Yes, Homer. But...

There is also a time to be wordlessly wakeful and aware.

"There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep." Odyssey, XI, l. 379

Less talk, more attention. Then, words. Only then.

Meliorism: unfamiliar formulation

"Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."*

No. Things worked for are the substance of hope. Faith is the willingness to work, in the spirit of hope, to create evidence in support of the vision of things not seen.

*Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: https://a.co/1gz0zsY

The Fate of Earth Day

...liberals have come to take as a core creed the urgent need to reckon with global warming, and limit carbon emissions. To turn concern into action requires politics. The science of carbon emissions is there. The politics is not. On its anniversary, Earth Day is worth not just celebrating but also studying—as a story with political lessons. ♦

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/15/when-the-earth-moved?_gl=1*eh8bq7*_up*MQ..&gclid=05dc19316ca81fce994f7f12f1af4029&gclsrc=3p.ds

Peter Attia’s Quest to Live Long and Prosper

Attia's point ("How to Die in Good Health") isn't longevity per se, I think, it's to feel good today and plan to feel good again tomorrow. And to know you'll be ready, whenever the time comes, to rejoin Russell's great sea of "universal life" (which really you're already doing, if you're doing it right). The point is to "live long and prosper" right now. Like Annie Savoy said, "I mean William Blake!

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour...

Attia "compares healthy aging to investing in retirement: contribute what you can, whether it’s a daily walk or an extra half hour of sleep, and the benefits may compound over time."

As we grasp that our days are limited, we seem to abdicate our need for control; we may try to close the gap between what we want and what we have. Healthy aging seems to require a shift in mind-set as much as a shift in muscle mass...
while I’m here, I want to know that I gave it my all,” he went on. “We have this one shot. Wouldn’t it be a shame if we didn’t make the most of it?”

If "the average American celebrates just one healthy birthday after the age of sixty-five," well, I'm already doing twice as well.

Humility

We live in such angry times in part because we live in such unhumble ones, as I note in this excerpt, published in The New York Times today, from my new book, "The Age of Grievance." -Frank Bruni

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/opinion/students-humility-american-politics.html

Daniel Dennett (1942-2024)

Remembering speaking with Dennet in Chicago at the APA February 2020, Told him I appreciated his email correspondence back in the 90s (and then later when I asked if he could arrange a meeting with Dawkins). Helped him figure out how to use the APA app, and sat across the aisle from him listening to Philip Kitcher and Martha Nussbaum at that meeting. 

"...I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say "Thank goodness!" this is not merely a euphemism for "Thank God!" (We atheists don't believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now…" Thank Goodness! 

==

After decades of enthusiastically following AI’s development, Dennett published a brief, unequivocal essay in The Atlantic earlier this year, “The Problem With Counterfeit People,” arguing that “creating counterfeit digital people” — known as deepfakes — could “destroy our civilization. . . . By allowing the most economically and politically powerful people, corporations, and governments to control our attention, these systems will control us.” Humanity’s future, he believes, depends on strict regulation: he wants every AI-generated thing to have some kind of watermark, so we can tell the difference between fake and real. Meanwhile, he’s taken to warning about the gaps in our understanding of the algorithms that drive machine learning. “Don’t worry about whether it is conscious or not, don’t worry about whether it’s alive or not,” he told me. “Worry about the fact that it can replicate and hence evolve independently of us. That’s what’s scary, because you can’t predict the mutations.”

…

“I think that my career has been all about opening philosophers’ minds to the facts they need to know if they are going to avoid the great foible of philosophy, which is mistaking failures of imagination for insights into necessity.”

He paused again, then said he particularly liked the last part of that sentence. “Your imagination is not gonna get any better if you don’t get out there and learn stuff,” he said. Then he repeated one of his more famous lines: “What you can imagine depends on what you know.”

“So maybe,” I asked, “you occasionally need to replace the footing on the barn?”

“Yeah,” he said…

https://downeast.com/arts-leisure/philosopher-daniel-dennett-on-the-illusion-of-consciousness/


Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soulhttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul

Dennett versus Searle https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12/21/the-mystery-of-consciousness-an-exchange/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/books/daniel-dennett-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare


…If we can’t say exactly how we think, then how well do we know ourselves? In an essay titled “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,” the philosopher Daniel Dennett argued that a layer of fiction is woven into what it is to be human. In a sense, fiction is flawed: it’s not true. But, when we open a novel, we don’t hurl it to the ground in disgust, declaring that it’s all made-up nonsense; we understand that being made up is actually the point. Fiction, Dennett writes, has a deliberately “indeterminate” status: it’s true, but only on its own terms. The same goes for our minds. We have all sorts of inner experiences, and we live through and describe them in different ways—telling one another about our dreams, recalling our thoughts, and so on. Are our descriptions and experiences true or fictionalized? Does it matter? It’s all part of the story.

