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.