Aug.8 Reports

REPORTERS, please post an assignment and a quiz (6+ quiz questions and at least a couple of discussion questions) ASAP prior to your presentation date, Tuesday at the latest, so we can all add supplemental questions & comments. The assignment can be a reading selection, a YouTube video, a podcast etc.

Pete's Questions [these aren't all included in the Google excerpts... maybe Pete can scan & share the other pages, with his assignment?]: Why are stories important? (21) How old is the universe? (51) How long did it take the universe to cool enough to combine neutrons and protons into nuclei of atoms? (57) How did life become organized as it is? (67) For all species, what is the one common thing that ultimately matters? (100) What makes a life worth living? (110) DQ Is the universe a self-generating entity or is it the effect of some external causal influence? If consciousness is hard to define, how can we understand how it is organized?

1. To tell everybody's story we must ask not what matter is, but what it ____.

2. Our appropriate attitude towards matter is what?

3. What are the two "imaginative options" for conceiving the improbable origin of our universe? 

4. What does Rue identify as the major problem with present-day political systems?

5. What happened in 1968 that reinforces Rue's message of one story shared by everybody, albeit in many "voices and versions"?

6. Everybody's story is full of potential for what?

[Postscript: we forgot to go over these in class, after our walkabout. 1. does.  2. gratitude.  3. a supernatural deity OR multiverse.  4. short-term thinking.  5. photo of earth from space.  6. unifying humanity.

DQ

• Do you agree that, as brute facts go, gods and multiverses are "no easier to swallow than impossible odds"?
• Any ideas how we can reform our politics to reward longer-term thinking?
• Would a revival of the space program contribute positively to creating the kind of human solidarity that Rue considers essential for our survival?
• 
  

Steve's Questions: 1. What is sociobiology? How does it compliment or contradict Darwin?
2. Who wrote the book entitled “Mere Christianity” that helped to change the author’s religious viewpoint?
3. How many letters are found in the human genome?
4. Define “Moral Law”.
5. What do the letters (SCNT) stand for in this book?
6. What is the name of the first cloned sheep?

DQ

1. Does the author attempt to disprove Darwinism? Explain.
2. What does the author believe are the shortcomings of Dawkin’s approach?

1. Who was Francis Collins' private sector competitor in the race to sequence the human genome?

2. Who called the sequenced genome "the language in which god created life"?

3. What was Collins' "unexpected revelation" at age fourteen?

4. What book did the Methodist minister down the street give Collins, and how did it impact him?

5. What argument "forced [Collins] to admit the plausibility of the God hypothesis"?

6. The real excitement of stem cell research lies in the prospect for what?

DQ

• Collins was raised by freethinkers who met at Yale. Do you think the children of educated secularists are more or less likely than those of religious traditionalists to become scientists?
• Does Rebecca Goldstein's commentary on her Argument #16, the Argument from Moral Truth, respond to Collins's claims for the Argument from Moral Law? Do any of her other arguments bear on Collins's view? (See *below)
• 
  

Winterton Curtis anticipated "everybody's story" and Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon when he wrote that "religion of whatever sort is a product of human evolution..."

And in saying that "science feeds the spiritual as well as the material man," (312) Curtis anticipated Carl Sagan's cosmic spirituality-his sense (as summarized by Ann Druyan) that "Darwin's insight that life evolved over the eons through natural selection was not just better science than Genesis, it also afforded a deeper, more satisfying spiritual experience." (Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God)

And with that, our summer course on Evolution in America is concluded... but of course, as William James asked rhetorically, "What has concluded, that we may conclude with regard to it?" Conclusions are always provisional and revisable, so long as experience remains to be had and reflected upon and conversed about. So, I propose we end with a toast: to experience, in all its multiform varieties, and to the unending conversation. As Carl Sagan scribbled in his message-in-a-bottle marginal notation to Leibniz, rejecting the latter's search for a "necessary being... a sufficient reason with which we could stop": "So don't stop."

And don't lose perspective.

Cheers!

* 16. The Argument from Moral Truth

1. There exist objective moral truths. (Slavery and torture and genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong.)

2. These objective moral truths are not grounded in the way the world is but rather in the way that the world ought to be. (Consider: should white-supremacists succeed, taking over the world and eliminating all who don't meet their criteria for being existence-worthy, their ideology still would be morally wrong. It would be true, under this hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way they have made it.)