Stories aren’t real, and yet they’re meaningful; we tell different stories about our minds, as we should, because our minds are different. The story I tell myself about my own thinking is useful to me. It helps me think, by giving me a handle on my mind when thinking gets slippery. The other day, I got stuck on a problem that troubled me. So I went for a swim, hoping to think it through. I wore a wetsuit against the cold water, and at first focussed only on the sensation of cold, and on steadying my breathing. But eventually I warmed up and relaxed. I treaded water a little way out from shore, buoyed by the waves, and prepared to think about my problem; I turned my mind toward it while I watched a seabird float nearby. Nothing happened for a while. I watched the bird, the clouds, the silver water. Then I sensed a thought in need of expression, as I’d known I would. I cleared my throat while the bird flew away. ♦︎

How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking?https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/16/how-should-we-think-about-our-different-styles-of-thinking

The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher

A "philosopher of the moment"… 

"He is not on social platforms; he told El País in a rare interview that he writes three sentences a day and spends most of his time caring for his plants and playing Bach and Schumann on the piano…"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-internets-new-favorite-philosopher?utm_source=threads&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tny&utm_social-type=owned

Life = momentum

"Energy and matter didn’t dissipate after the Big Bang, didn’t flatten out like a puddle into homogenous atomic soup, but clumped and hiccupped into structure. Stars formed, and planets, and surfaces, and seas. That disequilibrium eventually led to us as well.

From this vantage, the question of whether we’re alone could almost become moot. We’re not alone because we’re not separate from the swirl of a galaxy’s arms or the way wind catches dust in a gyre. We’re no more an anomaly than an atom is. How could we ever consider ourselves alone?

But at the same time, life is also something apart from the rest. A protein is more than an atom, a cell is more than a protein—some thresholds are clearly being crossed. Even if the lines are arbitrary, the differences are not.

When we pursue knowledge about the origin of life, we’re thinking about what life is. Is life self-replicating information? Is life a new way for the universe to organize energy? Is it, as Carl Sagan and others have put it, a way for the universe to experience—and hope to understand—itself?

It’s all of those, of course. Life is information and energy and awareness. It’s a squirreling away of entropy, so that one bit of ordered matter can look at another and try to know it. It’s momentum rolling, for a moment, uphill."

--"The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos" by Jaime Green: https://a.co/239Dkpi

Coming summer '24

  

MALA 6050 Americana: Streams of Experience in American Culture B term (7/1-8/9) web assisted (Tuesdays 6-9:10pm in JUB 202) w/Phil Oliver

Cosmic philosophy

Sagan: the stars are in us, we are star-stuff contemplating the stars, a way for the universe to know itself.

 

Tyson: The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.

 

Aurelius: Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.

Blowing smoke

For just over a week, Mount Etna, one of Europe's most active volcanoes, has been spewing circular, mostly white smoke rings into the skies over Sicily… https://nyti.ms/3Je4FKO

Eclipse or lecture

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https://youtu.be/tfnav2afQnI

Healthy Minds, Flourishing Lives

 

Nearly eclipsed

 It will almost eclipse my Honors Lecture...

Across North America on Monday, the moon will materialize and eat into the yellow orb of the sun, casting a shadow over a swath of Earth below, causing a total solar eclipse and reminding all in its path of our planet’s place in the cosmos.

Where the weather cooperates, millions of people will behold the disorienting, disquieting wonder of darkness in daytime. They will experience it on the beaches of Mexico and the plains of Texas; throughout the Midwest, New York State and New England; and across pockets of eastern Canada, from the steeples and spires of Montreal to the rugged coastline of Newfoundland... (continues)

Behind eclipse glasses or other safe means of viewing the phenomenon, they will watch the moon’s shadow grow until the light is extinguished.

In some places, it will be dim for as long as four and a half minutes, and in those moments eclipse viewers may gasp. They may shout. They may clap. They may even cry.

At this moment, it is dark in the South Pacific Ocean, where the eclipsed sun will first rise. As you prepare for this event to glide into your area, here’s what to know:

• The partial eclipse will first make landfall in North America near Mazatlán, Mexico, around 12:51 p.m. Eastern. It will reach the edge of Texas, near Eagle Pass, around 1:10 p.m. Canada will catch its first glimpse at 3:12 p.m. The Canadian province of Newfoundland will be the last major piece of land to see the total eclipse, which will conclude there around 3:45 p.m.

