Up@dawn 2.0

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Torture

“Talk! Or we’ll make you watch the State of the Union.”

Saturday, January 27, 2018

Quizzes Jan 30, Feb 1

Milesians and Pythagoreans, DR 1-2 

Write your quiz answers down on a sheet of paper, we'll go over them in class. You can claim a base for each correct answer (and a run on the scorecard for every four bases, up to 5 runs per class). Also claim a base for each posted alternate quiz question, discussion question, response to a discussion question, other comment, or relevant link. Keep track of everything you post in a dated personal log that will be collected later. Claim a RUN for posting a weekly 250+ word essay on the relevant topic of your choice.

1. Who labelled the early 6th & 5th century philosophers "PreSocratics," and what did they invent?

2. Aristotle said the Milesians were the first what?

3. Why does Gottlieb say Thales was not simply silly to suggest that H2O is the origin and essence of everything? OR, What must we do in order to refute him?

4. What essential facet of scientific thinking did Anaximander's work exemplify?

5. What famous poetic image do we associate with Pythagoras?

6. What was a good Pythagorean supposed to study?

7. What did Bertrand Russell, echoing Pythagoras and Plato, consider the mind's "highest good"?

8. How does Gottlieb think Aristotle was unfair to the Pythagoreans in his interpretation of their claim that numbers are the principles of all things?

FL 5-6
9. What made Anne Hutchinson "so American"?

10. How was freedom of thought in early America different from that of Europe in the 17th century?

11. Did most people in New England believe in witches, during the infamous Salem witch trials?

12. What's Protestantism's enduring influence?

(Post your suggested alternate quiz questions...)


Discussion Questions (Post your DQs too, and comment on mine and others' before class. Each gets you a base.)
  • What do you think Xenophanes meant when he said the following? Do you agree?
    But if cattle and horses and lions had hands
    or could paint with their hands and create works such as men do,
    horses like horses and cattle like cattle
    also would depict the gods' shapes and make their bodies
    of such a sort as the form they themselves have.
  • Do you favor natural, or supernatural, explanations of phenomena? Do you think it's possible to be a naturalist who also believes unproven religious or metaphysical claims about god(s), heaven, immortality, the soul, etc.? Or should naturalists consider themselves atheistic or agnostic, with respect to the objects of such claims?
  • Is it a good practice in science and/or philosophy to try and reduce complex phenomena to a simpler explanation? 
  • Can we make sense of our experience without invoking invisible causes? What makes some invisible phenomena preferable to others, scientifically?
  • Anaximenes was "struck by the fact that people breathe and corpses do not." (15) Was he onto something important? Is breath the essence of life? 
  • Are you "comforted" by the turn from Milesian speculations about nature to ethical questions about "the proper way to live" (17)? Or do you think both kinds of philosophizing are necessary?
  • Followers of Hippocrates "did not divide the world into the divinely mysterious... and the naturally explicable" (18) but instead tried to explain everything naturalistically. Was that an important milestone for medical science? Are modern-day "alternative" healers anti-Hippocratic?
  • Pythagoras famously had both a scientific/mathematical and a mystical/superstitious side. Do you find this incoherent, or intriguing?
  • Do modern humans unwittingly worship Dionysus, seeking some sort of transcendence via self-indulgent sensualism? (27) Is there anything to be said for that?
  • Do you believe numbers can "unlock the secrets of how the world work[s]"? (32) Or does the world include important qualities and experiences that cannot or need not (should not?) be quantified? Is it "madness" to relate everything to a corresponding number?-eg, maleness=2, femaleness=3, justice=4...(34)
  • Do you share or reject Shakespeare's "pure Orphism" in Merchant of Venice? (38)
  • Do you share or reject young Russell's "feeling that intellect is superior to sense"? (42)
  • "Disbelief was eventually permitted (in America), at least legally." But President George Bush said in his view atheists and agnostics were not "real Americans." Do you think most Americans interpret freedom of religion as including freedom from religion, for those who prefer it?
  • Is there something in our national makeup as Americans that accounts for the witch-trial phenomenon? 
  • Post your DQs...



