Perchance to dream

In CoPhi today we return to The Dream of Reason. What an apt title at this strange moment in our country's history, when the drowsy absence of commitment to reason, fact, and truth in the new administration feels increasingly and disorientingly somnambulistic. Gerald Ford's "long national nightmare" has a sequel. It's been said before...

It's very tempting, in these stress-inducing early days of the new fabulating denialist regime, to just nod off and request a wake-up call when it's safe and sane out there again. A leader really should read, and breathe fresh air at least once a day. ("Mr. Drumpf, who does not read books, is able to end his evenings with plenty of television... Mr. Drumpf can go for days without breathing in fresh outside air.") New studies show, Mr. President, that "when people get up and move, even a little, they tend to be happier..." 

But as Lord Russell said, that's a form of slumber to conjure monsters. We've got to keep our eyes open. Fight the power, for the planet. Sapere aude. Make the world safe again for the dreamers. And Dreamers.

It does in fact feel a bit like retreating into an ancient dreamscape, to take up the topic of preSocratic Milesians and Pythagoreans at a moment when every time we look up we discover the jarring rollback of another hard-won milestone of progress, on healthcare, the environment, gender equality, the 1st amendment, immigration...

But we must remind ourselves, those old first philosophers were modeling the very activity we must emulate now more than ever: throwing off convention, defying false authority, standing up to face the facts and seek the truth. They didn't know they were pre-anything, but went ahead and invented the best method of fact-finding and whistleblowing we've yet hit upon. They were our first, if not our best, naturalists (physici), and they were smarter than popularly believed. 

Thales may or may not have fallen in a well or monopolized the olive presses, but his claim about the ubiquity of H2O, "intimately connected with life" and flowing wherever life has managed to sustain and replicate itself, was not crazy at all. "In order to refute him we have to reason with him," as opposed I suppose to just stating the facts and telling the truth on him. (Or "giving him hell," as Harry Truman had it.) 

If Thales was a reductionist and precursor of Ockham and Thoreau ("simplify, simplify"), Anaximander "exemplified an additional and equally fundamental" scientific impulse, to peek behind the veil of appearances to discover the world's real generative machinery. He thought it was something determinative of all the oppositions we encounter in phenomena (hot-cold, wet-dry, red-blue) but itself indeterminate and without "observable qualities of its own." He called it apeiron (απειρων).

You can't mention him without also mentioning the other preSocratic "Anax"'s (unless you'd rather not be gratuitously confused) - Anaxagoras, whose matter/mind distinction has dogged us every since, and Anaximenes, who said the world comes from a vaporous mist. Onward through the fog.

What an odd duck was Pythagoras, with his numbers mysticism and belief in reincarnation and antipathy for beans and love for the inaudible celestial "music of the spheres." Study numbers, geometry, astronomy, and music, he instructed, and you'll grasp ultimate order in the cosmos.

Young Bertrand Russell had a Pythagorean and Platonic phase (as indeed did Plato), alleging our "highest good" in the mind's spectral "union with the universe." He later rethought that commitment, but in The Conquest of Happiness Old Russell still spoke of conjoining our respective destinies with the great "stream of life" (as I recently told congregants of the Sunday Assembly) that both antedates and succeeds our brief groundtime on Earth. Rising above petty day-to-day worries to contemplate eternity does in fact allow a bit of it to rub off on us, to lift us up. For a time.

Russell had another rethink, another "retreat from Pythagoras," ultimately giving up the hyper-rationalist "feeling that intellect is superior to sense." No. Intellect and sense have to collaborate, ideas, sensations, and perceptions have to come together and sound the alarm, to get us up and doing. Sleep then can be the restorative it's supposed to be, not an escape from responsible engagement with monsters and tweeters and oblivious fabulators who would trap us in their own terrible needs.

In Fantasyland today, Kurt Andersen says our "first great American heroine" Anne Hutchinson, early "feminist crusader," mansplaining target, etc., was also an early establisher of the subsequent  American Way: "so confident in herself, in her intuitions and idiosyncratic, subjective understanding of reality... she didn't recognize ambiguity or admit to self-doubt. Her perceptions and beliefs were true because they were hers and because she felt them so thoroughly to be true... [she] didn't have to study any book but the Bible to arrive at the truth. Because she felt it. She knew it." That certainly takes her down a peg. And us.