• The eclipse will carve a southwest-to-northeast path, sweeping through San Antonio at 2:33 p.m., Dallas at 2:40 p.m., Little Rock, Ark., at 2:51 p.m., Indianapolis at 3:05 p.m., Cleveland at 3:13 p.m. and Buffalo at 3:18 p.m.

• While the eclipse is most impressive when viewed at totality, hundreds of millions of people may experience a partial eclipse. In Chicago, the sun will be about 94 percent obscured. In Boston, 93 percent. In New York (around 3:25 p.m. Eastern time) and Philadelphia, there will be a 90 percent eclipse.

• Even the most devoted eclipse chasers know that they are at the mercy of the clouds. The New York Times’s weather data team has been tracking the forecast, which showed that nearly everyone along the path in the United States will have at least some chance of clouds obscuring their view. Danger of severe storms also compounded that concern in many parts of Texas. But there were some bright spots on the eclipse path, including Maine and other parts of New England, and optimism expressed for parts of Arkansas through Cleveland.

• In the United States, about 32 million people live along the eclipse’s path, and countless more will be driving toward it (and, eventually, away from it), creating gridlock. Allow extra time, and lots of it.

• It is never safe to look at the sun without protective eyewear. Throughout the partial stage of the eclipse, use eclipse glasses or try to construct a pinhole viewer to observe the shadow over the sun indirectly. It is safe to look at the fully eclipsed sun only for the duration of totality.

• The next opportunity to see a total solar eclipse in the 48 contiguous U.S. states and Canada isn’t until 2044. To see a total eclipse before then, you’ll need to travel.

• 
  

The Sun, the Shadow, and the Unselved Self: Helen Macdonald on Eclipses as an Antidote to Ideologies of Otherness and a Portal to Human Connection – The Marginalian

"…And then something else happens, a thing that still makes my heart rise in my chest and eyes blur, even in recollection. For it turns out there's something even more affecting than watching the sun disappear into a hole. Watching the sun climb out of it…"

https://www.themarginalian.org/2020/09/15/helen-macdonald-vesper-flights-eclipse/

Why I Love Baseball

My conference presentation today in Ottawa. I'll be lucky, as usual, to get through a fraction of the slides. But that's okay, I enjoyed making them.

Natural poetry

How to Breathe With the Trees

"… Writing a poem might seem like the least practical way imaginable to address melting glaciers, bleaching coral, drought, pollution and the like, never mind the overarching catastrophes of climate change and mass extinction. What can language do to save us now? What can something so small as a poem possibly do to save us now?

The answer lies in poetry's great intimacy, its invitation to breathe together. We read a poem, and we take a breath each time the poet takes a breath. We read a nature poem, and we take a breath with the trees. When the trees — and the birds and the clouds and the ants and even the bats and the rat snakes — become a part of us, too, maybe that's when we will finally begin to care enough to save them."

Margaret Renkl
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/opinion/ada-limon-poet-nature.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hU0.lOZT.XzlSs8kIsJDE&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ugrp=m

Breaking out

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INVITED SOCIETY: WILLIAM JAMES SOCIETY CHAIR: Phil Oliver, Middle Tennessee State University PRESENTERS: Phil Oliver, Middle Tennessee State University *"In Memoriam: the Legacy of John Lachs (1934-2023)" Randall Albright, Oklahoma State University [?] "Founding the William James Society" Justin Ivory, University of Minnesota [prizewinning essay] "Towards a Jamesian Constructivism" Sami Pihlström, University of Helsinki [presidential address] "Philosophical Temperaments, Freedom, and Responsibility"

“We get to die-that makes us the lucky ones”

"The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia."

Richard Dawkins, who turns 83 today, on the luckiness of death – superb, life-affirming read for anyone willing to stretch their mind beyond our intuitive human perspectives.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/07/25/richard-dawkins-death/

https://www.threads.net/@mariapopova/post/C4_cHhxPmR9/?xmt=AQGzsRHZwdWqHIIWkH56G4O4i4RyKWgrijfsm3N_eBMtEQ

The Anxious Generation

The book is out today.

"…childhood underwent a "great rewiring" in the blink of an eye, between 2010 and 2015. The result was a new "phone-based childhood," which altered the developmental pathways of children and adolescents, bringing them minimal benefits while reducing the time spent on beneficial real-world activities such as sleeping, playing with friends, talking with adults, reading books, focusing on one task at a time, or even just daydreaming...

https://open.substack.com/pub/jonathanhaidt/p/its-time-to-free-the-anxious-generation?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

“Glorious glimpses”

A marvelous tribute from John’s old(est?) student, shared yesterday by the Boston conference organizers. 

