Freedom Riders

On May 4, 1961, thirteen Freedom Riders left Washington, D.C. on two buses headed for New Orleans. Their goal: challenge segregated travel facilities throughout the South.

The violence they met along their route, including firebombings of the buses in Alabama, captured the nation's attention, including that of the Kennedy administration.

https://to.pbs.org/4bnu5li

Jazz, “the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom…”

[Duke Ellington's] autobiography was Music is My Mistress (1973), in which he said, "Jazz is a good barometer of freedom. In its beginnings, the United States spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free, that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country."

https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2013%252F04%252F29.html

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/