Freedom of thought in early America leaned in to supernaturalism and self-made-reality just as Europe's enlightenment - in the persons of Shakespeare, Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, and the like - was going in the opposite direction, towards the Age of Reason. Here it was "freedom to believe whatever supernaturalism you wished."

And so we got witches in Salem. "In 1692 virtually no one in New England disbelieved in witches." That's the legacy of Protestantism, says Andersen, no less than its contributions to its eponymous "work ethic."

In A&P today we finish Julian Baggini's Very Short Introduction. Baggini makes the case for naturalism and optimal rationality, wherein we "don't have to plug any gaps with speculation, opinion, or any other ungrounded beliefs." He notes that while "avowed" atheism may have a more recent lineage, its precursors include the ancient pre-Socratic Milesians mentioned above. "Anaxagoras is the earliest historical figure to have been indicted for atheism" (Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt: A History... & see Tim Whitmarsh's Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World - "Disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills"). 

Against the canard that Hitler, Stalin, and other monstrous modern autocrats have all been atheists, Baggini observes that none of them was "straightforwardly atheist" while all have "sacralized" themselves to quasi-religious status - and "sacralization is utterly foreign to mainstream rational atheism." Is militancy per se foreign to it as well?

"Most religious believers justify their faith by an inner conviction," and many of them will probably insist that that's also how non-believers justify their faithlessness. We should talk about that. Do inner convictions ever suffice to justify anything at all? Isn't subjectivity or temperament an inevitable factor in philosophy (as James said), even though western philosophy's official view is that it should not be? Or is inner conviction just a mirror of external, local contingencies of birth that we're not obliged to honor, defer to, or even respect?

"Avoid dogmatism." Hard to argue with that, but maybe it's also harder to follow than we want to admit. Foot-stamping and cursing aside, how many freethinkers will readily admit there might be something to theism after all? I'll admit there's this in it, for some: peace of mind. But peace of mind shouldn't be bought with false currency.

Humanists don't all agree on what a humanist is, but I agree with Baggini's broad definition: "Humanists are simply atheists who believe in living purposeful and moral lives."

Here's what I should have said to my friend Brian over beers at the Boulevard the other day: "In the case of ghosts, we not only lack a rational explanation of how ghosts can exist, we also lack any rational reasons to suppose that they do." 

And here's one of Baggini's parting statements: "Atheism is the throwing off of childish illusions and acceptance that we have to make our own way in the world. We have no divine parents who always protect us... [this is] the precondition for meaningful adult lives." That will strike plenty of theists as unfair. How does it strike us, A&P? It strikes me as a sharply-stated but not incorrect echo of Carl Sagan's milder, but no less protentous, Pale Blue Dot proclamation of "no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."

So in other words: grow up, humanity. Childhood's end beckons. Unlike Sir Arthur C. Clarke, I'm not worried about that marking the end of our happiness as well. (“They would never know how lucky they had been. For a lifetime, mankind had achieved as much happiness as any race can ever know. It had been the Golden Age. But gold was also the color of sunset, of autumn...")

In Bioethics today we weigh the influence - directive and sometimes distortive - of various "perspectives" (feminist, cultural, traditional, religio-philosophic). There's no such thing as a view from nowhere, so we must make an honest accounting of how our respective points of view may predispose our conclusions.

The "Perspectives" chapter asks whether and how professional healthcare providers should negotiate or accommodate the various framework beliefs of patients. Or their parents. How should physicians treat and care for children whose parents object to medical intervention on religious grounds?

James again: we all have a philosophy that "determines the perspective in [our] several worlds... a more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos." It's our task today, and most every day, to notice those perspectives and talk about them. Lucky us.
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On this day... poem-a-day
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Rivendell... What to do with Fort Negley?
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9.6.17. On this day in 1916, the first self-service grocery store, Piggly Wiggly, opened in Memphis, Tennessee. Piggly Wiggly was the first grocery store to let customers choose their own products. Before Piggly Wiggly, you handed your grocery list to a clerk, who walked around the store and selected your items for you on a shelf, and then rang you up...

Today is the birthday of social reformer and peace activist Jane Addams (books by this author), born in Cedarville, Illinois (1860). .. While in London, Addams visited a vegetable market and was appalled at the sight of vendors throwing bread and food in the air as a sport for paupers. The paupers clawed and scraped for tiny morsels of food. Addams was struck by how inhumanely the poor were treated. She and Gates vowed to do something when they returned to Chicago...

