Summer's over, wake up!

Vote!

A note from the provost:

You may have heard of MTSU’s 2018 True Blue Voter initiative, an important part of the University’s commitment to student voting. We’re engaged in a comprehensive program on campus to advance student involvement in this fall’s elections, toward which we have partnered with national civic and research organizations to guide us on best practices. You will be receiving emails from our office and the MTSU American Democracy Project this fall with reminders about voter registration, voter education, and getting to the polls.  

Voter registration is our first objective. We encourage all faculty to take 10-15 minutes in class at the beginning of the semester to get students to pull out laptops or phones to check their voter registration, to register, and/or to re-register now that they’re here. We have Q&A steps to help students think through their registration and voting options in order for them to become successful voters this fall. Have students start at our MTSU Register to Vote! button on the Provost’s website:

Also, in support of voter education, please consider including Constitution Day, Monday, September 17, and its Constitution readings in your syllabi.

Introductions

Let's introduce ourselves, Fall 2018 CoPhilosophy collaborators. (I'll tell you in class why I call my version of the Intro course "CoPhilosophy." But maybe you can guess, from the William James quote above.)

I invite you all to hit "comment" below and reply with your own introductions, and (bearing in mind that this is an open site) your answers to two basic questions: Who are you? and Why are you here? (in this course, on this campus, in this state, on this planet...)

Our first class meeting will consist mainly of introductions and a heads-up that this is an unconventional course in ways I hope you'll find delightful, instructive, and rewarding. If you don't like to move, breathe, and converse in the open air on nice days, this course may be a challenge. But, if you don't especially like the conventional lecture-style academic model in which I talk and you scribble silently in your seats, it may be just what you've been looking for.

We'll not go over the syllabus or get bogged down in the nuts and bolts of course mechanics on Day One, there's plenty of time for those details later. Peruse the blogsite and syllabus (linked in the right margin) before next class and let me know what's unclear. Meanwhile, read your classmates' intros and post your own.

I'm Dr. Oliver. I live in Nashville with my wife, two dogs we "rescued" in May (Pita and Nell) and a cat (Zeus). Older Daughter lives in Illinois. Younger Daughter is a college sophomore.

My office is 300 James Union Building (JUB). My office hours are Monday and Wednesday 4-5, & by appointment. Our Graduate Teaching Assistant Jamil Grimes' office hours, in my office or in 300B next door, the  are Tuesdays 11:15-12:15.

On nice days office hours may be outside, check my office door for details. I answer emails during office hours, but not at all on weekends. Surest way to get a quick response: come in or call during office hours.

I've been at MTSU since the early '00s, teaching philosophy courses on diverse subjects including atheism, childhood, happiness, the environment, the future, epistemology, metaphysics, Anglo-American philosophy, consciousness, evolution, and bioethics.

My Ph.D. is from Vanderbilt. I'm originally from Missouri, near St. Louis. I was indoctrinated as a Cardinals fan in early childhood, so I understand something about religious zeal. My undergrad degree is from the University of Missouri ("Mizzou") in Columbia MO. (I wish my schools weren't in the SEC-I don't approve of the inordinate emphasis on major collegiate sports culture or football brain injuries, as I'm sure to tell you again.)

My philosophical expertise, such as it is, centers on the American philosophical tradition of William James and John Dewey. A former student once asked me to respond to a questionnaire, if you're curious you can learn more about me there.

What you most need to know about me, though, is that I'm a peripatetic and will encourage you all to join me in that philosophical lifestyle as often as possible during discussion time. (If you're not sure what peripatetic means, scan the right sidebar or read the syllabus or ask me. Or look it up.)

I post my thoughts regularly to my blogs Up@dawn and Delight Springs, among others, and to Twitter (@osopher), and am continuing to experiment with podcasting as a classroom tool this semester. Follow me if you want to.

But of course, as Brian Cohen said, you don't have to follow anyone. (Extra credit if you get that reference... and real extra credit if you realize that my "extra credit" is usually rhetorical.) However, if a blog or podcast link turns up with the daily quiz (which will always be posted on this site no later than the night before class), you might find it helpful to read or listen.

Enough about me. Who are you? (Where are you from, where have you been, what do you like, who do you want to become,...?) Why are you here? (On Earth, in Tennessee, at MTSU, in philosophy class)? Hit "comments" below and post your introduction, then read your classmates'... and bear in mind that this is an open site. The world can read it. (The world's probably busy with other stuff, of course - Drumpf and Kardashians and cooking shows and other examples of what passes for "reality" these days.)