Herman Saatkamp obit quotes JL’s ILWL: “The best thing to do with old age is to accept it and to enjoy the glorious glimpses of life it presents. Up to a point at least, the mind rises to the mountains as the body goes down.” And he closes with “Mastery in life is to remember death and yet live joyously.”

Spirituality from a humanist perspective

Spent a delightful afternoon yesterday at Hattie B's and Bobby's Dairy Dip with Younger Daughter. Might even call it spiritual.

The question of humanist spirituality came up. To me, it means being gratefully aware that I'm alive,  breathing, thinking, enjoying, loving… as Marc reminds us to remind ourselves every morning.

And it means what Andrew Copson said:

A vast literature both popular and academic has investigated and promoted the concept of a materialist and non-theistic spirituality. Five aspects emerge from those various works that also accord with what I personally would describe as a spiritual experience. So, for this humanist at least, spiritual experiences, in no particular order:

1. are positive experiences – and at the more powerful end of experiences in general, causing a surge of feeling; 
2. are fleeting – and we become conscious of them only when they are underway or are over; 
3. are personal and individual experiences – they're subjectively experienced even when they're shared;
4. are not not intellectual or rational experiences – although they occur within ourselves and minds, they're not experiences to which you can ascribe any meaningful analysis (neither are they irrational experiences!). 
5. take you (metaphorically or imaginatively) outside of yourself – you feel as if you are connected to something bigger or more than yourself in some way.

All of that applies, accompanied by deep gratitude for the joy of an ongoing relationship with someone I've known, admired, and loved her whole life. As WJ said, this beloved incarnation too was among "matter's possibilities." It "lends itself to all life's purposes" and delights.  Pragmatism III

And don't underestimate the spirit of ice cream following hot chicken on a perfect spring afternoon.

Empathy & stoic sympathy

"…empathy is ethically problematic because, as with all highly emotional responses, it is easy for others to manipulate. Empathy also tends to be disproportionate to the situation (we feel more empathy for people we know or see directly), and does not scale up (it is impossible to feel empathy for anonymous thousands or even millions of people, regardless of how deserving they are). By contrast, sympathy is informed by reason and is therefore more wide ranging. We can sympathize even with people we do not know, or whose specific situation we have never experienced, because we are able to recognize that similar situations would be distressing for us, and that it would be unjust both for us and for anyone else to have to suffer through them.

In a sense, then, what Epictetus is observing is that in the normal course of events we tend to self-empathize ("Alas! Miserable am I.") while we sympathize with others ("Such is the lot of man."). The difference stems from our capability for more balanced judgment when the event does not touch us directly. Attempting to rectify this imbalance does not make us callous; it simply makes us more reasonable.

Reminding ourselves that difficult things happen—and not just to us—is comforting. We can start developing equanimity with respect to the things we don't fully control. Likewise, we can be grateful when things go our way but not become too attached to them, as they can just as easily be taken away. And when tough things happen, we are able to find the courage to face them in the best way possible, because such is the human condition."

Massimo Pigliucci
https://open.substack.com/pub/figsinwinter/p/practice-like-a-stoic-3-take-an-outside?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

A giant of philosophy

Commemorating a great philosopher and a better man


http://dlvr.it/T4WkQd

In Memoriam (redux): John Lachs

In Boston, at the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP),  I'll have the privilege of chairing the William James Society's session on Thursday afternoon. 

The first order of business at that session will be to honor the legacy of John Lachs, SAAP's co-founding (and confounding, I'm sure he'd delight in saying) first president and WJS's president in '07. He left us in November, was memorialized at Vanderbilt in December, but will never leave my grateful memory.

I've been sweating all day over just what to say. I still don't think I've said enough, but he'd remind me that enough is good enough. 

He'd remind me too of William James's admonition in Will to Believe. "Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher."

So, inevitable errors of commission and omission notwithstanding, here's what I plan to say Thursday:

In Memoriam: the Legacy of John Lachs (1934-2023)

Good afternoon and welcome, on behalf of the Wm James Society. I’m Phil Oliver, honored currently to serve as vice-president of the Society. I was a member of the inaugural executive committee, way back in 2001-2. Before that I talked James (and Emerson and, I recall, James Taylor) with our eventual founder Randall Albright, whom I met (and from whom we’ll hear shortly) via the old James Family listserv. Remember those?