The Genius of Pythagoras... Three Minute Philosophy: Pythagoras
==
Quiz Feb. 1 DR 3-5. Post your own alternative quiz questions (especially from the latter half of each chapter) and claim a base for each. You may also answer alternative quiz questions posed by classmates and claim bases for answering correctly, up to the total number of questions on the quiz that day.

1. How does Gottlieb think Heraclitus would reply to Aristotle's complaint about his ambiguous syntax?

2. Why did Heraclitus compare us all to beasts, drunkards, sleepers, and children? What did he say we fail to grasp?

3. What did fire symbolize, for Heraclitus?

4. Who were Parmenides' famous teacher and student?

5. What was Parmenides' surprising claim (aside from the idea that everything is eternal)?

6. How did Parmenides say language and thought connect to the world?

7. What was Zeno trying to discredit, with his famous paradoxes of motion?

8. What did Aristotle say Zeno invented, and how did his aim differ from Socrates'?

9. How does Gottlieb solve the Achilles paradox?
==
FL 7-8
10. What did pious congregants begin to do in The Great Awakening?

11. Who popularized for Christianity in America the idea of being "born again" ?

12. Who told his nephew to "question with boldness the existence of a god"?

13. Who said the Framers forgot to mention God in the Constitution?

14. What does Sapere aude! mean, and whose slogan was it?


DQ (Claim a base for each DQ you post and/or comment on.)

  • Should philosophers be deliberately enigmatic and impenetrable? Can an obscure epigrammatic statement be profound? Or should philosophers always strive for clarity? Do you find Heraclitus "tantalizing" or "annoying"?
  • Heraclitus was both introspective and empiricistic, valuing both the "inner stage" (45) and the evidence of the senses. Are you more introspective, more curious about the world around you, or both?
  • What do you think Heraclitus meant when he said you can't step into the same river twice?
  • Did Zeno draw the right implication when he said his paradoxes show Parmenides was right? (69)
  • What do you think of Goober's pre- and post-beard persona (see "Goober the philosopher" above), and of the why his friends react to him when he changes? What moral do you think the show's writers were trying to tell, with this story? Do you agree or disagree?
  • Do you expect your friends to be themselves and not change? Or do you encourage them to become themselves by changing? 
  • What do you think of the SoL's advice for dealing with a crisis of meaning (see below*)? Does it help to position yourself in a wider frame of reference, with respect to the "big picture" view of yourself as a small contributing part of a species, occupying a blip of time in a vast cosmos?
  • What do you think of the SoL's "problem with our phones"? Do they create a crisis of meaning, does tech generally pose an "existential threat" to life as we've known it? Or is this just more change we need to embrace and manage? 
  • An old pop song proclaimed "I hope I die before I get old." (Some of the band members did, in fact.) The alternative to growing old, of course, is dying young. Will you embrace aging and the changes in lifestyle and physical capacity it represents, or resist it?
  • COMMENT: A recent article says: “While most people enjoy relative continuity over the decades, being able to adapt to the changing context of our lives is the key to success throughout life.”
  • [Post your DQs]
==
The rest of the Dostoyevsky quote: "And having no respect, they cease to love, in order to occupy and distract themselves without love they give way to passions and to coarse pleasures, and sink to bestiality in their vices, all from continual lying to others and to themselves."

==
Get Up and Move. It May Make You Happier.
When people get up and move, even a little, they tend to be happier than when they are still, according to an interesting new study that used cellphone data to track activities and moods. In general, the researchers found, people who move are more content than people who sit.

There already is considerable evidence that physical activity is linked to psychological health. Epidemiological studies have found, for example, that people who exercise or otherwise are active typically are less prone to depression and anxiety than sedentary people.

But many of these studies focused only on negative moods. They often also relied on people recalling how they had felt and how much they had moved or sat in the previous week or month, with little objective data to support these recollections.

For the new study, which was published this month in PLoS One, researchers at the University of Cambridge in England decided to try a different approach. They would look, they decided, at correlations between movement and happiness, that most positive of emotions. In addition, they would look at what people reported about their activity and compare it with objective measures of movement.

