Nancy Sherman is the featured "opinionator" in the latest installment of the new Times philosophy blog "The Stone," with a timely Memorial Day message on stoicism:
After the loss of his daughter Tullia in childbirth, [Cicero] turned to Stoicism to assuage his grief. But ultimately he could not accept its terms: “It is not within our power to forget or gloss over circumstances which we believe to be evil…They tear at us, buffet us, goad us, scorch us, stifle us — and you tell us to forget about them?”
Put in the context of today’s wars, this could just as easily be a soldier’s narrative about the need to put on Stoic armor and the need to take it off.
If you're in middle Tennessee and you care about the future of life, you can dial up 89.5 FM at 8 a.m. this very morning to hear a local philosophy prof talking with Gina Logue (of MTSU On the Record) about that very topic.
Or catch the live stream at their website. Or download the podcast from iTunes in a day or so. (While you're there, check out On the Record podcast #45, too: "Pursuit of Happiness".)
Or you can watch Charlie Osgood's Sunday Morning on CBS. Or go for a walk. Or cook some pancakes. Or roll over and dream some more.
Time-lapse representations of significant events & achievements help us widen the frame of our typically short-term thinking, or they do me anyway. Maybe this will help us think beyond the shuttle? Sort of the same effect as Powers of Ten and the Contact opening...
There's nothing wrong with playing around, playing for fun, playing for no reason and with no other agenda... but play can be serious, too.
Most animals play. Evolution itself plays with lifeforms Whole cultures play with customs, ideas, belief systems, and fashions. But it's a special caliber of play—deep—that leads to transcendence, creativity, and a need for the sacred. -Diane Ackerman [ch1-nyt]
EDITORIAL CONTACT: Gina Logue, 615-898-5081, or WMOT-FM, 615-898-2800
“MTSU ON THE RECORD” TACKLES NEW “FUTURE OF LIFE” COURSE Dr. Phil Oliver Delves into How We Look at Life, Ethics, Planet’s Prospects
(MURFREESBORO) – Dr. Phil Oliver, professor of philosophy, will discuss his new fall 2010 course “The Future of Life,” on the next edition of “MTSU on the Record” with host Gina Logue at 8 a.m. this Sunday, May 30, on WMOT-FM (89.5 and wmot.org).
Oliver will integrate themes from two previous courses that focused on biomedical ethics and biotechnology with an examination of the sustainability of life on Earth, genetic engineering and humanity’s evolutionary prospects.
He cites a question from Pragmatism by William James as a starting point for discussion: “The really vital question for us all is, ‘What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?’”
== And here's the "happiness" interview I did for "On the Record" last year.
Good excuse to repeat one of my favorite Emerson lines:
"Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote those books."
This is nothing against books and libraries and old dead philosophers, but-- the message is-- don't just be a sponge, be a spring too. Or, as he also said:
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
He also said something about his books being in his library but his study being in nature.... Where the springs run deep.
The great but little-known Hypatia gets her due in Agora, a new film reviewed yesterday in the Times. Carl Sagan raised her profile in Cosmos... (text); maybe now she'll make it onto the Top Female Philosopher lists where she should have been all along.
She said: To teach superstitions as truth is a most terrible thing.
More good publicity (it's all good, right?) for our department in today's Tennessean, under the headline "MTSU avoids cutting programs":
Before the federal stimulus funds arrived, MTSU President Sidney McPhee warned students that the looming state budget cuts might force the university to eliminate entire departments and majors of studies. The social work, criminal justice administration, sociology, anthropology and philosophy departments all were being eyed for the chopping block.
Students reacted with outrage, marching in protest and bombarding the administration with calls and letters of protest.
Wendy Caldwell is a former MTSU student who is working as a cook while she saves money for her next round of classes.
With the Board of Regents considering another 6 percent to 11 percent increase in tuition, the process could take even longer.
Caldwell, who was double-majoring in math and philosophy, launched a Facebook group last year to protest the very idea of eliminating the philosophy department.
"The word philosophy means 'love of wisdom.' You can't have an education without philosophy," Caldwell said.
Philosophy classes taught her how to think, she said, recalling one class in which the professor discussed the link between the philosophy of Taoism and string theory in physics.
"Every penny I've ever spent on higher education was worth it for that moment."
In the end, the 2010-11 draft budget doesn't eliminate any majors or departments. In fact, it creates a brand-new college, the College of Applied, Behavioral and Health Sciences, and tweaks the administrative structures of other departments...
In November Jennifer Michael Hecht was awarded the "Free-thought Heroine" prize for 2009, recognizing in particular the brilliant contribution of Doubt: A Historyto the ongoing project of de-villifying atheists, humanists, naturalists and other free-thinkers. Bravo, Jennifer! Can't wait for the Bertrand Russell book.
The embed code is balking. But you can view her acceptance speech-- "Leaving Our Bodies to Art"-- here.
What I say assumes everyone in my audience is a co-irreligionist. I normally don't speak quite that way...
Reminded me of the "biotech & ethics" Friday chats we did a couple years back: rapid-fire, a bit choppy, but fun and challenging and quickly over.
Here was my little exchange. (The excisions marked by [...] indicate moments when all those other unseen chatters rushed in to interrupt with their own agendas. You obviously couldn't do this in the flesh, it would be too much like a presidential press conference.)
3:35
[Comment From Osopher]
Thanks for clarifying the end of the essay. But it still bothers me that you evoke a "mystery" surrounding this man, rightly credited by Jefferson with moments of moral sublimity but also documented by Bart Ehrman and others as having been almost uniformly misunderstood. So my question: what do you see as the unsolved mystery about Jesus of Nazareth?