So good finally to really meet you, Randall, and to publicly thank you for taking the initiative all those years ago to launch a far-flung community that has meant so much to so many of us. That’s the spirit of Wm James, to follow talk with action.

And that’s the spirit of SAAP’s first president John Lachs, who said “there is something devastatingly hollow about the demonstration that thought without action is hollow, when we find the philosopher only thinking it."

We lost a giant of philosophy when we lost John on November 14. Perhaps you’ve encountered one or more of those audio productions in the Giants of Philosophy series John edited in the 80s. He was an ideal choice to chair the APA’s centennial committee, tasked to “create a broader public awareness for philosophy by calling attention to its personal value and social usefulness.” That’s exactly what John did, always, throughout his long career (from which he formally retired only a couple of years ago at age 87).

When, for instance, my department at Middle Tennessee faced its existential crisis in the wake of the financial collapse of ‘08, John came and delivered a timely morale-lifting talk on the value of philosophy that got our university president’s and our dean’s attention. John was no ivory tower philosopher, but he did defend tenure as the institution that allows us to show the dean (and the prez, if we dare) any finger we like. Fortunately it never came to that, for us.

Those audiobooks are good, btw. Some of my best friends and former teachers are featured in them as authors, as channeled by professional actors. How strange to hear my old teacher John Compton talking about Sartre in the voice of Charlton Heston, or my old grad school pal and best man Daryl Hale on the Stoics and Epicureans… read by Lynn Redgrave.

John also got John Cleese to record a series of short PSAs “from the philosophers of America” extolling the value of philosophy in its centennial year of 2006. They reflect JL’s own voice, somehow elegant, earthy, funny, and profound all at once.

I’ve had occasion to pay public tribute to John before. In 2007 I was president of the Tennessee Philosophical Association and participant with a panel of my peers in tribute to John at that organization’s annual meeting. We thought he must surely be contemplating retirement at that time, at age 73. We were wrong.

I later contributed a very personal “addendum” to Krzysztof Skowronski’s festschrift tribute, in John Lachs’s Practical Philosophy (Brill, 2018). It was so gratifying to be recognized, in his reply, as a “kindred spirit”--I hope so– “and [he wrote] our love of William James brings us even closer together.”

John’s winking last words in that volume deserve to be heard, and smiled at, and pondered:

“Sad as it may sound to say it, the probability favors the view that death is final. Our delights are like the joys of the butterfly that hovered over a flower for a precious minute a thousand years ago. And then it is over in a moment of grace.

Of course we can hope for more. And, indeed, if the universe has an administration, we may be employed, like faculty, beyond our useful years.”

The last time I spoke with John, at his Nashville home not long before his precious time with us was at last over, we had a wide-ranging conversation that displayed once again his lifelong love affair with life. And his good-humored positivity and personal energy, even in the face of debilitating illness and the inescapable undeniable end. He said philosophers “ought to have the courage to look into the abyss alone and to face sudden tragedy and inevitable decline with equanimity born of joy or at least of understanding. I am prepared to be surprised to learn that we have a supernatural destiny, just as I am prepared to be surprised at seeing my neighbor win the lottery. But I don't consider buying tickets an investment.”

John left specific and detailed instructions for his memorial service in December, including these words from In Love With Life: “our lives can find meaning at each stage, and not lose usefulness even after death.”

He was a force of nature. He was a happy man. He was, monumentally to understate the case, “useful.” His example will endure.

There is so much more I’d like to say about John Lachs, his legacy, his contributions to this organization (president of the WJS 2007) and the founding of SAAP in the early 70s, his instrumental role in granting me and so many of my peers our profession, his professional and personal civility and kindness and decency. His fundamental humanity. He was a humane teacher, in a profession not always known for placing human values ahead of career ambitions. I’ll never meet a more exemplary model of genuine care and concern for the well-being of others, especially those others lucky enough to have entered his orbit.

Time presses here, though, so I invite you to go to my blog site Up@dawn and search his name. Here, he has the last words. From the epilogue of Stoic Pragmatism:

“I am grateful for living at a time when I can contribute to the recovery of American philosophy, a great and greatly neglected national treasure. The founding of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, in which I gladly participated, serves as clear evidence that just a few determined and persevering individuals can have a lasting effect on the future of a profession. We need to continue expanding the canon by adding to it thinkers whose work is excellent but who have, for one reason or another, been neglected over the years. I work on this, as I work on bringing philosophy into contact with a broader public, with the conviction that the energy and vision of a small band of people can make all the difference we need…

In the end, I do not want to be absorbed in the technical details of the problems of philosophy. My passion is to deploy philosophy to deal with the important issues that face us as individuals, as a nation, and as members of the human race. There is a large public waiting anxiously for what philosophy can offer—for careful thinking, clear vision, and the intelligent examination of our values. That is where the future of philosophy lies, that is where American philosophy has always pointed us, and that is where I will continue to be.”