Please include your section number in your reply, and in all future posts on this site:

• #H-01 TR 11:20-12:45, H117
• #H-02 TR 01:00-02:25, H117
• #H-03 MW 12:40-02:05, H117

From a distance, philosophy seems weird, irrelevant, boring...

  

and yet also – just a little – intriguing.

  

But what are philosophers really for?

  

The answer is, handily, already contained in the word philosophy itself.

  

In Ancient Greek, philo means love and sophia means wisdom.

  

Philosophers are people devoted to wisdom.

  

Being wise means attempting to live and die well.

  

In their pursuit of wisdom, philosophers have developed a very

  

specific skill-set. They have, over the centuries, become experts in

  

many of the things that make people not very wise. Five stand out:

  

There are lots of big questions around: What is the meaning of life?

  

What's a job for? How should society be arranged?

  

Most of us entertain them every now and then, but we despair of trying

  

to answer them. They have the status of jokes. We call them

  

'pretentious'. But they matter deeply because only with sound answers

  

to them can we direct our energies meaningfully.

  

Philosophers are people unafraid of asking questions. They have, over

  

the centuries, asked the very largest. They realise that these

  

questions can always be broken down into more manageable chunks and

  

that the only really pretentious thing is to think one is above

  

raising big naive-sounding enquiries.

  

Public opinion – or what gets called ‘common sense’ – is sensible and

  

reasonable in countless areas. It’s what you hear about from friends

  

and neighbours, the stuff you take in without even thinking about it.

  

But common sense is also often full of daftness and error.

  

Philosophy gets us to submit all aspects of common sense to reason.

  

It wants us to think for ourselves. Is it really true what people say

  

about love, money, children, travel, work? Philosophers are interested

  

in asking whether an idea is logical – rather than simply assuming it

  

must be right because it is popular and long-established.

  

We’re not very good at knowing what goes on in our own minds.

  

Someone we meet is very annoying, but we can’t pin down what the issue is.

  

Or we lose our temper, but can’t readily tell what we’re so cross about.

  

We lack insight into our own satisfactions and dislikes.

  

That’s why we need to examine our own minds. Philosophy is committed

  

to self-knowledge – and its central precept – articulated by the

  

earliest, greatest philosopher, Socrates – is just two words long:

  

Know yourself. 

We’re not very good at making ourselves happy. We overrate the power

  

of some things to improve our lives – and underrate others.

  

We make the wrong choices because, guided by advertising and false glamour,

  

we keep on imagining that a particular kind of holiday, or car, or computer

  

will make a bigger difference than it can.

  

At the same time, we underestimate the contribution of other things –

2:51

 like going for a walk - which may have little prestige but can

contribute deeply to the character of existence.

   

Philosophers seek to be wise by getting more precise about the

   

activities and attitudes that really can help our lives to go better.

  

Philosophers are good at keeping a sense of what really matters and what doesn't.

  

On hearing the news that he’d lost all his possessions in a shipwreck,

  

the Stoic philosopher Zeno simply said:

  

‘Fortune commands me to be a less encumbered philosopher.’

  

It’s responses like these that have made the very term ‘philosophical’

  

a byword for calm, long-term thinking and strength-of-mind,

  

in short, for perspective.

  

The wisdom of philosophy is – in modern times – mostly delivered in

  

the form of books. But in the past, philosophers sat in market squares

  

and discussed their ideas with shopkeepers or went into government

  

offices and palaces to give advice. It wasn’t abnormal to have a

  

philosopher on the payroll. Philosophy was thought of as a normal,

  

basic activity – rather than as an unusual, esoteric, optional extra.

  

Nowadays, it’s not so much that we overtly deny this thought but we

  

just don’t have the right institutions set up to promulgate wisdom

  

coherently in the world. In the future, though, when the value of

  

philosophy* is a little clearer, we can expect to meet more

  

philosophers in daily life. They won’t be locked up, living mainly in

  

university departments, because the points at which our unwisdom bites

  

– and messes up our lives – are multiple and urgently need attention -

  

right now.

*Bertrand Russell, "The Value of Philosophy"

Just Mercy

	MTSU (@MTSUNews)
8/20/18, 7:12 PM Author & activist #BryanStevenson of ⁦‪@eji_org‬⁩ is joining us this Saturday, 8/25, for #MTSU's University #Convocation! Y'all have read #JustMercy; now, all y'all come greet our new freshmen & transfer students and hear Bryan speak! #TrueBlue ow.ly/OmQS30lucgo#Classof2022 pic.twitter.com/hkkjV7wEIv

How to Get the Most Out of College

...the professors I speak with strongly caution students against wedding themselves to a single field of study before being exposed to several of them. College’s greatest gifts can be an introduction to a passion you didn’t previously have and a pivot into an occupation you never before envisioned.

