Solvitur ambulando

The first month of the roaring 2020s is practically in the books now. How do you like this decade so far?

In CoPhi today it's Peripatetic Philosophy (and more), Emerson's perambulating "gymnasium of the mind" and Diogenes's silently-cynical walk away from the absurd philosophic abstraction that allowed the old paradoxers to deny the reality of motion and change.

Diogenes was quite the character, probably someone we'd steer clear of ourselves if we encountered him on campus or down on the square. Shabby, vulgar, utterly indifferent to our conventions and etiquette and delicacies of all kinds. He was Bad Socrates (not that he wasn't capable of shabbiness and iconoclasm too), Socrates in a Barrel, or (since I've been confessing, a propos "cosmic philosophy," my long-standing Trek-geekdom) the alt-universe anti-philosopher. He was the Dog Philosopher, though my own pooches are much better behaved than he seems to have been.

Cynicism is as much an anti-philosophy as it is a philosophy: there is a clownish element in it which mocks excessive intellectualism. For example, many Greeks took seriously Parmenides’ arguments for the non-existence of change or motion, illustrated in the paradoxes of Zeno such as Achilles and the tortoise. Aristotle spends many pages in his Physics trying to counter Zeno’s arguments in an attempt prove that motion and change are real. However, when the question of the reality of motion came up in conversation, it is alleged that Diogenes, instead of arguing as the others did, simply got up and walked around the room. This is on a par with Samuel Johnson’s ‘refutation’ of Berkeley’s idealism by kicking a stone, or G.E. Moore’s ‘proof’ of objects in the external world by holding up first one hand, then the other. In each case the response is to refuse the terms of the discourse offered, to reply with an action rather than an argument, thus purporting to show that ‘common sense’ wins out over idle speculation. In Diogenes’ case the point is that we already know that there is such a thing as motion, so any argument to the contrary must be wrong.

Diogenes was happy to satirize the absurdities of academic philosophising. When Plato’s Academy repeated Socrates’ definition of man as ‘featherless biped’, he (in one version of the story) threw a plucked chicken over the wall. (The story sounds too good to be true, but it seems clear that at one point the Academy did arrive, if only temporarily, at this definition. The evidence comes in Plato’s late dialogue The Statesman.) By comparison with, say, the Stoics, the Cynics have a limited curiosity. There is no Cynic logic, no Cynic cosmology. There is even a sort of philistinism about them: of the written works of the Cynics, for the most part only the titles remain, and from these titles – such as an encomium on hair or a treatise on the fart – there seems little reason to lament lost Cynic works as missing masterpieces. The Cynics worked primarily by satire, scurrility, wit, and provocation: except for them, philosophy was (and is) largely a laughter-free zone. How to be a Cynic, Philosophy Now

And today in A&P we'll conclude our quick look at Julian Baggini's Very Short Intro. He, like me, accepts the A-word but prefers the conventionally more positive connotations of Humanism. Humanists "are simply atheists who believe in living purposeful and moral lives." Call it what you will, this unblinking resolve to honestly acknowledge and make the best of our mortal and finite condition seeks and generally sustains  a state of emotional liberation, and at least as often as any alternative attitude attains a joyous spiritual elevation of heart and mind. But, "real life is about accepting ups and downs, the good and the bad..."

Baggini's last words: "Atheism does not seek to shield us from the truth by myth and superstition."

Amen to that.

(And as I noted in class, if you're looking for a secular "church" where you can celebrate that liberation with others of the spirit, check out Sunday Assembly. I did, once. But like Groucho and Woody I guess I really don't want to join a club that will have someone like me.)

From the archive:
9.5.19 LISTEN. I hate to say anything perceptibly averse to a public position taken by the Bahamian-born president of our university, at a time of horrific tragedy in his homeland. But his op-ed touting the important economic role played by our school in middle Tennessee tells only part of the story. I'm sure he'd agree.

Our university has a bigger role to play, in my estimation, in resisting the inertial drag that holds our people back in a medieval mindset. It was reported that a Nashville school had banned Harry Potter, lest the students' reading of Rowling might conjure actual evil spirits. That struck me as a joke, in the long line of jokes at the expense of benighted Tennesseans - frequently state legislators and fundamentalist Christians - typically told by late-night comics.

But then I saw the Tennessean poll showing a significant percentage of respondents supporting that ludicrous move. That's not so funny, in the age of Trump. A booming economy is far less impressive when its people are sick with superstitious supernaturalism. Our grads need to be ready to think, not just work, when they hit the job market.

Oh well, perhaps this regression too is solved by walking...
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Today (orig. published 1.25.18) 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.