She and Gates raised money from other wealthy women, and found a large mansion in need of repair. They named it Hull-House, and within two years, they were serving 2,000 residents a week.

Hull-House held classes in cooking, English language, and citizenship, and even operated a day care, library, art gallery, and a kindergarten. Addams was a firm believer that education could lift children from dire circumstances. She said: “America’s future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live.” WA
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1.26.17 - 5:30/6:53, 41/47/32, 6:53/5:06. Happy birthday Hans Selye, the endocrinologist and stress/strain researcher who said: "Find your own stress level — the speed at which you can run toward your own goal. Make sure that both the stress level and the goal are really your own, and not imposed upon you by society, for only you yourself can know what you want and how fast you can accomplish it. There is no point in forcing a turtle to run like a racehorse or in preventing a racehorse from running faster than a turtle because of some 'moral obligation.' The same is true of people." ...And so long Mary Tyler Moore. Thanks for Laura and Mary.

Solvitur ambulando

Today in CoPhi we consider (and practice?) the peripatetic way of life, the approach to philosophy and philosophizing legendarily credited to Aristotle's Lyceum apprentices and carried forward through the ages by the likes of Hobbes, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Mill, Darwin, Russell, and so many more. Christopher Orlet guides our tour.

Solvitur ambulando was Diogenes the Cynic's supposed rebuttal to Zeno's Paradoxes of Motion. It's a clever and (say some possibly sexist celebrants) manly rhetorical riposte, but more impressively it's a solid practical demonstration that ideas simply have to travel, to get anywhere. Up again off your Thinking Rock, your comfy chair, your laurels and your conventions. Perambulate, people, at least down the hall and back if not out into the wide open spaces of our local lyceum. It's about to get wintry here again, but that never stopped Socrates. Maybe some of us are more like Descartes, whose mind purportedly "only worked when he was warm."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the other hand, said “My mind only works with my legs.” (Also a good heat-and-light source.) I'm with him on that, so long as I still have legs to stand on. A mind really should be flexibly adaptable to circumstantial necessity.

Rousseau was not in fact known for his adaptability, being one of the more bumptious and difficult thinkers of all time. He was a little crazy, but his Reveries of the Solitary Walker registers some of the delights of the long-distance strider while striking a few good aphorisms along the way. “I have never thought, for my part, that man's freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.”

And, “Truth is an homage that the good man pays to his own dignity.”

And, “In all the ills that befall us, we are more concerned by the intention than the result. A tile that falls off a roof may injure us more seriously, but it will not wound us so deeply as a stone thrown deliberately by a malevolent hand. The blow may miss, but the intention always strikes home.”

And ponder this passage, in which J-J describes the temporary suspension of ego that a good walk can engender.

“Entirely taken up by the present, I could remember nothing; I had no distinct notion of myself as a person, nor had I the least idea of what had just happened to me. I did not know who I was, nor where I was; I felt neither pain, fear, nor anxiety. I watched my blood flowing as I might have watched a stream, without even thinking that the blood had anything to do with me. I felt throughout my whole being such a wonderful calm, that whenever I recall this feeling I can find nothing to compare with it in all the pleasures that stir our lives.”

The New England transcendentalists went in big for the "gymnastics for the mind" too. “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,” wrote Thoreau, “unless I spend four hours a day at least – and it is commonly more than that – sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from worldly engagements.”  Henry walked to work every day. Nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if you try (and don't live 42 miles away from campus).

"Charles Darwin planted a 1.5 acre strip of land with hazel, birch, privet, and dogwood, and ordered a wide gravel path built around the edge. Called Sand-walk, this became Darwin’s ‘thinking path’ where he roamed every morning and afternoon with his white fox-terrier." He loved dogs as much as he loved walking and thinking. Like us, Darwin's dogs are still evolving.

"Of Bertrand Russell, long-time friend Miles Malleson has written: 'Every morning Bertie would go for an hour’s walk by himself, composing and thinking out his work for that day. He would then come back and write for the rest of the morning, smoothly, easily and without a single correction.'" That really works, sometimes. But it doesn't work for "the average citizen [who] walks a measly 350 yards a day... it is not surprising that half the population is diagnosed as obese or overweight."