3. The world itself — the way that it is, the laws of science that explain why it is that way — cannot account for the way that the world ought to be.

4. The only way to account for morality is that God established morality (from 2 and 3).

5. God exists.

FLAW 1: The major flaw of this argument is revealed in a powerful argument that Plato made famous in the Euthyphro. Reference to God does not help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The question is: why did God choose the moral rules he did? Did he have a reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is good, while genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he didn't. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide the grounding for moral truths for us, and God himself is redundant. And if he didn't have a good reason, then his choices are arbitrary—he could just as easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and genocide good—and we would have no reason to take his choices seriously. According to theEuthyphro argument, then, the Argument from Moral Truth is another example of The Fallacy of Passing the Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in grounding morality in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be committed to my own interests mattering in a way that yours do not just because I am me and you are not.

FLAW 2: Premise 4 is belied by the history of religion, which shows that the God from which people draw their morality (for example, the God of the Bible and the Koran) did not establish what we now recognize to be morality at all. The God of the Old Testament commanded people to keep slaves, slay their enemies, execute blasphemers and homosexuals, and commit many other heinous acts. Of course, our interpretation of which aspects of Biblical morality to take seriously has grown more sophisticated over time, and we read the Bible selectively and often metaphorically. But that is just the point: we must be consulting some standards of morality that do not come from God in order to judge which aspects of God's word to take literally and which aspects to ignore.

COMMENT: Some would question the first premise, and regard its assertion as a flaw of this argument. Slavery and torture and genocide are wrong by our lights, they would argue, and conflict with certain values we hold dear, such as freedom and happiness. But those are just subjective values, and it is obscure to say that statements that are consistent with those values are objectively true in the same way that mathematical or scientific statements can be true. But the argument is fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.

17. The Argument from Altruism

1. People often act altruistically — namely, against their interests. They help others, at a cost to themselves, out of empathy, fairness, decency, and integrity.

2. Natural selection can never favor true altruism, because genes for selfishness will always out-compete genes for altruism (recall that altruism, by definition, exacts a cost to the actor).

3. Only a force acting outside of natural selection and intending for us to be moral could account for our ability to act altruistically (from 2).

4. God is the only force outside of natural selection that could intend us to be moral.

5. God must have implanted the moral instinct within us (from 3 & 4).

6. God exists.

FLAW 1: Theories of the evolution of altruism by natural selection have been around for decades and are now widely supported by many kinds of evidence. A gene for being kind to one's kin, even if it hurts the person doing the favor, can be favored by evolution, because that gene would be helping a copy of itself that is shared by the kin. And a gene for conferring a large benefit to a non-relative at a cost to oneself can evolve if the favor-doer is the beneficiary of a return favor at a later time. Both parties are better off, in the long run, from the exchange of favors.

Some defenders of religion do not consider these theories to be legitimate explanations of altruism, because a tendency to favor one's kin, or to trade favors, are ultimately just forms of selfishness for one's genes, rather than true altruism. But this is a confusion of the original phenomenon: we are trying to explain why people are sometimes altruistic, not why genes are altruistic. (We have no reason to believe that genes are ever altruistic in the first place!) Also, in a species with language, namely humans, committed altruists develop a reputation for being altruistic, and thereby win more friends, allies, and trading partners. This can give rise to selection for true, committed, altruism, not just the tit-for-tat exchange of favors.

FLAW 2: We have evolved higer mental faculties, such as self-reflection and logic, that allow us to reason about the world, to persuade other people to form alliances with us, to learn from our mistakes, and to achieve other feats of reason. Those same faculties, when they are honed through debate, reason, and knowledge, can allow us to step outside ourselves, learn about other people's point of view, and act in a way that we can justify as maximizing everyone's well-being. We are capable of moral reasoning because we are capable of reasoning in general.

FLAW 3: In some versions of the Argument from Altruism, God succeeds in getting people to act altruistically because he promises them a divine reward and threatens them with divine retribution. People behave altruistically to gain a reward or avoid a punishment in the life to come. This argument is self-contradictory. It aims to explain how people act without regard to their self-interest, but then assumes that there could be no motive for acting altruistically other than self-interest.