*Forecast calls for 95 degrees at class time, we may want to just ramble around inside the building.

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.* (1.25.18)

Cosmic philosophy

We noted in class the other day the valuable catalytic function of philosophy, often also achieved by literary adepts, as a constructive provocateur of others' thinking. Gish Jen's new novel The Resisters, whose total literary charms Dwight Garner seems not entirely to recognize in this review, is one I've been looking forward to ever since Ann Patchett began touting it as a game-changer months ago. How can I resist? It appears to be a timely addition to the environmentally-woke genre known as cli-fi, and it imagines a future in which baseball, at least, still thrives.

“The Resisters” is set in a future surveillance state known as AutoAmerica. The ice caps have melted, and much of the land is underwater. A racial and class divide has cleaved the population.

The “Netted” have jobs, plush amenities and well-zoned houses on dry land. The “Surplus,” most of whom live on houseboats in “Flotsam Towns,” have scratchy blankets, thought control and degradation. Members of this underclass have not begun to grow gills, like the buff men and women in Kevin Costner’s “Waterworld,” but that may not be far off.

Much of the futuristic language Jen deploys, her portmanteaus, reflects the banality of both corporate uplift (“SpritzGrams,” “WrinkErase”) and state-sponsored evil: “EnforceBots,” “ToeBombs,” “AutoWar.” There’s been an anti-immigration push called “Ship’EmBack.” There is “Total Persuasion Architecture.” I could have used a few more paragraphs about “EgoShrink,” “HomoUpgrade” and “GonadWrap.”

Into this totalitarian landscape, like a flower slipped into the barrel of a rifle, Jen inserts an almost old-fashioned baseball novel. We meet Gwen, a young southpaw with long fingers and hair dyed the color of a David Hockney swimming pool. She redoes her ponytail on the mound between pitches before launching her blistering fastball and her spookily precise off-speed stuff. Her slider and curveball combination — her slurve — is a killer...

Well I'm hooked, and I probably have my subject for the 2021 Baseball in Literature & Culture Conference (having already committed to The Brothers K this year).

Today in CoPhi it's "Cosmic Philosophy" (and more) which can mean many different things to different people, all having to do with the perception of oneself as one with an ordered and rational universe (and with everyone and everything in it). To me, it means pondering William James's "really vital question for us all," which he posed in Pragmatism (Lecture 3): "What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?"

He's been gone from this world for a century and a decade now. I imagine he'd say we're going to have to do better. An essay in the Sunday Times noted our present dearth of speculative and hopeful wonder, in the darkness where dreams of a better future should be.

Carl Sagan says that too, in the remarkable Pale Blue Dot soliloquy I never tire of. Sagan's first little book The Cosmic Connection, which I first read back in High School, was one of the lures that brought me to philosophy's sense of wonder at our oneness with it all. "The cosmos is within us..."

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual." The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

John Muir was another cosmic philosopher of literary genius. "When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty." Gorgeous indeed, and an antidote to the cosmic despair of a kid who sees no point in doing his homework, or a robot who "lives" merely to pass the butter.

In A&P today we turn explicitly, not for the last time this semester, to our anchoring theme of meaning and purpose. Julian Baggini closes the chapter on that subject with a short list of atheists whose lives were indisputably purposive and meaningful. He might have included Sagan...

“The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.” Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

And Christopher Hitchens.

"A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so." Hitch-22: A Memoir

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From the archives:
9.3.19 [LISTEN] Nice long holiday weekend, must remember this is Tuesday... and not forget Happiness, where we had a delightful conversation last time about one of my favorite films by a morally-compromised director. What are the things that make life living, for me? Let's see...

I enjoyed how our upcoming Lyceum speaker from Vandy noted the irony of celebrating Labor Day as a prof "at a university founded by a notorious union-buster"... and couldn't resist echoing the observation. My university's "most prestigious scholarship is named for a Koch-funded alum whose campaign of extreme libertarian stealth has damaged our democracy." Our Buchanan scholars, not to mention our entire faculty and staff, should all read Democracy in Chains. Then maybe we can muster a movement to remove his name, along with Nathan Bedford Forrest's from the ROTC Building (and something like a gazillion streets in middle Tennessee). Names and symbols do matter.

BTW, The Times let me set the record straight Sunday: William James was not a "white-man's-burden" nationalist/imperialist/racist like his friend Kipling...