Several cities around the globe have a designated "Philosophers' Walk," and we peripatetics are doing our best to inaugurate informal ones everywhere we go. Did you see all those philosophers marching out there Saturday, all around the world?

Today in Fantasyland Kurt Andersen recalls Sir Walter Raleigh's gold-digging dream (a base to the first student who knows who called him a "stupid git," before promising to "give you everything I've got for a little peace of mind"), and regrets the early colonial pseudoempiricism he thinks helped pave the way for our present predicament. He cites historian Daniel Boorstin's contention that American civilization has favored those who are inordinately credulous and receptive to advertizing, and Sir Francis Bacon's prescient point about what we now call confirmation bias. "My side right or wrong" is a charirtable rendering of that attitude these days, when bias rarely acknowledges its own fallibility. Now, typically, it's just: "My side - !" Or, "I believe, therefore I'm right."

The School of Life, btw, is out with a new video saying bias isn't always a bad thing. But maybe they just want to believe that. "Loathing of bias is the flipside of faith in facts." Faith in? Or fidelity to? Semper fi, reality-based community.

Andersen says our founding mythology underrates the "run-of-the-mill" puritans who were in it for the money and not so much the theology, the first nonnative new Americans who landed at Plymouth Rock rather than Jamestown. "The Puritans are conventionally considered more 'moderate' than the Pilgrims. This is like calling al-Qaeda more moderate than ISIS."

Finally, Andersen reminds us that our forebears were apocalyptic. They were sure the end was near, and said so right after proclaiming Ronald Reagan's "city on a hill." Let's hope they're not about to have their dream fulfilled. But, that Doomsday Clock is ticking.*

Also recommended today: reflections on the pale blue dot and space exploration, the natural next step for a peripatetic species that revels in boldly going where no one has gone before. Did you catch Neil deGrasse Tyson on that, last night on BookTV?

In A&P today we ask if atheists can be good and find meaning in life. (SPOILER: yes they can.) We consider the views of Plato (Euthyphro), Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Rick & Morty.

In Bioethics we look at the relevance of moral theories and formulae that would, if reliable, settle our bioethical disputes. (SPOILER: they don't.) The new revised edition of our text invites us to weigh in on "Anna's story" and what we think of all the actors involved in her decision to issue a Do Not Resuscitate instruction. The message seems clear: no single theory will do the scenario complete justice. But what about the Mayor's Dilemma, bumped to chapter's end? Maybe we can try out our improvisational skills, on that.
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Two "most e-mailed" stories may indicate a surge of angst amongst collegians: 

You’ll Never Be Famous — And That’s O.K. Today’s college students desperately want to change the world, but too many think that living a meaningful life requires doing something extraordinary and attention-grabbing like becoming an Instagram celebrity, starting a wildly successful company or ending a humanitarian crisis...

As students head to school this year, they should consider this: You don’t have to change the world or find your one true purpose to lead a meaningful like. A good life is a life of goodness — and that’s something anyone can aspire to, no matter their dreams or circumstances.
-Emily Esfahani Smith (@emesfahanismith), an editor at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is the author of “The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed With Happiness.”

The Real Campus Scourge. Across the country, college freshmen are settling into their new lives and grappling with something that doesn’t compete with protests and political correctness for the media’s attention, something that no one prepared them for, something that has nothing to do with being “snowflakes” and everything to do with being human.
They’re lonely...

We urge new college students not to party too hard. We warn them of weight gain (“the freshman 15”). We also need to tell them that what’s often behind all that drinking and eating isn’t celebration but sadness, which is normal, survivable and shared by many of the people around them, no matter how sunny their faces or their Facebook posts.
-Frank Bruni

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Happy birthday Robert Burns ("Auld Lang Syne") and Virginia Woolf who said “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” Though associated with a very small tract of London real estate (Bloomsbury) she was a true cosmopolitan. But what would she make of Marsha Blackburn and Diane Black?