19. The Argument from Personal Purpose

1. If there is no purpose to a person's life, then that person's life is pointless.

2. Human life cannot be pointless.

3. Each human life has a purpose (from 1 & 2).

4. The purpose of each individual person's life must derive from the overall purpose of existence.

5. There is an overall purpose of existence (from 3 and 4)

6. Only a being who understood the overall purpose of existence could create each person according to the purpose that person is meant to fulfill.

7. Only God could understand the overall purpose of creation.

8. There can be a point to human existence only if God exists (from 6 & 7).

9. God exists.

FLAW 1: The first premise rests on a confusion between the purpose of an action and the purpose of a life. It is human activities that have purposes—or don't. We study for the purpose of educating and supporting ourselves. We eat right and exercise for the purpose of being healthy. We warn children not to accept rides with strangers for the purpose of keeping them safe. We donate to charity for the purpose of helping the poor (just as we would want someone to help us if we were poor.) The notion of a person's entire life serving a purpose, above and beyond the purpose of all the person's choices, is obscure. Might it mean the purpose for which the person was born? That implies that some goal-seeking agent decided to bring our lives into being to serve some purpose. Then who is that goal-seeking agent? Parents often purposively have children, but we wouldn't want to see a parent's wishes as the purpose of the child's life. If the goal-seeking agent is God, the argument becomes circular: we make sense of the notion of "the purpose of a life" by stipulating that the purpose is whatever God had in mind when he created us, but then argue for the existence of God because he is the only one who could have designed us with a purpose in mind.

FLAW 2: Premise 2 states that human life cannot be pointless. But of course it could be pointless in the sense meant by this argument: lacking a purpose in the grand scheme of things. It could very well be the there is no grand scheme of things because there is no Grand Schemer. By assuming that there is a grand scheme of things, it assumes that there is a schemer whose scheme it is, which circularly assumes the conclusion.

COMMENT: It's important not to confuse the notion of "pointless" in Premise 2 with notions like "not worth living" or "expendable." It is probably confusions of this sort that give Premise 2 its appeal. But we can very well maintain that each human life is precious—is worth living, is not expendable—without maintaining that each human life has a purpose in the overall scheme of things.

20. The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance

1. In a million years nothing that happens now will matter.

2. By the same token, anything that happens at any point in time will not matter from the point of view of some other time a million years distant from it into the future.

3. No point in time can confer mattering on any other point, for each suffers from the same problem of not mattering itself (from 2).

4. It is intolerable (or inconceivable, or unacceptable) that in a million years nothing that happens now will matter.

5. What happens now will matter in a million years (from 4).

6. It is only from the point of view of eternity that what happens now will matter even in a million years (from 3).

7. Only God can inhabit the point of view of eternity.

8. God exists.

FLAW: Premise 4 is illicit: it is of the form "This argument must be correct, because it is intolerable that this argument is not correct." The argument is either circular, or an example of the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Maybe we won't matter in a million years, and there's just nothing we can do about it. If that is the case, we shouldn't declare that it is intolerable—we just have to live with it. Another way of putting it is: we should take ourselves seriously (being mindful of what we do, and the world we leave our children and grandchildren), but we shouldn't take ourselves that seriously, and arrogantly demand that we must matter in a million years.

21. The Argument from the Consensus of Humanity

1. Every culture in every epoch has had theistic beliefs.

2. When peoples, widely separated by both space and time, hold similar beliefs, the best explanation is that those beliefs are true.

3. The best explanation for why every culture has had theistic beliefs is that those beliefs are true.

4. God exists.

FLAW: 2 is false. Widely separated people could very well come up with the same false beliefs. Human nature is universal, and thus prone to universal illusions and shortcomings of perception, memory, reasoning, and objectivity. Also , many of the needs and terrors and dependencies of the human condition (such as the knowledge of our own mortality, and the attendant desire not to die) are universal. Our beliefs don't arise only from well-evaluated reasoning, but from wishful thinking, self-deception, self-aggrandizement, gullibility, false memories, visual illusions, and other mental glitches. Well-grounded beliefs may be the exception rather than the rule when it comes to psychologically fraught beliefs, which tend to bypass rational grounding and spring instead from unexamined emotions. The fallacy of arguing that if an idea is universally held then it must be true was labeled by the ancient logicians consensus gentium.