And on Sunday Morning, General Mattis pulled out his copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. I'd wondered how he coped with working for an impossible Commander in Chief.
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We're talking cosmic perspective in CoPhi today. Did you see the Super Blood Wolf moon last night? Or the big eclipse, August before last? Celestial events always dwarf the petty pace of politics and pop culture, and restore - however briefly - a sense of perspective so crucial to the philosophizing imagination. Even an ordinary everyday experience in the open air of dawn can evoke that cosmic feeling, as it did for me on my morning dog-walk today (I can't speak for the dogs, they didn't seem particularly moved. But they do always seem to have a sane perspective on things, from a canine point of view.) The moment we stepped out into the predawn we were met by a bright and brilliant post-supermoon, joined shortly thereafter by a fireball sunrise. Look up!

"The cosmic perspective flows from fundamental knowledge. But it's more than just what you know. It's also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge to assessing our place in the universe. And its attributes are clear:

The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it's not solely the province of the scientist. The cosmic perspective belongs to everyone.
The cosmic perspective is humble.
The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious.
The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small.
The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we're told.
The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place.
The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote, but a precious mote and, for the moment, the only home we have.
The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them.
The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and sex.
The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave—an indication that perhaps flag waving and space exploration do not mix.
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.

At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth.

Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock.

During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore—in part because it's fun to do. But there's a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their low contracted prejudices. And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace the cosmic perspective." Neil deGrasse Tyson

And, the cosmic perspective dismisses all narrow parochialism. The Tennessee eclipse? Really?

In Nashville's sky, a ring of fire (nyt)...
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Originally published August 21, 2017
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[Posted just after the solar eclipse:]
...Weren't you happy to experience and share that cosmic diversion last Monday? But that gets it backwards. Politics, impactful though it is on lives and prospects, is the diversion. We need to remember that we're standing on a planet that's evolving, and revolving, etc. We need to retain a cosmic perspective. Then, we'll not be so inclined to discount the importance of our happiness.

If we were to ask the question: “What is human life's chief concern?” one of the answers we should receive would be: “It is happiness.” How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.

Thus spake my philosophical spirit-guide James, a little over a century ago. But if that's too current, you can go back to Aristotle. "Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence." 

But the issue of our existence is never settled by the citing of authorities, no matter how lustrous. We have to work it out for ourselves, find a way to flourish in personal terms while also remaining responsibly committed to the welfare of our peers and the survival of our species. No simple task, but there's none more urgent.

That sounds almost grim, in an existentialist sort of way. "You will never be happy," said Camus, "if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

Well, I disagree. That's too pessimistic, too Schopenhaurian.

“What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.”

If that's the course you signed on for, this one will disappoint. The world does have a great deal to offer. It has a world. We get to live here. We're the lucky ones who got to live at all, who'll get to be happy if we apply ourselves just a bit to the question of how to do it.

 That, anyhow, is our working hypothesis. It makes me happy to begin working it out again. We'll see if we can verify the SoL's 60-second secrets, and its preference for eudaimonia.

There's nothing more fun, and often funny, that the pursuit of happiness.

  

Truthiness and the abyss

Sad to hear of the death of Terry Jones, the Python who said of Brian "he's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!" Two down, announced John Cleese (who pulls no punches when eulogizing his pals), four to go.

Can't help noticing that my own pals and I have lately been sharing notice of others' mortality - our old prof John Post, the singer-songwriter we used to hear a lot back in grad school David Olney [nyt]. Wonder whose mortality we're really noticing?

I suspected it was a form of denial when my old roomie recommended a Netflix show called Derry Girls, described there as concerned with the "universal challenge of being a teenager." That's not one of my concerns,  I told him, at this stage of life when our former teenagers are almost all growed up. But he says that’s not what’s compelling about it, so I said I’d give it a look - even though his favorite viewing when we lived together on Belmont in grad school was Ernest Angley (“recreate the eardrum… it’s a mineracle!”) and the 3 Stooges. "Hey," he responded, "that's entertainment!" In fairness we also watched a lot of Andy Griffith, which really is.
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In CoPhi today, after a glance at the headlines and history, we explore our respective definitions of philosophy-I like James's "unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly." We solicit favorite philosophers (my current top 5: James, John Dewey, John Stuart Mill, David Hume, and Bertrand Russell), and try to summarize our personal philosophy of life. No one will be pithier than Sally Brown: "No!"

And, those who read Educated over the summer or attended convocation last August can tell us what they thought of it. It's one of those books that lingers in the imagination, reminding a professional educator just how radically transforming an education can be for anyone, especially those who've been raised in extremis (by fundamentalist anti-intellectualist endtime apocalpyse-nowists) like Tara Westover.

And, we'll discuss William James's Pragmatism lecture 1, the School of Life's What's Philosophy for?, and the opening of Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History.