And so he was, and so in our hearts and minds he continues.

It is still very hard for me to picture him at rest, but: requiescat in pace, John Lachs.

North to Boston

I'm heading up to Boston next week for the annual gathering of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. 

I'll chair the William James Society's session, commencing with a few reflections on the legacy of my mentor John Lachs.

The next day I'll comment on two papers (and unofficially on two others if the opportunity presents itself).

Yesterday I made headway on some of those comments. Here's a snippet of what I think I'm going to say. 

Layla Mayorga, Fordham University
"The Right to Flourish: A Pragmatic Inquiry into DACA Policy"

I thank Layla Mayorga for re-shining a light on the DACA situation, which has been lately eclipsed by so much else on the crowded and multiply-perplexing global stage. The Dreamers’ plight now threatens to become the plight of us all in the U.S. and, indeed, in so many countries that have claimed democratic status: denied an opportunity to flourish as fully-enfranchised and respected members of a functional democratic society. Too many of our compatriots and neighbors are tilting not merely to the right, but so far to the reactionary right and so xenophobically hostile to the very idea of immigration, so distant from Emma Lazarus’s solicitous democratic ethos, welcoming everyone from everywhere “yearning to breathe free,” that they’ve effectively disavowed any commitment to our founding declarations of principle and aspiration.

And too many of us who’ve sympathized with the Dreamers have let ourselves become distracted from their fate, so evidently entwined with our own. We need to refocus on this issue.

We’re in the same boat, documented or not. We must revitalize our commitment to universal human rights, dignity, and respect. And we must do it urgently. Now. A “pragmatist view of democracy” will insist on nothing less than what Dewey called a “reweaving of the social fabric” that recognizes and celebrates every significant stitch and strand. A new book by Marie Arano, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority, “aims to show that Latinos are as essential to the fabric of America as everyone else is.” Nyer And let’s be frank: many or most legal but “undocumented” DACA candidates are more essential, they make a far greater positive contribution, than many or most of those who would disavow and deport them. They do in fact “contribute to Social Security and Medicare,” and more broadly to the general zeitgeist of the nation. They are part of it. They are not interlopers or invaders, let alone the scurrilous slanders so ignorantly trumpeted and repeated by America Firsters.

Also inseparable from that fabric lately, alas, is political polarization. “Barack Obama was one of many Presidents who thought there might be a glimmer of hope for a broad bipartisan immigration deal—and he held out a solution for the Dreamers in search of it. But the deal never happened. Instead, Obama enacted a temporary executive fix, one that is still being fought over in the courts now, a decade later. As for the fate of the Dreamers, it says everything that they aren’t even part of the current negotiations. The politics have moved on.” NYer Feb1

Politics notwithstanding, the philosophy remains firmly sewn. That’s what we’ve got to come back to, to hang onto, to keep on pushing. As Dewey said so eloquently in The School and Society: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.”

One of our problems these days is that the best and wisest are drowned out by the worst and loudest, the “robber bands” who wear the funny red hats and dream of a past that never was...
==
Naoko Saito, Kyoto University
"Pragmatism and Philosophy as a Way of Life: Deweyan Growth in the Age of Jiko-Keihatsu"

I thank Professor Saito for introducing me to Jiko-Keihatsu, which at first glance–doubtless superficial–sounds a lot like “how to succeed in business” without really growing (in the Deweyan sense of growth as the deepening and expanding of our democratic “heritage of values” in ever-more-inclusive habits of community and patterns of education).

Or maybe that’s second glance. The first phrase that occurred to me, when pondering the initial definition of Jiko-Keihatsu as “self-development (or self-enlightenment),” was auto-didacticism. That signifies something I do reflexively associate with real growth in the Deweyan sense. Auto-didacts may lack formal schooling in a particular field of study or domain of discourse, but they do attest the intrinsic appeal of education as a foundational democratic touchstone. Their example promotes the idea of growth implicitly and often passionately. They find curiosity its own reward. They value knowledge for its own sake, for theirs, and for its contributions to the common weal.

