent "consciousness hygiene."