MALA 6050 (Topics in Science and Reason) - Americana: Streams of Experience in American Culture

Coming to MTSU, Jy '24-

 

B term (7/1-8/9) web assisted (Tuesdays 6-9:10pm in JUB 202) w/Phil Oliver

American Experience-pbs

Television's most-watched and longest-running history series, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE brings to life the incredible characters and epic stories that have shaped America's past and present, Tuesdays at 9 pm on PBS. Learn more at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience.

American Experience

the language of liberty

In his new book, the liberal economist Joseph Stiglitz seeks to take back the language of liberty from the right.

https://www.threads.net/@newyorkermag/post/C6MTAScr4Q7/?xmt=AQGziYwtoxH9-ajbqnTzNd2kWqpBayvt4LWSLxfVujLo6Q

Daniel Dennett (1942-2024)

Remembering speaking with Dennet in Chicago at the APA February 2020, Told him I appreciated his email correspondence back in the 90s (and then later when I asked if he could arrange a meeting with Dawkins). Sat across the aisle from him listening to Philip Kitcher and Martha Nussbaum at that meeting. 

"...I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say "Thank goodness!" this is not merely a euphemism for "Thank God!" (We atheists don't believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence  is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now…" https://www.edge.org/conversation/daniel_c_dennett-thank-goodness

The "root of judgment, character, and will"

"The idea of mindfulness itself is by no means a new one. As early as the end of the nineteenth century, William James, the father of modern psychology, wrote that “the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will…. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.” That faculty, at its core, is the very essence of mindfulness. And the education that James proposes, an education in a mindful approach to life and to thought."

"Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes" by Maria Konnikova: https://a.co/3Omi6OR

Erin McKenna

“[American Philosophy] means a situated approach to philosophy that is context sensitive, experimental, and fallibilist. This approach encourages a pluralistic attitude as it is important to encounter and try to understand many different perspectives on any given situation or problem that one might want to try to address and ameliorate. This approach encourages open-mindedness and humility and finds intellectual dogmas and moral absolutes to be among the biggest obstacles to ongoing critical inquiry. It means substantive and sympathetic engagement with one’s environment and the various beings within that environment...” -Erin McKenna

(continues)

Erin McKenna is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. Among many books and articles she is the author of Living with Animals: Rights, Responsibilities, and Respect (2020), Livestock: Food, Fiber, and Friends (2018), American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present, (with Scott L. Pratt 2015), Pets, People, and Pragmatism (2013), and co-editor (with Lee McBride) of Pragmatist Feminism and the Work of Charlene Haddock Seigfried (2022). She is a Past President of SAAP.

“Glad to the Brink of Fear,” new RWE bio

In "Glad to the Brink of Fear," author James Marcus frames Ralph Waldo Emerson as "as a writer for our times." Read the full review by Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of English emeritus Larry Rosenwald in @nytimes: https://nyti.ms/3IER7YB

https://www.threads.net/@wellesleycollege/post/C5Js944Kc9e/?xmt=AQGztTDdcRccmVHpWl0MA8vkuev_wf_0WjYAbjsFMNYP0Q

Hannah Arendt and the art of beginning afresh: “we are free to change the world”

Hannah Arendt is a creative and complex thinker; she writes about power and terror, war and revolution, exile and love, and, above all, about freedom. Reading her is never just an intellectual exercise, it is an experience.

[…]

She loved the human condition for what it was: terrible, beautiful, perplexing, amazing, and above all, exquisitely precious. And she never stopped believing in a politics that might be true to that condition. Her writing has much to tell us about how we got to this point in our history, about the madness of modern politics and about the awful, empty thoughtlessness of contemporary political violence. But she also teaches that it is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, matters the most.

She too lived in a "post-truth era," she too watched the fragmentation of reality in a shared world, and she saw with uncommon lucidity that the only path to freedom is the free mind. Whether she was writing about love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss or about lying in politics, she was always teaching her reader, as Stonebridge observes, not what to think but how to think — a credo culminating in her parting gift to the world: The Life of the Mind...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/03/15/we-are-free-to-change-the-world-hannah-arendt/

Thomas Burke

American philosophy is a broad enterprise reaching well beyond the borders of the United States, encompassing a wide range of topics and agendas. But, in my opinion, the distinctive, defining, core contribution of American philosophy to philosophy at large is the classical American pragmatism of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead. This school of thought has influenced philosophical discourse all over the world even as we are still trying to figure out what pragmatism is in the first place.

How did you become an American philosopher?

In the late 1980s I was struggling as a graduate student at Stanford to find a dissertation topic. At one point Jon Barwise sent a note to the in-house “situation theory and situation semantics” email list mentioning that during one of his recent talks someone had asked a question concerning possible links to Dewey’s discussions of situations some 50 years earlier. Barwise knew nothing about it and was therefore suggesting it as a possible research topic for anyone who might be interested. I was not particularly interested, but I was struggling. So I took the bait. When I asked him about it, he handed me a copy of Russell’s 1939 review of Dewey’s 1938 Logic. This led me to look at the book itself, and I was hooked. I knew next to nothing about Peirce or James, not to mention Dewey, but I was already primed (via some familiarity with James Gibson’s “ecological psychology”) to jettison modern epistemology in favor of something, anything, that was oriented to a more dynamic interactive conception of ourselves as living things who happen to be able to think...