Also on this day in 1939, Enrico Fermi split an atom.
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*Doomsdsay Clock 30 seconds closer to apocalypse. The clock is now set at two minutes to midnight — the closest it has been since 1953, after the United States tested its first thermonuclear device, followed months later by the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb test... (WaPo)
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For those who, like me, have been hoping to hear that Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac might receive a reprieve, here's a discouraging update... Gun violence in America's schools keeps coming closer to home... Larry Nassar won't be abusing any more gymnasts...
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9.5.17. Today in Happiness, we'll join Daniel Haybron's discussion of "attunement" and its three basic aspects: inner calm ("tranquility"), confidence, and expansiveness of mood or spirit ("feeling 'carefree,' or being 'uncompressed'). Just how I feel during and after our daily dogwalk through the neighborhood, and how I imagine I'd feel if I ever could set foot in the sea of tranquility.

The great fire of London ended on this date in 1666, and the great reign of terror began in France in 1793 (WA), among other things. If it's not one thing it's another.

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1.24.17 - 5:35/6:55, 41/53, 5:03
Happy birthday Edith Wharton, who said "There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it." She found her writing voice when her friend Henry James told her, in true Jamesian spirit, "Don't pass it by — the immediate, the real, the only, the yours."

What it's all about

We begin at the beginning in all four classes today, asking What is philosophy? What is atheism? What is bioethics? Or answering, to turn it around Jeopardy-style. The short affirmative prompts, then, to which these simple questions are each an appropriate respective response:

• The stubborn commitment to thinking and speaking clearly, motivated by the love and pursuit of wisdom.
• The belief that there are no gods or other supernatural agencies and forces guiding the fate and destiny of human beings.
•  The study of life in light of the rules, conditions, and actions by which it may flourish.

I'll solicit crowd-sourced alternative prompts and definitions from each class, as always.

[Scooter and I began early this morning, btw. Sometimes he's lazy at 5:20 a.m., but not today... so we had a lovely pre-dawn ramble, when the world seems most stable and still. I recommend it, future peripatetics.]

Not every philosopher is devoted to clarity, nor does every philosopher seem especially clear on the meaning of wisdom. When the Philosophy Bites inquisitors asked a sampling of contemporary philosophers to say what their profession is and does, the results varied widely. None of them came up with a better answer than William James's "stubborness." What is philosophy? Who's your favorite? The most impressive? To that last, I'd have to nod to my old mentor John Lachs. He taught me to mistrust mediation. (Here he was last Fall in one of my old Vandy haunts, deploring the tendency of people to shun responsibility in a place where I used to be responsible for counting the cash and locking the doors when the movies ended.)

There's less variety among atheists, definitionally, but there's a distinct spectrum of attitudes and temperaments within the godless community. Some atheists are "friendly" like Hemant Mehta and Julian Baggini, some are nasty like P. Zed Myers, many just want to understand what others mean by "God" and why, like Spinoza. I'm urging him as our role-model.

There's plenty of difference among bioethicists, particularly when religious convictions concerning the god-granted sanctity of life are introduced, but none would deny that good living is the field's focus. And good dying. That'll be our capstone topic, as Atul Gawande leads us into the thicket of issues surrounding life's final chapters. 

What does it mean to live a good life and anticipate a good death? If that's our jeopardy answer, the affirmative prompt might just be: What all of our classes are ultimately about... which also suggests a better answer to the question they put to this otherwise-impressive panel of contemporary philosophers who gathered one evening at the New School: does philosophy matter? If it matters to live a good life, a life of wisdom, passion, toleration, and kindness, then it certainly does.

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On this day... a poem ... another (but still missing WA). Happy birthday John Hancock, & happy HoF induction Willie Mays, Elvis Presley, James Brown...

1.21.16-5:50/6:67, 31/41. King Louis XVI was beheaded on this date in 1793 in Paris, btw. Lots of heads rolled in the French Revolution. Not a good last chapter for anyone, though the King's gracious last words weren't bad.

Opening Day, take 2

Let's try that again...

After two snowdays we'll finally kick off the "Spring" semester, with two sections of CoPhi, Atheism, & Bioethics on tap today and every Tuesday/Thursday 'til winter's well behind us. An old new routine, up at 5 and straight into the shower, before coffee, before walking the dog, way before dawn.

So that's a reality check, to commence a semester dedicated to the proposition that we who value philosophy must embrace facts, truth, and reality. One new reality I must face this morning is an ironic one, for a self-avowed peripatetic: I somehow wrenched my knee yesterday, and will be moving today with a visible limp. Never take mobility for granted, is my Opening Day lesson this time.