Writing Your Way to Happiness JAN. 19, 2015
How Exercise May Protect Against Depression OCT. 1, 2014
Work. Walk 5 Minutes. Work.DEC 28


To accomplish these goals, they first developed a special app for Android phones. Available free on the Google app store and ultimately downloaded by more than 10,000 men and women, it was advertised as helping people to understand how lifestyle choices, such as physical activity, might affect people’s moods. (The app, which is no longer available for download, opened with a permission form explaining to people that the data they entered would be used for academic research.)

The app randomly sent requests to people throughout the day, asking them to enter an estimation of their current mood by answering questions and also using grids in which they would place a dot showing whether they felt more stressed or relaxed, depressed or excited, and so on.

Periodically, people were also asked to assess their satisfaction with life in general.

After a few weeks, when people were comfortable with the app, they began answering additional questions about whether, in the past 15 minutes, they had been sitting, standing, walking, running, lying down or doing something else.

They also were asked about their mood at that moment.

At the same time, during the 17 months of the study, the app gathered data from the activity monitor that is built into almost every smartphone today. In essence, it checked whether someone’s recall of how much he or she had been moving in the past quarter-hour tallied with the numbers from the activity monitor.

In general, the information provided by users and the data from activity monitors was almost exactly the same.

Of greater interest to the researchers, people using the app turned out to feel happier when they had been moving in the past quarter-hour than when they had been sitting or lying down, even though most of the time they were not engaged in rigorous activity.

In fact, most of the physical activity that people reported was gentle walking, with little running, cycling or other more strenuous exercise.

But the links between moving in any way and feeling happy were consistent for most people throughout the day, according to the data from their apps. It also didn’t matter whether it was a workday or weekend.

The researchers also found that people who moved more frequently tended to report greater life satisfaction over all than those who reported spending most of their time in a chair.

In general, the results suggest that “people who are generally more active are generally happier and, in the moments when people are more active, they are happier,” says Gillian Sandstrom, a study co-author who was a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge and is now a lecturer in psychology at the University of Essex.

In other words, moving and happiness were closely linked, both in the short term and longer term.

Of course, this type of study does not establish causation. It cannot tell us whether being more active actually causes us to become happier or, conversely, whether being happy causes us to move more. It only shows that more activity goes hand-in-hand with greater happiness.2COMMENTS

The study also is limited by its reliance on cellphone data, Dr. Sandstrom says, because it may not have captured information about formal exercise. People often do not carry their phones when they run, cycle or engage in other types of vigorous activity, she and her colleagues point out in the study. So those types of workouts would not be reflected in the app or the phones’ activity monitor, making it impossible to know from this data set whether formal exercise is linked to happiness, for better or worse.

Still, the size of the study group and the consistency of the findings are compelling, Dr. Sandstrom says. They do indicate that if you get up and move often, you are more likely to feel cheerful than if you do not. nyt
==
1984
George Orwell’s classic book “1984,” about a dystopian future where critical thought is suppressed under a totalitarian regime, has seen a surge in sales this month, rising to the top of the Amazon best-seller list in the United States and leading its publisher to have tens of thousands of new copies printed.

Craig Burke, the publicity director at Penguin USA, said that the publisher had ordered 75,000 new copies of the book this week and that it was considering another reprint.

“We’ve seen a big bump in sales,” Mr. Burke said. He added that the rise “started over the weekend and hit hyperactive” on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. Since Friday, the book has reached a 9,500 percent increase in sales, he said.

He said demand began to lift on Sunday, shortly after the interview Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to Donald J. Drumpf, gave on “Meet the Press.”

In defending a false claim by the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, that Mr. Drumpf had attracted the “largest audience ever to witness an inauguration,” Ms. Conway used a turn of phrase that struck some observers as similar to the dystopian world of “1984.”
(continues)

Friday, January 26, 2018

Sir Walter Raleigh, "such a stupid git"

In case anyone's curious about the answer to my trivia question in class the other day...