If you’ve ever had the good fortune of teaching a non-traditional student or retiree who returned to university voluntarily and enthusiastically because they’d independently discovered the joy of philosophy (or some other discipline) and had recovered (or never lost) the love of learning, you’ll know what I mean. Their hunger to study and thus to grow has no ulterior agenda, is not rooted in anxiety or fear or “panicked perfectionism,” it is simply a genuine desire to assimilate the object of their interest and become, in the process, larger of character, spirit, and sensibility.

Auto-didacts generally possess a temperamental and motivational affinity, I think, to the Deweyan emphasis on learning to learn and go on learning, and to the Deweyan view of “life itself” as just such a perpetual program of self-directed education.

The qualifying phrase “in the business model” immediately raises a flag for me, I confess, since growth in the business world is invariably identified with bottom lines and projected short-term earnings, the business cycle, the repudiation of limits to macroeconomic growth, disregard of long-term interests like environmental sustainability, etc. Those are ulterior motives for growth, as I understand the Deweyan mindset, albeit ubiquitous and inescapable in our culture.

I confess a bias when it comes to such language: I am instantly reminded of that Monty Python caricature of business culture in The Meaning of Life, the “Very Big Corporation of America,” the “urgent realization of just how much there is still left to own,” the failure of souls to develop because of our “ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia,” etc.

That said, I’m prepared to be challenged on this bias. Perhaps a Deweyan should be more receptive to business models, less contemptuous of “the business of America,” more open to the convergence of pragmatism and commerce.

And yet, Dewey said things like: “As long as politics is the shadow of big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.” And, “Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one’s true business in life.”

And in light of Hanamura’s critique of the conflation of happiness and meaning with success or failure, WIlliam James famously said something to H.G. Wells about “our national disease” you’d expect a Deweyan to cheer: “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”--Letters, 9.11.06

But perhaps that’s enough about that.

Human existence is of course universally natural for all, if for any at all. Dewey’s right about that. I don’t personally find Heidegger’s Dasein a helpful elaboration of our experience either as natural humans or as responsible citizens, or a useful perspective on what it would mean to achieve an appropriately integrated social system–let alone a “great community” of mutual respect –particularly in view of his failure to distance himself and philosophy generally from German colonial imperialism and its atrocities. He compared the Allies’ refusal to sanction his return to the post-war classroom to Hitler’s worst crimes. I’d leave him out of this conversation...

And so on, and so on.

Maybe we can talk about this a bit in class today, and tonight. A trial run up the flagpole, as it were, and a glimpse (for any students who care) at the sort of thing academics do at conferences. 

I do hope I'll have time to get out of the hotel and see a bit of Boston too. And I hope it's warmer there than it's been, I see it snowed in MA on the first day of Spring.

Red alert

Yesterday the World Meteorological Organization officially certified 2023 as the hottest year in human history. Just to put on the record here what should have been the lead story in every journal and website on our home planet…

Bill McKibben

https://open.substack.com/pub/billmckibben/p/how-not-to-act-in-an-emergency?selection=261b3a42-1938-4aa6-922a-f306225c287c&r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

The right side of the U-curve

…People aged 60 and older in the U.S. reported high levels of well-being compared to younger people. In fact, the United States ranks in the top 10 countries for happiness in this age group.

Conversely, there's a decline in happiness among younger adolescents and young adults in the U.S. "The report finds there's a dramatic decrease in the self-reported well-being of people aged 30 and below," says report author Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a professor of economics and behavioral science, and the director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University…

U.S. drops in new global happiness ranking. One age group bucks the trend
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/03/20/1239537074/u-s-drops-in-new-global-happiness-ranking-one-age-group-bucks-the-trend

George Plimpton

George signed my old copy of his Sidd Finch* fable, in Cooperstown in 2001. He'd just talked about the pleasurable experience of connecting two remote points in space with a hurled baseball. I think he was a connoisseur of obscure but distinct pleasures.

"Writing is a very lonely business and when you come to a book fair and you sit at a table and people come up to you with books that they've had in their library for many years and they think it's been somewhat enhanced by a signature, it's always a pleasure."
George Plimpton, born on this day in 1927.**

**It's the birthday of George Plimpton [and John Updike, to make a pleasing writerly connection], born in New York (1927). He was the founding editor of The Paris Review, a job that he held for 50 years, from 1953 until his death in 2003, and he conducted long, insightful interviews — including one of only two interviews that Hemingway gave in his life. WA

*George's late-life hearing wasn't spot-on...

but I didn't mind. Just glad I got to meet him, he was only with us another couple of years. 