(Recommended: LISTEN: What is Philosophy? and Who's Your Favourite Philosopher? (PB Philosophy Bites). Also recommended, if you need help articulating your personal philosophy: Look on the This I Believe website for essays you like, and post links to them; and this; TIB II)

In his first Pragmatism lecture, delivered to a "splendid audience" of about 500 in November, 1906, James said the most practical and important thing about each of us is that we have a philosophy (know it or not), a "view of the universe," and that it affects us more than anything else. But it's disarmingly simple, not deep and profound. It's just "our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means, only partly got from books." But that part matters. Read the assignments, kids.

We'll note James's disdain for the superficiality of Leibniz's theodicy, and the fatuousness of believing that all is always for the best. If this  really is the best of possible worlds, we're going to have to rethink the value of possibility.

We'll consider the notion that philosophy is all about learning to live and die well. ("What is Philosophy For?")

And then it's on to "the reality-based community" that's been so besieged, of late. Karl Rove got Kurt Andersen's attention with that "remarkable phrase," leading him to write Fantasyland. Stephen Colbert's "truthiness" was also a catalyst.

Why does Andersen think Americans are so fantasy-prone? It's our birthright, we've been taught, to believe any damn thing we want. But it really all goes back to the Reformation and Martin Luther's debunking of expert theological authority.

But first, the word is truthiness. LISTEN Aug. '19

I wonder what to make, in the dim light of "truthiness," of Nigel Warburton's assertion that "the point of writing philosophy is to be a catalyst to other people’s thought, not to set down the truth for all time. There are many different ways of doing this, some of them literary." I agree that catalyzing thought and talk are vital to the ongoing pan-temporal conversation that is philosophy. And, I agree that the truth is elusive and that those who think they've laid exclusive claim to it are dogmatists we should resist. But we're still seeking truth, right? We're not just trying to say provocative things that may or may not help others in their respective searches, important as that work is.

But perhaps this is Richard Rorty's point: keep the conversation going. Asserting truth "for all time" does tend to be a conversation-stopper.
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Speaking (as I was back in the opening paragraphs of this post) of the abyss...

In Atheism & Philosophy (A&P) today we take up Julian Baggini's Very Short Intro. May also mention Neil deGrasse Tyson's god-talk, hawking his new book; and Julia Sweeney peering through the No God glasses.

We may also follow up our discussion Tuesday of William James on the will to believe as applied to what Martin Hagglund and others call secular faith. Baggini insists that atheism is not a form of faith, but a rational response to a dearth of evidence. If "committing to any belief or action that is not strictly proven to be right requires faith, then we are really robbing the idea of faith of its distinctive character." (31) Okay, but what about James's climber?

Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss. (WB)

And when we notice the precarious state of American democracy these days, aren't we all out on a cliff over an abyss, in search of fortitude and the strength and motivation to carry on? Courage, Adam Schiff!

Opening Day!

Or Opening Deja-vu, all over again. Like last time, and the time before, and the time before that, but also different. [Fall 2019]

Another fresh start, a blank slate, a return to that form of life we call academia and philosophia. Call it what you will, the first day of a new semester is an always-welcome recurrence I'm happy to affirm. I say yes to the challenge of introducing the next generation to this odd but essential practice of mature reflection on behalf of our adolescent species. The break was actually a little long, in some ways, though the break from that congested commute down I-24 to the 'boro was (as always) a time-giving, anxiety-relieving happy respite.

We'll do our usual Opening Day round of introductions: Who are you? Why are you here? I always encourage students to be creatively and playfully thoughtful with their responses to those questions, and there's usually a small handful of creatively playful responses mixed in with the dull literal Joe ("Just the facts, M'am") Fridays. "I'm Bill, I'm in concrete management, I'm here for the GenEd credit..." Thanks, Bill. Anybody given any thought to who you are independent of your academic and career aspirations, why you're living this life, in this place, with these goals and intentions?

Philosophers and physicists wonder why there's something rather than nothing, a universe where there might (we suppose) have been nought at all. Beyond that, as William James said, there's a mystery as to the existence of every particular, "this very thing," in its very particularity. Today begins, again, the worthy task of getting more of my young charges to grasp and grapple with (or at least acknowledge and value) that mystery, and grow from the encounter.

Atheism and Philosophy begins again today too. In addition to the usual questions we'll ask: Do you have firm convictions regarding religion, spirituality, an afterlife, a deity...? Do you think religion and science are (or can be) compatible? What sources of meaning and purpose in life do you recognize?

So, shall we hit the ground running? And not say, like that jaded bowl of petunias, "Oh no, not again!"

Or maybe I'll just talk about my dogs.