In the introduction of Socrates: A Very Short Introduction, C.C.W Taylor describes Socrates as one of the most influential and most elusive of all philosophers.  His influence was due to his personality, the impact he had on Plato, and of being the ideal model of the philosophic life.
His elusiveness is attributed to the fact that he wrote nothing and the only complete examples left are from Plato’s dialogues and the writing of Xenophon with a few scrapes written by others. There are enough differences in these writings to presume the writing were presented with their own purposes in mind.

            To summarize the Life chapter, Taylor tells us Socrates’ father was a stonemason and his mother was a midwife and he had three sons from a bad-tempered wife. A second wife named Myrto is mentioned in the writings, but little is known of her. Little is known of the first half of his life other than he was a pupil of Archealaus who was interested in natural philosophy and ethics. He believed the just and the disgraceful exist not by nature, but by learned behavior. Socrates early philosophic interest are shown in Plato’s Phaedo.
           
Historically, Socrates emerged on the scene with his courageous service in the Peloponnesian war. Plato described him as having tremendous physical endurance, wore simple clothing and walked barefoot. He was talkative and was a joke for his eccentric and simple lifestyle. His odd physical appearance, strange religious beliefs, and talk of nonsensical philosophy added to this “strange” portrayal. These characteristics were stressed by the comic playwright Aristophanes in his play Clouds. In the play, students pay Socrates to learn techniques to avoid paying debts by learning how to make the weaker argument defeat the stronger or as Taylor describes it as the Unjust argument defeats the Just argument. Socrates is also portrayed as a philosopher who was fascinated by the heavens and rejected traditional religion in favor of natural gods replacing Zeus. The play concludes with his house burning down as a symbolism of his punishment.

Taylor talks about the views of Socrates being caricatured as a representative of the new learning and out of the norm for the conservative Athenians. but the citizens of Athens were probably aware of this exaggeration since there was a signification difference between the wealth of the Sophist and Socrates who gave his time away at no charge and lived in poverty.

Drastic changes occurred in Athens after its defeat in the Peloponnesian war. No longer a democracy, Athens fell under the tyranny of a group of 30 which killed or exiled thousands of people. From the writings, Socrates remained apolitical during the tyranny as he did under a democracy even though he did have associations with a few of the thirty.

Socrates was indicted and brought to trial in the Spring of 399 BC for not recognizing the gods of the city, bringing in new gods and corrupting the youth. Meletus who brought on the indictment caricaturized Socrates as having eccentric beliefs and guided by an inner voice which warned him against being involved in politics. There’s no record of the trial, no writings on the speeches for the prosecution, but there are two written for the defense, one by Xenophon and one by Plato.

I learned from this chapter the accusations against Socrates were vague and seemed political. His associates among the 30 were anti-Athenian and anti-democratic and were part of a religious scandal in 415 BC. Aristophanes in the Clouds portrayed Socrates as an antagonist of traditional religion and was involved in the occult.

The defense against these accusations written by Plato and Xenophon were very different from each other. In Plato’s version, the accusations against Socrates were misrepresented by the caricature of Aristophanes in two ways – that he claims to be a natural philosopher and he teaches for pay. Also, mentioned in the defense was his divine mission. I thought this divine mission was fascinating. Socrates’ friend asked the oracle of Apollo at Delphi if there was anyone wiser than Socrates, in which the answer was no. Socrates was puzzled by this answer, since he didn’t claim any expertise. As a result, he went out to find someone wiser than he. When he questioned, them he discovers none are as wise as they claimed to be. From this he concluded, the reason he was the wisest is that he was aware of his own ignorance and had a mission to show others their claims of their wisdom were false. This examination of others was a large part of his unpopularity, but what he believed to be a great benefit to the society.

In Xenophon’s defense, the oracle said no one was more free-spirited or self-controlled than Socrates and that his defense to the charges were to refute the claims of not recognizing the local gods and the charges of the new gods were his own divine sign.

