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Delight Springs

A blog about ideas, popular culture, philosophy, and personal enthusiasms (or "springs of delight") of all kinds.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

grandeur in this view of life

Posted by Phil at 2/23/2012 05:00:00 AM
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Labels: evolution, Symphony of science

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Delight

They who know the truth are not equal to those who love it, and they who love it are not equal to those who delight in it. Confucius

Springs

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."
"The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?"--William James


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.

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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.”

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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)
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The More day to dawn podcast (subscribe at iTunes, & to the RSS feed here) and the Up at dawn podcast (subscribe at iTunes) include posts from my blogs and additional spontaneous musings.

"There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star." Henry David Thoreau






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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.

Montaigne on death & the art of living

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Fossils in the making

“If you could forget mortality... You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras. Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don't warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn't differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to outlast us are not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than coral reefs.Here everything returns upon itself, repeats and renews itself, and present can hardly be told from past.” Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

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Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton)

Why ‘Earthrise’ Matters thebookoflife.org/why-earthrise-…

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    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.

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    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

    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
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    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)

    ----"A damned-yankee professor in Little Dixie" (1957)

    ----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
    ----Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution

    John Dewey, The
    Influence of Darwin on Philosophy

    Randall Fuller, The Book That Changed America: How Darwin's Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation

    Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

    Jay Hosler, Sandwalk Adventures (a graphic novel)

    Philip Kitcher, Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith

    Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion

    Loyal Rue, Everybody's Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution

    Rebecca Stott, Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists

    Hanne Strager,
    A Modest Genius: The story of Darwin's life and how his ideas changed everything

    Emma Townshend, Darwin's Dogs: How Darwin's Pets Helped Form a World-Changing Theory of Evolution

    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 AM
    Proceeding 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

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    "There is something devastatingly hollow...

    "There is something devastatingly hollow...
    ...about the demonstration that thought without action is hollow, when we find the philosopher only thinking it." John Lachs
    Front Cover
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    ==
    Conference in Berlin honoring John Lachs, August '2015 :
    http://berlinphilosophyforum.org/category/aaev/program/ …

    "Immediacy and the Future" by Phil Oliver, Berlin Practical Philosophy International Forum

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    My Favorite Philosophers

    Couldn't pick just five.

    1. William James
    2. John Stuart Mill
    3. John Dewey
    4. David Hume
    5. Michel de Montaigne
    6. Bertrand Russell
    7. Ralph Waldo Emerson/Henry David Thoreau (a tie, and a couple)
    8. Aristotle (mostly because he contradicts Plato)

    Where are the women? Up until relatively recently, they weren't invited into the conversation. But I'm doing my homework. Thanks to Jennifer Michael Hecht's wonderful Doubt: A History, I know the names of some 19th century women who'd likely have become favorites of mine and many others, in a better world: Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, Annie Besant, Ernestine Rose, Etta Semple, Helen Hamilton Gardener...


    The Director

    The Director

    My favorite films

    Older daughter (the film student) pressed me to name my favorites. This could change, but for now here they are (and here are my blurbs about them).

    1. The Life of Brian
    2. 2001
    3. Manhattan
    4. Sophie's Choice
    5. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

    Ray Lankford's bat

    Ray Lankford's bat
    in the hands of a great ex-catcher

    "KO"

    "KO"
    Great nickname for the pitcher who shut out Hillwood in the postseason opener!

    It's her time

    It's her time
    The clock on my office wall

    Hobbes

    Image result for hobbes

    He walked much and contemplated, and he had in the head of his cane a pen and ink-horn, carried always a note-book in his pocket, and as soon as a thought darted, he presently entered it into his book, or otherwise he might perhaps have lost it."

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    "It cannot be always seaside...

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    ...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!


    It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well—be not detain’d! ...

    Walt Whitman

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