In the spirit of Heraclitus, who didn't exactly say you can't step twice into the same river - it was more like, the same river perpetually hosts new waters - I try to approach each rendition of these old courses with new eyes and fresh receptivity to what can and must be different.

For one thing, we're now a full year into the benighted age of Drumpf's reality-bending world of alt-facts. That's the elephant in the room, whatever his physician says. (6'3/239 - really?)

So to address and tame the elephant we'll be reading and discussing Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland in CoPhi, alongside Anthony Gottlieb's Dreams (of Reason and Enlightenment) and Nigel Warburton's Little History. It's not enough to chart the history of (mostly-western) philosophers' takes on truth, facts, and reality, we've got to think about where we're taking those ideas/ideals... and how to take them back from the charlatans who've somehow seized the spotlight and, for the moment, the reins of political power.

As my sometime-namesake Philip Roth says, "No one [but Mencken, maybe] could have imagined that the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the U.S.A., the most debasing of disasters, would appear not, say, in the terrifying guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon." But there we are. We must deal with it.

"I go to sleep smiling and I wake up smiling. I’m very pleased that I’m still alive." We can deal.

Again in the spirit of Heraclitus: my friend the new interim Dean to our south has a nice tagline on his emails, from the not-a-looney author of  A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, that seems worth noting on Opening Day: "The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do, with great artists; ... with artists like these we do really fly from star to star." And so we must do what we can to borrow other eyes, not only by accessing the perspectives of "great artists" and thinkers but by simply showing up and conversing, collaborating, and co-philosophizing in kindness (as Kurt Vonnegut knew) and civility.

I'll drop a couple more names in class, to kick us off: Immanuel Kant, not a real pissant, said (says one twittering muse) "science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life."

And the guy Kant said woke him from his dogmatic slumbers, David Hume, said (same source) "philosophical discussion unites the two greatest and purest pleasures of human life: study and society."

Once more, then, unto the breach (a base to the first student today who can tell me who said that the first time, and another to the first who can tell me how many bases gets you a run). Let's get organized, and let's get to studying. It will be my  pleasure and I hope, fellow co-philosophers, yours as well.

Opening Day!

It's Opening Day of the Spring 2018 semester at our school. [UPDATE: Opening Day has been postponed by weather.]

I'm glad we call it Spring and not Winter, though I do try to appreciate George Santayana's observation that "to be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring." But spring and summer are still what will pull me through, following Thoreau: "A healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter, summer is in his heart."

I'll meet two sections of CoPhilosophy today, commencing once again to try and explain what philosophy is for: it's for getting better at asking questions and entertaining alternative possible answers, for coexisting with those who answer differently, for learning to love thinking for ourselves, for learning how to be happy, for learning how to live and die.... among other things.

Alain de Botton's School of Life has its critics, but it sure performs a valuable service when it comes to opening a philosophical conversation. That's what our classes are, extended conversations with one another but also with philosophers long past and, we may hope, into a far future.

Our quest is for clarity, in William James's sense when he defined philosophy as an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly, and for sweep:

"...explanation of the universe at large, not description of its details, is what philosophy must aim at; and so it happens that a view of anything is termed philosophic just in proportion as it is broad and connected with other views... any very sweeping view of the world is a philosphy in this sense." Some Problems of Philosophy

We're also in search of mutual understanding and respect, in Spinoza's sense when he said "I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them."

And we're also after kindness, in Kurt Vonnegut's sense when he welcomed babies to planet Earth and informed them of its one indispensable rule:

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

Ultimately of course, in philosophy - philo-sophia - we're searching for wisdom.

"It’s one of the grandest and oddest words out there, so lofty, it doesn’t sound like something one could ever consciously strive to be – unlike say, being cultured, or kind. Others could perhaps compliment you on being it, but it wouldn’t be something you could yourself ever announce you had become..." SoL

This semester we acknowledge the particular duress lately suffered by our grand old standby philosophical abstractions "truth, reality, fact," et al, by taking up Kurt Anderson's Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. This moment may have blindsided many, but we might have seen it coming. Maybe, with the right vision, we can see how to get past it.

And so we begin. Put on your philosophy goggles, everyone. You don't want to look directly at the Form of the Good (aka the sun) without 'em. No one's exempt from the laws of nature.