 I wondered why the defenses offered different versions of the oracle story and the author does a good job explaining this for he questions whether the story of the oracle is true or an invention of Plato. He believes it is true, and raises great points in defense, such as asking the question; why name a specific person (Chaerephon) as the person who asked the question of the oracle and points out that after the death of Chaerephon his brother testified the story as being true at the trial. As far as the differences?  Just like today we all see circumstances through our own experiences.  I believe both defense told the story with their own opinion and purpose in mind. As for which defense captures the moment more authentically, I believe everyone has a need for a purpose in their lives and Socrates divine mission fits that bill and I can’t help but thinking of today’s term of ‘fake news’ when reading of the effects of Aristophanes caricature of Socrates.

Questions:

Is there any evidence of the Delphi oracle?


What does Socrates mean by the phrase “the best of one’s soul”?

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Quiz Jan25

Write your quiz answers down on a sheet of paper, we'll go over them in class. You can claim a base for each correct answer (and a run on the scorecard for every four bases, up to 5 runs per class). Also claim a base for each posted alternate quiz question, discussion question, response to a discussion question, other comment, or relevant link. Keep track of everything you post in a dated personal log that will be collected later. Claim a RUN for posting a weekly 250+ word essay on the relevant topic of your choice.

Peripatetic philosophy - Gymnasiums of the Mind...
1. What were Aristotle's followers called?

2. Who said his mind only worked with his legs?

3. Whose mentor called walking "gymnastics for the mind"?

4. Who had a "Sand-walk"?

5. How much does the average American walk?

6. Name a city with a "Philosophers' Walk".

FL 3-4
7. What was Sir Walter Raleigh's dream and fantasy, and what did he help invent?

8. By what has American civilization been shaped, according to historian Daniel Boorstin?

9. What English Enlightenment philosopher said humans tend to notice instances that confirm their prior superstitions and opinions but ignore ("neglect and pass by") those that do not?

10. Is America's founding mythology, the first nonnative new Americans who mattered were who?

11. What did the early Puritans predict was immanent?

And some discussion questions (remember, you get a base for each DQ suggestion you post or comment on before class... also for each alternative quiz question, relevant comment, link, etc.):


  • Would you like to have attended Aristotle's school, Plato's, neither, or both? Why?
  • Do you consider yourself an active or a sedentary person, by preference? (If given a choice, on a lovely Fall day, would you rather stay in and play video games or go out for a walk/hike/run/bikeride/swim/etc.?)
  • What's the most memorable outdoor experience you've ever had?
  • Have you ever attempted to share your beliefs, convictions, core principles (etc.) in public? (Ifyes, would you say you did it in a spirit of evangelism and proselytizing, or in a philosophical way? What's the difference? And if no, why not?)
  • Are you a good listener? (Do you try to understand the points of view of those who disagree with your beliefs, or do you simply dismiss them as just wrong?)
  • Do you agree that we live in a time of intolerance and incivility, when it comes to dissenting points of view?
  • Are Americans especially prone to be gullible when confronted with false claims and "advertizing"?
  • Post your own suggested discussion questions...


==
Some old posts

Monday, August 29, 2016
Walking to the stars

What a gorgeous, beckoning crescent moon out here in this morning's pre-dawn.

In CoPhi we're talking walking today, with side-orders of space-faring and belief-sharing.

We'll discuss the first two chapters of Frederic Gros's Philosophy of Walking, and Christopher Orlet's Gymnasiums of the Mind.

We'll also consider these old posts and this one on walking and believing (and the ongoing This I Believe franchise), Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, and Sagan heir Neil de Grasse Tyson's Why exploring space still matters. The common thread? Some of us fervently believe, with Nietzsche, Rousseau, and so many others, that the best ideas first come while walking. Some of us also believe we should expand our range to include more distant turf, over the Terran horizon. I'm a believer.

Given the vast scale of the cosmos, and the fact that we've really only just learned to walk, "we" means future humans. But the horizon just came a lot closer, with the discovery of our sister planet at Proxima Centauri. By present propulsion technology, of course, Proxima Centauri is NOT in such close proximity. It's 80,000 years away. If that Russian billionaire figures out how to boost those iPhone-size probes to a fifth of the speed of light they'll get there in 20 years. This is less about us getting there, than about us getting excited about our great-great...grandchildren getting there, and for that even to be possible we have to get excited about sustaining this planet, here and now. An Exoplanet Too Far

Neil Tyson believes a redoubling of our efforts in space would be the most practical investment we could ever make in our species.

