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.