Opening Day!

LISTEN. Opening Day will be a little different this year. Okay, a lot different.

2020 has been a year like no other, hasn't it? [LISTEN to my Opening Day intro last January, which now seems a small eternity ago.]

But Opening Days are still a big deal. We get to introduce ourselves, and I get to begin introducing the course. Everybody's still in first place, we've all still got high hopes (I hope).

Here's how I'll introduce myself when our first class of the semester gathers in Zoom-space this afternoon...

If you haven't guessed, from my sporting metaphors, I'm a baseball fan. Raised in the St. Louis area, I went to my first live Cardinals game several stadia ago. I've not got to see them in action much yet in 2020, bunch of them came down with the virus.

My wife and I were in Scottsdale, AZ back in March, enjoying Cactus League Spring Training, when the plug was pulled on this baseball season. The rest of Spring Training was canceled (glad we got to see Murfreesboro TN's favorite millionaire athlete David Price pitch for LA earlier in the week), MLB's Opening Day was delayed ('til late July, it turned out, and that turned out to be too soon). Resumption of our Spring semester was also delayed, and we haven't been in the brick-and-mortar classroom since.

But let's look on the Bright Side. Many of us, thanks to these extreme measures, social distancing, masking etc., have managed to dodge COVID-19. We're healthy enough to carry on by other means. We'll be communicating, in my classes, on this platform and on Zoom. And we'll look forward to the day when we can again share physical space on our currently-lonely campus.

Meanwhile, in spite of everything, it's Opening Day again. As Mr. Cub used to say, let's play two! (He got to play on grass under the big sky at Wrigley Field, before they conformed and added lights and night games, we'll play on Zoom-CoPhi first, then Environmental Ethics). But since I'm a peripatetic, I'll again urge us all to find our own piece of turf and sky each day. I guarantee it will improve your and our experience of the course. As Chris Orlet reminds, in Gymnasiums of the Mind: Solvitur Ambulando, "it is solved by walking"--for pretty much any it.

Nearly every philosopher-poet worth his salt has voiced similar sentiments. Erasmus recommended a little walk before supper and “after supper do the same.” Thomas Hobbes had an inkwell built into his walking stick to more easily jot down his brainstorms during his rambles. Jean- Jacques Rousseau claimed he could only meditate when walking: “When I stop, I cease to think,” he said. “My mind only works with my legs.” Søren Kierkegaard believed he’d walked himself into his best thoughts. In his brief life Henry David Thoreau walked an estimated 250,000 miles, or ten times the circumference of earth. “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.” Thoreau’s landlord and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson characterized walking as “gymnastics for the mind.” 

Read the rest, if you're curious about the peripatetic life. It's a short essay, but if you follow the peri-philosophers' footsteps it may just change your life.

Also by way of introducing myself, I suggest you take a look at Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot [video]- he was an early influence on me and my version of Cosmic Philosophy.

And William James's opening lecture on Pragmatism, wherein he insists that we all have a philosophy whether we know it or not.

And my book...

And Brian Cohen...

For the record, here's how things began the last time we commenced a real (on ground, in person) semester:

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

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 again, and my canine philosophy. (Did someone mention Diogenes?)