We overwhelm teenagers with advice about choosing a college. Go big. Go small. Put prestige above cost. Do the opposite.

We inundate them with tips for getting in. Spend summers this way. Write essays that way. Play a niche sport. Play an obscure instrument.

And then? We go mum, mustering less urgency and fewer words for the subject of actually navigating the crucial college years to best effect. It’s strange. And it’s stupid, because how a student goes to school matters much, much more than where.

So for several years — during visits to campuses, interviews with experts on higher education and interactions with recent graduates — I’ve been gathering wisdom along those lines.

My interest isn’t which types of programs at which kinds of institutions yield the surest employment and highest salaries. That information is already out there and always changing. I also worry that it casts college as purely vocational and plants the false notion that, at the age of 18, you know yourself well enough to plot out the entirety of your professional life.

My focus is on optimal ways to socialize, to prioritize, to pick up skills integral to any career and to open up exciting opportunities both en route to a degree and after you’ve acquired it. Not nearly enough of the roughly 20 million Americans who are beginning or resuming college over the coming weeks pause, in their trepidation and exhilaration, to think about that.

Many don’t have the luxury: College for them is a slapdash scramble to grab credits as they can while working a demanding job, caring for family members or both. More than a third of the students enrolled in higher education in this country attend two-year institutions. Those at four-year institutions often don’t participate in the romantic ideal of nurturing dormitories and verdant quadrangles. They live with parents. They pray for parking.

But others do have the freedom to tailor their time. They just neglect to take advantage of it. My friend Eric Johnson, who provides guidance to underprivileged students at my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, put it to me this way: “The more you regard college as a credentialing exercise, the less likely you are to get the benefits.”

Johnson is as thoughtful and insightful about higher education as just about anyone I’ve come across. The wisest students, he said, “move into a peer relationship with the institution rather than a consumer relationship with it.” They seize leadership roles. They serve as research assistants.

And they build social capital, realizing that above all else, they’re in college “to widen the circle of human beings who know you and care about you,” he said. That’s perfectly put.

Many students, nervous about a new environment, follow friends from high school or people whose demographic backgrounds match their own into homogeneous cocoons. That can indeed provide solace and support. But it’s also a wasted opportunity — educationally, morally, strategically. Diversity opens you to an array and wealth of ideas, and being comfortable with it is an asset in just about any workplace or career. You can decide to establish that comfort in college.

But perhaps the most important relationships to invest in are those with members of the school’s faculty. Most students don’t fully get that. They’re not very good at identifying the professors worth knowing — the ones who aren’t such academic rock stars that they’re inaccessible, the ones with a track record of serious mentoring — and then getting to know them well.

As part of my research, I collected surveys from about 30 recipients of the prestigious Mitchell scholarship, a rough analogue of the Rhodes that sends 12 recent American college graduates every year to universities in Ireland to pursue master’s degrees. (I was on the panel of judges who selected the winners from 2015 through 2017.) I asked them to reflect on college and to rank, in order of importance, such activities and dynamics as course work, travel abroad, internships, relationships with classmates, involvement in campus groups and reading done apart from any class obligation.

Relationships with faculty members was also an option, and it was the clear winner, placed near the top by almost all of the scholars and at the top by many, including Azza Cohen, a documentary filmmaker who graduated from Princeton in 2016. To explain that ranking, she directed me to a 2014 essay of hers for The Daily Princetonian that was titled “Empty Chairs.” It charted her realization and regret that she and so many classmates skipped professors’ office hours and didn’t avail themselves of invaluable conversations and counsel. “In the routine rush to finish our assignments, sometimes the breadth of the surrounding intellectual force field slips our minds,” she wrote. She was then a sophomore, and she mended her ways.

Reading her essay, I was reminded of an interview I did several years ago with Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, about her days at the University of Denver. She said she liked to sign up for the front end of office hours, because she wanted to catch professors when they weren’t feeling depleted and watching the clock. She read up on professors beforehand and, if their written work was accessible, familiarized herself with it, so she could make mention of it. That flattered them and pegged her as a serious, considerate person.

Taking that too far, of course, could be repulsively obsequious. The correct calibration is everything. And it's worth acing, because a professor or administrator who takes a genuine interest in you can be a bridge to other influential people inside and outside the school, to limited-space seminars, to special collaborations, to exclusive summer programs, to competitive internships, to graduate work and more.