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"immediate delight... fruits for life"

Leave "the liver" (but not the delighted liver) out of it

"...Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see "the liver" determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they religious or of non-religious content.

To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our DIS-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of its possessor's body at the time.

It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of these its favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent.

Let us play fair in this whole matter, and be quite candid with ourselves and with the facts. When we think certain states of mind superior to others, is it ever because of what we know concerning their organic antecedents? No! it is always for two entirely different reasons. It is either because we take an immediate delight in them; or else it is because we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life..."

WJ, Varieties: https://a.co/avNzVGY

Passion for teaching, respect for students, contempt for academic irrelevance

I find myself drawn again, at the outset of another semester's teaching, to the wisdom of John Lachs's Stoic Pragmatism, which begins with a simple truth— "Age clarifies"— and concludes with an epilogue I wish every teacher would commit to memory and practice. 

"…I am unable to think of anything more important for the future of academic philosophy in this country than for it to become less academic. 

Having had more than my share of bad instructors, I sought a job in education as a way to earn a living while I continued my philosophical reflections. I never suspected that I would develop a passion for teaching. Yet conveying to others the benefits I receive from philosophy has become a burning desire and a consuming activity in my life. I do it in a way that seems to some a form of witnessing, showing the immediate pertinence of philosophical ideas to my life.

 Immense satisfaction attends my good fortune in having had the opportunity to make a contribution to the lives of thousands of undergraduates. I view this multitude of people as extended family: I keep in touch with as many of them as I can and cheer them on in the pursuit of their purposes. I hope philosophy has made a significant difference in their lives. I have also been fortunate in having launched more than sixty young philosophers on their careers. My relation to them is one of lifelong concern and support; helping them with their problems and careers is of vital importance to me. I think of these activities not as the result of optional commitments on my part, but as the continuing expressions of my philosophical beliefs. 

People whose minds are energetic and who are interested in their fields find it easy to teach well. Bored instructors are boring and the self-absorbed fail to place themselves in the shoes of their students to see how what they say is received. Thinking before one's students' eyes—which means, among other things, teaching without notes—demonstrates what one expects them to do. Keeping in mind the interconnectedness of things and especially the relations of what one teaches to the ordinary concerns of students renders instruction vivid and, when things go well, even memorable. 

By no means least, good teaching requires deep respect for students. The activity is hallowed because it enables one human being to contribute to the creation of another. Its chance of success is enhanced by embedding it in wider human relations; truly good teachers tend to offer caring companionship as the context of instruction. Perhaps all learning is imitation; if so, there is added reason for teachers to offer themselves as living examples to their students. Knowledge that makes little difference to the instructor's life is, in any case, rightly suspicious and may deserve to be disregarded by students…"

— Stoic Pragmatism by John Lachs
https://a.co/bWipA9F

Natural satisfaction

 Also crucial to bear in mind, when summoning the will to accomplish a challenging project: 

"The attitude of seeking fulfillment in the future... enjoy activities at the time we do them..." etc.

--John Lachs, Intermediate Man

Free will and “the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world”

It's a familiar text for James scholars, this early diary entry, but so much of his mature philosophy is already presaged by it. It's an essential touchstone, and a good launchpad for any daunting project.

"I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second "Essais" and see no reason why his definition of Free Will—" the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. For the remainder of the year, I will abstain from the mere speculation and contemplative Grüblei in which my nature takes most delight, and voluntarily cultivate the feeling of moral freedom, by reading books favorable to it, as well as by acting. After the first of January, my callow skin being somewhat fledged, I may perhaps return to metaphysical study and skepticism without danger to my powers of action. For the present then remember: care little for speculation; much for the form of my action; recollect that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action—and consequently accumulate grain on grain of willful choice like a very miser; never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number. Principiis obsta [or as Barney Fife said, nip it!]—Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate initiative which Bain posits as needful for the acquisition of habits. I will see to the sequel. Not in maxims, not in Anschauungen [abstractions, intuitions], but in accumulated acts of thought lies salvation. Passer outre [Disregard, & carry on]. Hitherto, when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, without carefully waiting for contemplation of the external world to determine all for me, suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into; now, I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power. My belief, to be sure, can't be optimistic—but I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world. Life shall [be built in] * doing and suffering and creating." *

— April 30, 1870. The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott

What Is an Emotion? William James’s Revolutionary 1884 Theory of How Our Bodies Affect Our Feelings – The Marginalian

… Long before scientists came to demonstrate how our emotions affect our bodies, James argued that the relationship is bidirectional and that while "bodily disturbances" are conventionally considered byproducts or expressions of the so-called standard emotions — "surprise, curiosity, rapture, fear, anger, lust, greed, and the like" — these corporeal reverberations are actually the raw material of the emotion itself. 

James writes:

Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion. Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colourless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we could not actually feel afraid or angry.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/01/11/what-is-an-emotion-william-james/