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5. The Arguments from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants

1. There are a vast number of physically possible universes.

2. A universe that would be hospitable to the appearance of life must conform to some very strict conditions: Everything from the mass ratios of atomic particles and the number of dimensions of space to the cosmological parameters that rule the expansion of the universe must be just right for stable galaxies, solar systems, planets, and complex life to evolve.

3. The percentage of possible universes that would support life is infinitesimally small (from 2).

4. Our universe is one of those infinitesimally improbable universes.

5. Our universe has been fine-tuned to support life (from 3 & 4).

6. There is a Fine-Tuner (from 5).

7. Only God could have the power and the purpose to be the Fine-Tuner.

8. God exists.

Philosophers and physicists often speak of "The Anthropic Principle," which comes in several versions, labeled "weak," "strong" and "very strong." All three versions argue that any explanation of the universe must account for the fact that we humans ( or any complex organism that could observe its condition) exist in it. The Argument from Fine-Tuning corresponds to the Very Strong Anthropic Principle. Its upshot is that the upshot of the universe is . . . us. The universe must have been designed with us in mind.

FLAW 1: The first premise may be false. Many physicists and cosmologists, following Einstein, hope for a unified "theory of everything," which would deduce from as-yet-unknown physical laws that the physical constants of our universe had to be what they are. In that case, ours would be the only possible universe. (See also The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe,# 35, below).

FLAW 2: Even were we to accept the first premise, the transition from 4 to 5 is invalid. Perhaps we are living in a multiverse (a term coined by William James), a vast plurality (perhaps infinite) of parallel universes with different physical constants, all of them composing one reality. We find ourselves, unsurprisingly (since we are here doing the observing), in one of the rare universe that does support the appearance of stable matter and complex life, but nothing had to have been fine-tuned. Or perhaps we are living in an "oscillatory universe," a succession of universes with differing physical constants, each one collapsing into a point and then exploding with a new big bang into a new universe with different physical constants, one succeeding the other over an infinite time span. Again, we find ourselves, not surprisingly, in one of those time-slices in which the universe does have physical constants that support stable matter and complex life. These hypotheses, which are receiving much attention from contemporary cosmologists, are sufficient to invalidate the leap from 4 to 5.

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12. The Argument from The Hard Problem of Consciousness

1. The Hard Problem of Consciousness consists in our difficulty in explaining why it subjectively feels like something to be a functioning brain. (This is to be distinguished from the so-called Easy Problem of Consciousness, which is not actually easy at all, and is only called so in relation to the intractable Hard Problem. See FLAW 3 below.)

2. Consciousness (in the Hard-Problem sense) is not a complex phenomenon built out of simpler ones; it can consist of irreducible "raw feels" like seeing red or tasting salt.

3. Science explains complex phenomena by reducing them to simpler ones, and reducing them to still simpler ones, until the simplest ones are explained by the basic laws of physics.

4. The basic laws of physics laws describe the properties of the elementary constituents of matter and energy, like quarks and quanta, which are not conscious.

5. Science cannot derive consciousness by reducing it to basic physical laws about the elementary constituents of matter and energy (from 2, 3, and 4).

6. Science will never solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness (from 3 and 5).

7. The explanation for consciousness must lie beyond physical laws (from 6).

8. Consciousness, lying outside physical laws, must itself be immaterial (from 7).

9. God is immaterial

10. Consciousness and God both partake in the same immaterial kind of being (from 8 and 9).

11. God has not only the means to impart consciousness to us, but also the motive, namely, to allow us to enjoy a good life, and to make it possible for our choices to cause or prevent suffering in others, thereby allowing for morality and meaning.

12. Consciousness can only be explained by positing that God inserted a spark of the divine into us (from 7, 10, & 11).

13. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 3 is dubious. Science often shows that properties can be emergent: they arise from complex interactions of simpler elements, even if they cannot be found in any of the elements themselves. (Water is wet, but that does not mean that every H¬2 0 molecule it is made of is also wet.) Granted, we do not have a theory of neuroscience that explains how consciousness emerges from patterns of neural activity, but to draw theological conclusions from the currently incomplete state of scientific knowledge is to commit the Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance.

FLAW 2: Alternatively, the theory of panpsychism posits that consciousness in a low-grade form, what is often called "proto-consciousness," is inherent in matter. Our physical theories, with their mathematical methodology, have not yet been able to capture this aspect of matter, but that may just be a limitation on our mathematical physical theories. Some physicists have hypothesized that contemporary malaise about the foundations of quantum mechanics arise because physics is here confronting the intrinsic consciousness of matter, which has not yet been adequately formalized within physical theories.