Damian Walker saw that at U.N.C.-Chapel Hill, from which he graduated last spring. “The most influential thing I did here was find mentors,” he told me. And he found them largely by opening up to them.

Walker attended U.N.C.-Chapel Hill as a Carolina Covenant Scholar, which means that his family was poor enough for him to qualify for full financial aid. He told me that early on, he went to an open campus discussion about police violence against minorities. Several faculty members were also there, and he approached Judith Cone, the vice chancellor for innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development.

“I didn’t know who she was,” he recalled. “Short lady. I shared my story about how police shootings affected my life, my family. She gave me her business card and said, ‘Follow up.’ I still have that business card to this day.” He went to see her in her office and kept going to see her in her office, and with the encouragement and help of her and other faculty members, he cobbled together the money to go to an educational conference in Massachusetts, to meet with entrepreneurs in New York City and to spend the summer between his junior and senior years interning for a company in China. He’s about to head back to China to teach English for a while. He’s well on his way to fluency in Mandarin, which he thinks will give him a definite edge in any future business career.

Walker is an example of what a mammoth study by Gallup, Purdue University and the Strada Education Network has found. Previously known as the Gallup-Purdue Index and now called the Strada-Gallup Alumni Survey, it has questioned about 100,000 American college graduates of all ages about their college experiences, looking for connections between how they spent their time in college and how fulfilled they say they are now.

The study has not found that attending a private college or a highly selective one foretells greater satisfaction. Instead, the game changers include establishing a deep connection with a mentor, taking on a sustained academic project and playing a significant part in a campus organization. What all of these reflect are engagement and commitment, which I’ve come to think of as overlapping muscles that college can and must be used to build. They’re part of an assertive rather than a passive disposition, and they’re key to professional success.

I’m not saying that this is a cinch or ignoring the demons in the way. Anxiety and depression are legion on campuses today, holes that too many students fall into and never crawl out of. More than ever, students should be on the lookout for them and take the necessary steps to mitigate them.

Be careful, especially at the beginning of college, about spending too much time alone. Isolation can become its own bad habit and prying eyes can be the best insurance policy against destructive behavior. Regulate time on social media, where discourse can be barbed and peers curate honeyed alter egos that stoke insecurity in those looking at them. Don’t drink too much and don’t shortchange sleep, as prosaic as that sounds. And work out in some way.

“We know that exercise is very, very important,” said Jan Collins-Eaglin, the associate dean for wellness at Pomona College in Southern California. “It will calm you down.” She noted, too, that many schools have invested in their mental-health services but that many students hesitate to use them. “Seeking help is not taboo,” she said. “If you get over that, you are one step ahead of the game.”

One crossroads that students often get needlessly worked up about is choosing a major. It's less make-or-break than you think. I hear that from a majority of thriving college graduates, and the professors I speak with strongly caution students against wedding themselves to a single field of study before being exposed to several of them. College’s greatest gifts can be an introduction to a passion you didn’t previously have and a pivot into an occupation you never before envisioned.

“You have to ask yourself what lies closest to your heart,” said Jim Gates, a renowned theoretical physicist at Brown University who previously taught at the University of Maryland and M.I.T. “If you are fortunate enough to find something that you’re totally obsessed with, you’re likely to work very hard at it. If you’re a human being of average intelligence and you work very hard at something, you’re likely to become very good at it. And if you become very good at it, people are likely to notice.” That means they’re likely to employ and reward you as well.

Regardless of major, there are skills to insist on acquiring because they transcend any particular career. Communication — clear writing, cogent speaking — is one of them, and many different courses can hone it.

Another of those skills, frequently overlooked, is storytelling. It’s different from communication: a next step. Every successful pitch for a new policy, new product or new company is essentially a story, with a shape and logic intended to stir its audience. So is every successful job interview. The best moment in a workplace meeting belongs to the colleague who tells the best story. So take a course in Greek mythology, British literature, political rhetoric or anything else that exposes you to the structure of narrative and the art of persuasion.

I asked Mitchell scholars if there was a department or discipline that they wished they had paid more heed. Science majors mentioned humanities. Humanities majors mentioned computer science and statistics. In retrospect, if not in real time, intellectually curious people appreciate and want the benefits of balance. So incorporate it, to some degree, in your college years.

Several Mitchell scholars also fretted that they’d lost out on some of what college had to offer by sticking to predetermined scripts, sweating perfection and avoiding risks. That dovetailed with a concern that many professors articulate to me — that students aren’t learning to stumble and to right themselves, which they can do in college with lower stakes than later on.

