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Delight
Springs
"The worm at the core of our usual springs of delight can tun us into melancholy metaphysicians. But the music can commence again, and again and again, at intervals."
I'm a philosophy prof at a large state university in middle Tennessee. This is my personal blogsite, not sponsored by or otherwise officially related to my school; views expressed are my own.
“We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.” Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Updike on waiting for inspiration
When asked in 1978 about his writing process, Updike said, “I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them, you will never write again.”
Resist!
- Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History By Kurt Andersen
- Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities By Rebecca Solnit
- How Democracies Die By Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt
- No Is Not Enough: Resisting Drumpf's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need By Naomi Klein
- One Nation After Drumpf: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet-Deported By E.J. Dionne, Jr., Norman J. Ornstein, Thomas E. Mann
- Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump By Michael Isikoff, David Corn
- Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic By David Frum
- (Additional titles here)
"More day to dawn" podcast
"Up at dawn" podcast
==
Up@dawn 2.0
The Philosophy of Happiness
Montaigne's garden
"I want death to find me planting my cabbages, not concerned about IT or - still less- my unfinished garden" Montaigne
(I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens not being finished.)
I believe, in truth, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that more terrify us than the thing itself... we seem dead and buried already. … Happy is the death that deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials.
Fossils in the making
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 | Five Books (@five_books) |
The 'father of science fiction' HG Wells suffered terribly from class anxiety. Huxley and Woolf thought him 'vulgar' == Five books on... | |
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Greetings from Earth
Winterton C. Curtis
My first landlord was an old zoologist at the University of Missouri named Winterton Curtis (1875-1965). He was one of the scientific experts not allowed to testify at the Scopes Trial in Dayton TN in 1925. My parents (and I) rented rooms from him in his home on Westmount in Columbia Missouri while Dad attended Veterinary school at Mizzou in the early '60s, and later maintained a cordial friendship with him. He used to visit when I was a kid and pull dollar bills from my ears. Dad thought that must be why I was always so fascinated by the concept of evolution.
----"A damned-yankee professor in Little Dixie" (1957)
----Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology (1921)
John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy
Randall Fuller, The Book That Changed America: How Darwin's Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation
Hanne Strager, A Modest Genius: The story of Darwin's life and how his ideas changed everything
Dr. Curtis wrote, in 1921,
The humanistic philosophy of life, which flowered in Greece and which has blossomed again, is not the crude materialistic desire to eat, drink, and be merry. It is a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile. The otherworldliness of the Middle Ages does not satisfy the spiritual demands of modern times. Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology
The humanistic philosophy of life, which flowered in Greece and which has blossomed again, is not the crude materialistic desire to eat, drink, and be merry. It is a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile. The otherworldliness of the Middle Ages does not satisfy the spiritual demands of modern times. Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology
Of the Scopes Trial itself, he wrote of the 1925 Dayton Tennessee spectacle:
The courtroom audience impressed me as honest country folk in jeans and calico. “Boobs" perhaps, as judged by Mencken, and holding all the prejudices of backwoods Christian orthodoxy, but nevertheless a significant section of the backbone of democracy in the U.S.A. They came to see their idol “the Great Commoner” and champion of the people meet the challenge to their faith. They left bewildered but with their beliefs unchanged despite the manhandling of their idol by the “Infidel” from Chicago.... A Defense Expert's Impressions of the Scopes Trial
The courtroom audience impressed me as honest country folk in jeans and calico. “Boobs" perhaps, as judged by Mencken, and holding all the prejudices of backwoods Christian orthodoxy, but nevertheless a significant section of the backbone of democracy in the U.S.A. They came to see their idol “the Great Commoner” and champion of the people meet the challenge to their faith. They left bewildered but with their beliefs unchanged despite the manhandling of their idol by the “Infidel” from Chicago.... A Defense Expert's Impressions of the Scopes Trial
Requiescat in pace, Dr. C.
A selective evolutionary bibliography:
Michael Boulter, Darwin's Garden: Down House & the Origin of Species
Eugene Byrne and Simon Gurr, Darwin: A Graphic Biography
Matthew Chapman, Trials of the Monkey (Darwin's great-great...grandson comes to Dayton TN)
Winteron C. Curtis, "A Defense Expert's Impressions of the Scopes Trial" from D-Days at Dayton: Fundamentalism vs Evolution at Dayton, Tennessee (1956)
----Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology (1921)
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist
Jay Hosler, Sandwalk Adventures (a graphic novel)
Rebecca Stott, Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists
And don't overlook the compendious website Darwin online.
Darwin discussion questions, quotes etc. here.
Je suis Charlie
Charles Darwin (@cdarwin)1/11/15, 6:51 AMProceeding on foot
==
"And maybe this is what I have learned more than anything from my great-great-grandfather: to keep my eyes and my mind open, to enjoy the wonders of nature and never cease to ask questions." Sarah Darwin, foreword to "A Modest Genius: The story of Darwin's life and how his ideas changed everything" by Hanne Strager
We all need a philosophy...
"That's my new philosophy."
Philosophers' Song
"...nothin' Nietzsche couldn't teach ya..."
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"There is something devastatingly hollow...
...about the demonstration that thought without action is hollow, when we find the philosopher only thinking it." John Lachs
Freedom and Limits: the Philosophy of John Lachs
==
Conference in Berlin honoring John Lachs, August '2015 :
http://berlinphilosophyforum.org/category/aaev/program/ …
http://berlinphilosophyforum.org/category/aaev/program/ …
"Immediacy and the Future" by Phil Oliver, Berlin Practical Philosophy International Forum
"I'd like to have an argument..."
"No you wouldn't!"
...but I'll be your friend.
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in the hands of a great ex-catcher
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Great nickname for the pitcher who shut out Hillwood in the postseason opener!
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"It cannot be always seaside...
...even as it cannot be always May, and through the gaps thought creeps in." H.G. Wells
Song of the Open Road
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose...
I think heroic deeds were all conceiv’d in the open air, and all free poems also...
Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,
It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth...
Allons! the road is before us!
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