FLAW 3: It has become clear that every measurable manifestation of consciousness, like our ability to describe what we feel, or let our feelings guide our behavior (the "Easy Problem" of consciousness) has been, or will be, explained in terms of neural activity (that is, every thought, feeling, and intention has a neural correlate). Only the existence of consciousness itself (the "Hard Problem") remains mysterious. But perhaps the hardness of the hard problem says more about what we find hard — the limitations of the brains of Homo sapiens when it tries to think scientifically — than about the hardness of the problem itself. Just as our brains do not allow us to visualize four-dimensional objects perhaps our brains do not allow us to understand how subjective experience arises from complex neural activity.

FLAW 4: Premise 12 is entirely unclear. How does invoking the spark of the divine explain the existence of consciousness? It is the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another.

COMMENT: Premise 11 is also dubious, because our capacity to suffer is far in excess of what it would take to make moral choices possible. This will be discussed in connection with The Argument from Suffering, #25 below.

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All 36 are here...

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Also of interest:


The Evolution of Morality, by Richard Joyce - Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality...

The Ethical Project, by Philip Kitcher - ...Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as members of our species have worked out how to live together and prosper. Elaborating this radical new vision, Kitcher shows how the limited altruistic tendencies of our ancestors enabled a fragile social life, how our forebears learned to regulate their interactions with one another, and how human societies eventually grew into forms of previously unimaginable complexity. The most successful of the many millennia-old experiments in how to live, he contends, survive in our values today...
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For my part, I will continue the sacred search for non-"bullshit" ways of bridging the religious and scientific divide! 

Good luck, everyone.

"NEXT"

Summer '18-MALA 6040, Evolution in America -

Here's a pic from our last, peripatetic class... Henry Adams (who fretted about the 2d Law of Thermodynamics, despite William James's counterpoint that the occupants of an entropic universe need not be unhappy) said "the chief wonder of [our] education is that it did not ruin everybody involved in it." By that standard, I think we had a successful summer semester!! Good luck, all!

• August 8 - Final report presentations - Pete, Everybody's Story: wising up to the epic of evolution by Loyal Rue; Steve, The Language of God by Francis Collins; Exam, drawn from even-numbered quiz questions. (Thanks for the Study Guide, Don) Remember, the top two run-scorers are exempt: congrats, Don & Pete!

The course evaluation period begins Monday, August 6th at 8 am and ends Wednesday, August 8th at 11:59 pm.

You may evaluate your courses anytime during the evaluation period. The evaluation is mobile friendly...

Your feedback requested & appreciated: should I offer an MALA version of my Philosophy of Happiness course next summer? Or, a course on the history and future of peripatetic (walking) philosophy? Or a repeat of, or variation on, this course? Perhaps a course on Experience and Identity: how our experiences define or fail to define us, individually and as a species. Texts might include William James's Varieties of Religious Experience and Carl Sagan's Varieties of Scientific Experience... Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Experience"... Or, do you have other suggestions?

REPORTERS, please post an assignment and a quiz (6+ quiz questions and at least a couple of discussion questions) ASAP prior to your presentation date so we can all add supplemental questions & comments. The assignment can be a reading selection, a YouTube video, a podcast etc.

To post your assignment, scroll down to near the bottom of this page to find "Step By Step Instructions to Embed a PDF On Blogger"... OR give us a link where we can find the material you'd like us to read/watch/hear... OR tell us which scanned pages in Google Books (Jy 25) (Aug1) (Aug 8) we should read.

The final report should also include a blog post of at least 500 words and any relevant links, graphics, videos or other "bloggish" content you find appropriate. Final draft due by our last class date, Aug.8-but feel free to post interim work-in-progress drafts in the meantime, to use in conjunction with your presentation and to solicit constructive feedback from the class.