One of those scholars, Aaron Kurman, who graduated from the University of Virginia in 2005 and now works as a human rights lawyer in Israel, copped to all of that and more, writing: “I didn’t learn how to fail. I didn’t learn how resilient I was. I didn’t learn to distinguish between what was truly important to me and what I was doing because I thought it was important in others’ eyes. I didn’t learn how freeing it is to pursue what drives you even when others whose opinions you deeply value don’t understand or support it. I didn’t learn the value of doing something truly open-ended, where you don’t already know at the outset what you are going to do next.” All of that came later. But it could have come in college — at least the beginnings of it.

Something else that can come in college is an enormously expanded self-knowledge that translates into a hugely improved design for living. But that hinges on an adventurous spirit, especially outside the classroom.

“The mistake is to confuse career success, financial success and reputation with happiness,” said Andrew Delbanco, a Columbia University professor who is the president of the Teagle Foundation, which promotes liberal arts education, and the author of the 2012 book “College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be.” Delbanco added that an important component of real contentment is figuring out what lights your emotional and intellectual fires, not necessarily for the purpose of a job but for the purpose of reflections and pastimes that fill in all those hours away from work.

Is it poetry? Music? Sport? Those and more are abundant on college campuses. “You’re trying to shape a life that leads you to a happy place,” Delbanco said. Let college do precisely that.

Frank Bruni, nyt
...Despite declining enrollment, traditional college majors are more important than ever.
colleges shouldn’t lose sight of what makes traditional majors — even the arcane ones — so meaningful, especially now. And they shouldn’t downgrade the nonvocational mission of higher education: to cultivate minds, prepare young adults for enlightened citizenship, give them a better sense of their perch in history and connect them to traditions that transcend the moment. History, philosophy and comparative literature are bound to be better at that than occupational therapy. They’re sturdier threads of cultural and intellectual continuity. Opinion | Frank Bruni: Aristotle’s Wrongful DeathMay 26, 2018

Opinion | Frank Bruni: The Lie About College DiversityDec. 12, 2015
Opinion | Frank Bruni: How to Measure a College’s ValueSept. 12, 2015
Opinion | Frank Bruni: How to Survive the College Admissions MadnessMarch 13, 2015

Why Liberal Education Matters

A liberal education, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, should deepen our ability to “animate” dimensions of the world around us ... Emerson wrote that colleges “serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius ...

As Dewey put it, to discover “what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity
to do it, is the key to happiness.” Rather than starting out with a predetermined
outcome for what students must do, liberal education helps them make those discoveries and secure those opportunities...

Michael S. Roth, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters

We all seek a deeper understanding of love, death, anger, pain, and many other themes treated in great works of art, literature, and philosophy. No matter how we earn our living, we all need to confront ourselves, our own life and death.

Students should have a major subject, which might prepare for a career... But they should also take some courses that prepare them more broadly, for citizenship and life.

Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities

...the drumbeat of talk about skills and jobs has not lured people into engineering and biology-not everyone has the aptitude for science-so much as it has made them nervously forsake the humanities and take courses in business and communications. Many of these students might well have been better off taking a richer, deeper set of courses in subjects they found fascinating and supplementing it, as we all should, with some basic knowledge of computers and math...

Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

Why does liberal education matter? https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VKsoOZf1C1ubs7gjOE7SAI2lVD8k_wop/view?usp=sharing

Star Stuff: The Story of Carl Sagan

Commence!

1. MTSU‏ @MTSUNews Aug 11

   If you didn't get to attend #MTSU’s #summer2018 #commencement ceremony today in @MurphyCenter, we have it all right here — a story, photos, links, the works about the new #Classof2018 members! Check it out, share and have a great weekend! #TrueBlue #woohoo http://ow.ly/Gstt30lmP5b 

   

    

   

   

   

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2. MTSU‏ @MTSUNews Aug 11

   Want one like this for your very own? Come on by; we'll be thrilled to help you earn your #degree(s) at #MTSU! Here's where everyone who #graduated today got started: https://www.mtsu.edu/how-to-apply  #TrueBlue #joinus #wehavecookies #anduniversitydegrees

   

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3. MTSU‏ @MTSUNews Aug 11

   Whoa, that was fast! #MTSU's #summer2018 #commencement is done, and 858 new grads are ready for the world! We are so very proud of you all, #Classof2018 #graduates! Have great lives, do good works, and come back to see us! You’re officially @MTAlumni! #WeARETrueBlue