'We need to double NASA's budget because not only is it the grandest epic adventure a human being can undertake, not only would the people who led this adventure be the ones we end up building statues to and naming high schools after and becoming the next generation's Mercury 7 as role models, not only will there be spinoff products from these discoveries, but what's more important than all of those, what's more practical than all of those, is that he will transform the economy into one that will lead the world once again rather than trail the world as we are inevitably going to be doing over the next decade.'"

And it'll give us peripatetics a lot more room to roam.

The cosmic perspective need not lead to resignation and existential despair, of the sort hinted in Bertrand Russell's "A Free Man's Worship" - "For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space..." -and made light of in his "Why I Am Not a Christian" - "Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence..."

Some do, actually. But others, reflecting on a mote of dust with Carl Sagan, dream.

We humans have set foot on another world in a place called the Sea of Tranquility, an astonishing achievement for creatures such as we, whose earliest footsteps three and one-half million years old are preserved in the volcanic ash of east Africa. We have walked far.

It all began with one small step. Between now and the end of eternity, we have countless more steps to enjoy. Let's go.

And bring a book. I recommend Five Billion Years of Solitude: the Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings.

5:45/6:18, 73/90, 7:17
==
Back for Day 3, we turn happily to our philosophical labors in CoPhilosophy. Today we introduce (and maybe even emulate) the peripatetics, and we explore the earnest atmosphere of This I Believe.

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) founded his Lyceum just outside Athens and

gathered around him a group of brilliant research students, called “peripatetics” from the name of the cloister (peripatos) in which they walked and held their discussions. The Lyceum was not a private club like [Plato's] Academy; many of the lectures there were open to the general public and given free of charge. EB
Nowadays, a "peripatetic" has just come to mean someone who travels a lot. I prefer the older signification, of someone who (like Aristotle's students in the Lyceum peripatos) walks while talking philosophy. That's how we'll understand and apply the concept in our CoPhi collaborations.

...the act of ambulation – or as we say in the midwest, walking – often serves as a catalyst to creative contemplation and thought. It is a belief as old as the dust that powders the Acropolis, and no less fine. Followers of the Greek Aristotle were known as peripatetics because they passed their days strolling and mind-wrestling through the groves of the Academe. The Romans’ equally high opinion of walking was summed up pithily in the Latin proverb Solvitur Ambulando: “It is solved by walking.”

...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.”

In order that he might remain one of the fittest, 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. 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.”

None of these laggards, however, could touch Friedrich Nietzsche, who held that “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Rising at dawn, Nietzsche would stalk through the countryside till 11 a.m. Then, after a short break, he would set out on a two-hour hike through the forest to Lake Sils. After lunch he was off again, parasol in hand, returning home at four or five o’clock, to commence the day’s writing. Christopher Orlet, "Gymnasiums of the Mind"
This I Believe II was MTSU's freshman summer read this year. Jay Allison, who revived the old '50s TIB franchise, was to have spoken at convocation last year but weather interfered.

Here's where it all began, in 1951. As Mr. Murrow said, there's no "pill of wisdom"... but lots of wise people are real pills. Many of these concise testimonials of conviction will make you feel better about the human condition.




These little essays are sometimes light and fluffy, sometimes dense, sometimes funny, occasionally profound. I'm asking students to find their faves. Sticking just to those included in Jay Allison's first book, I guess these would be mine:Albert Einstein, An Ideal of Service to Our Fellow Man
Oscar Hammerstein II, Happy Talk
Victor Hanson, Natural Links in a Long Chain of Being
Penn Jillette, There is No God
Erroll Morris, There Is Such a Thing as Truth
Azar Nafisi, Mysterious Connections That Link Us Together
Eboo Patel, We Are Each Other's Business
Jackie Robinson, Free Minds and Hearts at Work
Wallace Stegner, Everything Potent is Dangerous
Arnold Toynbee, I Agree With a Pagan
John Updike, Testing the Limits of What I Know and Feel

An old post: Why We Don't Share

This just scratches the surface. There are tens of thousands of essays in the archives, growing daily; and that probably doesn't include yours. Yet.
==

Thursday, June 5, 2014
An image of life itself
I started walking seriously in college, in the late 70s. Coincidentally, that's also when English travel writer John Man published Walk! It Could Change Your Life..., a used unjacketed copy of which has been languishing unnoticed and unread for many years on a shelf in my Little House out back (the rear porch of which is my conveniently remote summer office).