Faith, gratitude, sublimity, happiness

A remarkable 30 minutes with Paul Simon and Stephen Colbert


http://dlvr.it/T49Dbg

Colbert and Simon on religious faith, gratitude, happiness

This interview is "incredible"-meaning delightful. 

I don't agree with Colbert on one point, I do think happiness (not sublimity) is the more profound "goal"… but I respect Stephen's thoughtful (if slightly manic) reflections here. And his experience, and his pain and suffering. And I share his gratitude. I just don't think I owe it to a god.

But as Montaigne said, "Que sais-je"… I don't know, and neither do you. Believe what you will.

Paul's a Yankee fan and a scorekeeper, and his gratitude is unconditional. He and I are co-congregants in the Church of Baseball. Time to cue up Graceland...

Infinite pi

Why do mathematicians care so much about pi? Is it some kind of weird circle fixation? Hardly. "The beauty of pi, in part, is that it puts infinity within reach," Steven Strogatz writes. "Even young children get this."http://nyer.cm/YRAp5EU

It's also nice that someone in our Honors College provided free 🥧 yesterday. I care about 🥧 too.

Stephen Hawking (who died on Einstein’s birthday) on Einstein’s & Spinoza’s God

I use the word "God" in an impersonal sense, like Einstein did, for the laws of nature, so knowing the mind of God is knowing the laws of nature. My prediction is that we will know the mind of God by the end of this century…

https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/07/17/stephen-hawking-brief-answers-to-the-big-questions/

YouNeverKnow

A great word, though an unsettling state of mind. But this much I know...


http://dlvr.it/T441tM

A nation of Know Nothings?

Long day ahead, first of two Thursdays when I get to stay at school for my block of classes in the MALA (Master of Liberal Arts) tag-team course on Knowledge, 6-9 pm. My job is to represent philosophers' contribution to the subject. What do we know? Should it bother us to know how much we don't know? Etc.

One thing I know for sure: Younger Daughter was thrilled yesterday afternoon to trade in her beloved but miles-weary 2014 Buick Encore, a.k.a. Steve, for a 2023 Nissan Frontier pickup she's dubbed Frankie. 

And I know she deserves every happiness.

I also know that with her new vehicle and her looming new career, she's showing the kind of courage Elizabeth Zott urged in Lessons in Chemistry (a truck-warming copy of which I was happy to give her as we awaited the e-signing and paperwork). "Courage is the root of change…"

That's the first thing I'll say about knowledge tonight. If we know anything, we know it takes courage to change and wisdom to know when to stay the course.

That could also be my segue to talk about the Know Nothing-ism I think characterizes the rise of authoritarian bluster in our national politics. But I should probably steer clear and stick to the relatively-safe space of Socrates, Pyrrho, Montaigne, Descartes et al.

If I could muster the courage, though...

The Biden administration has "passed a series of laws that rivaled President Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society of the 1960s…" *

Their opponent is a thug who promises to end democracy as we've known it.

Seems like a no-brainer. But it seems we've become a nation of Know Nothings.

So we'll see.

==

*HCR continues:

The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan rebuilt the economy after the worst of the coronavirus pandemic; the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act) is rebuilding the nation's roads and bridges; the $280 billion Chips and Science Act invests in semiconductor manufacture and scientific research; the $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act enables the government to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies and invests in programs to combat climate change. Projects funded by these measures are so popular that Republicans who voted against them are trying to claim credit. 

Biden, Harris, and the Democrats have diversified the government service, defended abortion rights, reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, relieved debt by enforcing the terms of student loans, passed a gun safety law, and reinforced NATO.

They set out to overturn supply-side economics, restoring the system on which the nation had been based between 1933 and 1981, in which the government regulated business, maintained a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. The result was the strongest economic recovery from the pandemic of any country in the world…"

And yet, droves of voters say they prefer the guy who vows to be a dictator on Day 1. 

As the old Dominican hurler Joacquin Andujar once said, when asked to name his favorite English word: youneverknow. 

Ripples: Terry Pratchett

'No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away... The span of someone's life is only the core of their actual existence.' The great humanist author Terry Pratchett. He was our patron and is sorely missed. He died #OnThisDay 2015. GNU Terry Pratchett.

https://www.threads.net/@humanists_uk/post/C4ajxc3I9ur/?xmt=AQGzKkiKd2K0_NxXdYXJBmuxbTDFt3-Xw8wBpkH7flo3kg

Elizabeth Zott, meliorist

Meliorists are social chemists, who embrace and catalyze constructive change. We must learn their lessons.


http://dlvr.it/T3yTVW