"The ignorant do not have a right to an audience"...Philosophers in the rain/perfect day for a stroll..."The genius of Charles Darwin" (video)...Democracy in Chains...Nancy MacLean (video)... Scopes re-enactment slideshow... The American Experience documentary series featured the Scopes Trial... and so did In Search of History (featuring Stephen Jay Gould's commentary-the better of the two, in my opinion)... the NYTimes podcast "The Daily" featured the ACLU and gave Scopes a nod on Monday Jy 30... The Tangled Tree, a new book by David Quammen

I've acquired The Creation, so we'll definitely finish screening it sooner or later. Also, I've found my copy of Inherit the Wind... so we can take a longer look at it too, when time allows.

NOTE: your online participation is expected, even if you cannot join us in person. But please do join us in person.

We've not all been posting weekly essays and contributing to the quizzes. Do we need to take a bit more class time for that, perhaps at the beginning?

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If we wish we can delegate quiz-building this way: those whose question intervals fall on even-numbered pages take the first half of the material, odd the second half.

Remember to open your author invitations, so you can post your weekly essays (250+ words, worth 4 bases, a whole run). Keep a log of everything you post, and when, so you can claim your bases & runs on the scorecard. You get a base for for each question, comment, link etc., and for each correctly-answered quiz question, and a run for every 4 bases.

And, you get a run (4 bases) for your weekly mini-essay (250+ words). Try to post everything byTuesday before class, so we'll all have an opportunity to respond to your thoughts and questions.

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Quiz June 13, SG 1-2, TM 1-6

Quiz June 20, SG 3-4, TM 7-11... remember to post quiz & discussion questions for both our texts, and lots of comments (or if you prefer, contrary to WJB, interpretations) and links... Happy Fathers Day! Darwin as family man... Darwin on family, work, and happiness...

Quiz June 27, SG 5-6, TM 12-16... Go over last week's quiz... My colleague Bombardi is at the Green Dragon again tonight 'til 8:30, let's adjourn by 7:30 if we can... good 3d meeting, though we missed several of you. You missed some scintillating discussion, a peripatetic stroll in mild & lovely weather, and Part 1 of our screening of "The Creation." It pre-empted our review of the quiz, so we'll be doubling up next time.

July 4 - Happy Independence Day! I'm going to Montreal...

Quiz July 11, SG 7-8, TM 17-23. Let's all officially commit to our final report topics and nail down our presentation dates by today. Final reporttopics/texts - note the expanded bibliography of suggestions. You can post edited, in-progress drafts of your final blogs at any time, if you'd like to solicit early feedback.

Quiz July 18, SG 9-10, TM 24-30

July 21 (Saturday) - Field Trip to Dayton, TN! - Historic re-enactment of the 1925 Scopes Trial, Rhea County Courthouse, 1 pm Eastern Time(don't come late like Matthew Chapman). Any of us who want to travel together can meet in front of the library Starbucks at 9 am (we lose an hour to the time zone). Additional tickets can be purchased directly from scopesfestival.com.

July 25 - Final report presentation - Don, The Book That Changed America: How Darwin's Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation by Randall Fuller (excerpt) AND The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy by John Dewey; [Abi's presentation postponed]

August 1 - Final report presentations - Chris,The Blind Watchmaker: why the evidence of evolution reveals a world without design by Richard Dawkins; Chase, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are by Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan; Abigail,Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists by Rebecca Stott

Dayton slideshow...

Henry walks to work...

If you've always wanted to be in pictures, here's a note from Dawn McCormack:

"We have been asked to find 30 people who can act as law school students in two video shoots on July 31st. Here is the info I have: The shoot is on July 31st, and we're basically looking for two groups of 15 students, one from 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM in the Honors Building, and another from 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM and the Miller Education Center on Bell Street. We're looking for a diverse group of students or staff members that look like they could pass as law school students (avg. age ~25). Please reach out to undergraduate and graduate students who might be interested, and have them contact me via email: dawn.mccormack@mtsu.edu"

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CoPhi returns on August 27, 2018

Fall 2018, PHIL 1030-
#H-01 TR 11:20-12:45
#H-02 TR 01:00-02:25
#H-03 MW 12:40-02:05

Texts:
American Philosophy: A Love Storyby John Kaag
A Little History of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton
The Joys of Walking ed. Edwin Mitchell
Fantasyland by Kurt Andersen

Up@dawn... Up@dawn 2.0... Osopher(tw)

300 James Union Building (JUB), MW 4-5 & by appt.

EXTRA CREDIT OPPORTUNITY: go through the links below, find and fix the broken ones.

See "Previously" at the bottom of the page for old announcements