It's an undeservedly neglected gem. My Philosophy Walks project has finally drawn me to this compendium of insight and delight, drawings, period photos, practical tips for dedicated walkers (including a section at the end on stretching), and judiciously selected quotations like this one from Donald Culross Peattie's Joy of Walking:
Time is not money; time is a an opportunity to live before you die. So a man who walks, and lives and sees and thinks as he walks, has lengthened his life. 
I'm happy to acknowledge another unsung fellow philosopher of walking.

There's nothing about Walk! in John's published biographical note. I suppose he considers it too slight (compared with his impressive subsequent body of work) to mention. I would differ with that judgment, and concur enthusiastically with his conclusion:
Walking means seeing the unseen, understanding, friendship, privacy, emotional perspective, physical capacity... an image of life itself.
Early in the book, Man offers a partial taxonomy of walking styles including the Peripatetics' "stroll" - " the type of locomotion adopted by tourists, lovers, promenaders and thinkers."

I actually think better, I think, at a faster clip. With dogs. Without a stick.
==
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Reconnoitring
This would have been a fine way to preface Philosophy Walks, but Robert MacFarlane has already used it for The Old Ways:
This book could not have been written by sitting still. The relationship between paths, walking and the imagination is its subject, and much of its thinking was therefore done -- was only possible -- while on foot...
Above all, this is a book about people and place: about walking as a reconnoitre inwards, and the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move. 
So I'll be writing a different preface to a different book, though one that also cannot be conceived or executed at anchorage. His foot journey was geographically extended, mine tend to circle familiar ground, but we're both members in good standing of the peripatetics club.

Isn't reconnoitre a great word! It's le bon mot for a big part of what I walk for.  I'd be truly lost without my daily morning internal reconnaissance, which can only happen after moving to "higher" ground on shank's mare. The elevation sought is not necessarily to be measured in feet or meters, or even in words. But the bookish medium defiantly imposes that particular yardstick, so I'd better go reconnoitre for some more of those. Words, I mean.
==
Friday, June 28, 2013
Sympathetic peripatetics
"Peripatetic": terrific word, fabulous idea. One day early in the Fall semester I'm going to fulfill a lifelong ambition and conduct class peripatetically.
From the time of Aristotle until 86 BC there was a continuous succession of philosophers in charge of the school in the Lyceum. The common name for the school, Peripatetic, was derived either from the peripatos in the Lyceum grounds or from Aristotle’s habit of lecturing while walking [but, you call this walking?]... The Lyceum’s fame-and the fame of other schools in Athens-attracted increasing numbers of philosophers and students from all over the Mediterranean world...
The utter destruction of Athens in AD 267 probably ended this renaissance of scholarly activity. The work of Peripatetic philosophers continued elsewhere, but it is unclear whether they returned to the Lyceum. Nothing certain is known about the Lyceum during the remainder of the third through early sixth centuries AD. Any remaining philosophical activity would certainly have ended in AD 529, when the emperor Justinian closed all the philosophical schools in Athens. 
We don't seem to know much for sure about the ancient peripatetics.
According to the tradition, Andronicus of Rhodes was the eleventh successor of Aristotle as head of the Peripatos, the school that Aristotle founded in Athens (Ammonius, In De Int. 5.28-29). We have good reasons to doubt this tradition. 
Well, we almost always have good reasons to doubt every tradition. Aristotle's Lyceum and its walking philosophers ended in Athens but "continued to exist in the form of a philosophical sect," and more importantly continues to exist as an idea, a state of mind, and a style of living. Walk this way...

Podcasts: I believe in the peripatetic life... Sym-pathetic peripatetics