3:36
Adam Gopnik: By "unsolved mystery" I meant only that there are aspects of the Jesus myth that are just never going to be susceptible to rational judgment, and that faith, as everyone says, remains a leap -- foolish or necessary -- but a leap past reason. [...]
3:38
[Comment From Osopher]
So the mystery might be more about us: why do so many find reason so uncongenial?
3:39
Adam Gopnik: Because our lives are bounded by the certainty of death, I suppose, and what reason can give us seems, to some -- to so many -- unsatisfying. I'm with Darwin on this one -- enough in life to give anyone meaning, if we make it hard enough -- but I understand the opposite feeling. Much the best account of this, I think-- this double feeling --is in William James's "Varieties Of Religious Experience" [...]
3:42
[Comment From Osopher]
Totally agree about Darwin and James. Thanks for the chat and for the review, I've got to go and pick up the kids now.
3:43
Adam Gopnik: Pleasure sharing views; even in this odd and pixeled forum.
And I do totally agree: many of us don't feel a need for Jesus to furnish our lives with meaning, though we admire his message-- which was not exclusively his, of course-- of hope and charity and love and forgiveness etc. But like William James and Adam Gopnik I must also acknowledge the "double feeling" of so many others for whom sweet reason seems not to be enough.
It is indeed a pleasure sharing views. But I don't think I'll be joining your "mafia family" (an avatar-driven online game, I presume? ), Adam. Thanks for the invite, but I already feel a little guilty for the time I stole to join you online yesterday. But only a little.
Older Daughter's High School sports awards ceremony was last night. She catches.
What else does she now have in common with Joe Mauer, Pudge Rodriguez, Thurman Munson, Johnny Bench, Yogi Berra, and not many others who wore the misnamed "tools of ignorance"?
What an intelligent, insightful, English look at William Jamesand his Varieties of Religious Experience on the latest installment of the BBC's radio program "In Our Time." But one of the panelists complained near the end that the Americans oddly were planning no public commemoration of the impending centenary of James's August 1910 death. That may have been the only incontestably-false statement on the show.
The William James Society (http://wjsociety.org), in cooperation with the Chocorua Community Association and Harvard’s Houghton Library, is planning a long-weekend symposium, August 13-16, 2010, to honor the life of James on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his death. In the spirit of James, the symposium, “In the Footsteps of William James,” will be an opportunity to explore the local settings of James’s life and to reflect on James’s ability to encounter experience afresh and approach problems creatively.
The symposium will be held in two places: in Chocorua, NH, and Cambridge, MA, and it will include:
ô€‚ƒ opportunities to explore James’s settings in Chocorua, including his summer home and hiking trails, along with performance of period music and stories of his experiences in the area;
ô€‚ƒ attendance at the opening of the Houghton Library’s exhibition on James;
ô€‚ƒ tour of James’s Cambridge, including his home and work settings;
ô€‚ƒ presentations by leading scholars and public intellectuals on James’s life, work, and impact;
􀂃 seminar conversations with James experts to allow more informal and in-depth exploration and reflection.
Please see the William James Society web page (http://wjsociety.org, under Symposium 2010) for more information, as it becomes available, on schedule, speakers, registration, and other attendance information.
It's been raining again, nervous people are probably rushing the depleted stores once more for bottled water and other provisions. But it looks like it'll be a calm, pleasantly cooler day. A good day for reflection. (Like most of the others.)
If you asked me to name the film or stage show that had the greatest impact on me as a young person, I'd have to say South Pacific. I first saw the adaptation of James Michener's tale performed on the large outdoor stage at St. Louis's Municipal ("Muny") Opera.as a kid, in the intense humid midwestern summertime, in the middle of the civil rights struggles of the '60s, at a moment when I was having my consciousness raised about racial bigotry. I'd just seen Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, [clip] whose impact on me was also profound, and would soon read my baseball hero Bob Gibson's ghosted memoir From Ghetto to Glory. Dr. King had been shot the previous summer. (I may in fact have seen this show at the Muny as early as 1963, but it was the '69 performance that I'm pretty sure I'm recalling.)
Michener caught a lot of snark from lit critics who thought his approach ham-handed or unsubtle or something, but he was a very good man. His "This I Believe" essay aired yesterday.
Around the world I have lived with my brothers and nothing has kept me from knowing men like myself wherever I went. Language has been no barrier, for once in India, I lived for several days with villagers who didn’t know a word of English. I can’t remember exactly how we got along, but the fact that I couldn’t speak their language was no hindrance. Differences in social custom never kept me from getting to know and like savage Melanesians in the New Hebrides. They ate roast dog, and I ate Army spam, and if we had wanted to emphasize differences, I am sure each of us could have concluded the other was nuts. But we stressed similarities and, so long as I could snatch a Navy blanket for them now and then, we had a fine old time with no words spoken.
It was in these islands that I met a beat-up, shameless old Tonkinese woman. She would buy or sell anything, and in time we became fast friends and I used to sit with her, knowing not a word of her curious language, and we talked for hours. She knew only half a dozen of the vilest English obscenities, but she had the most extraordinary love of human beings and the most infectious sense of this world’s crazy comedy. She was of my blood, and I wish I could see her now.
Commencement addresses are usually forgettably underwhelming. But there have been some good ones, like Paul Hawken's at the University of Portland last year:
Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television.
This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequeathed to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.
Hawken's talk at Google was more restrained, but it also bore the powerful message of Blessed Unrest: we must stop stealing from the future, and in fact there are hopeful signs that more and more people all around the world are committed to doing just that. They're beginning to connect, in an atomized and non-ideological movement that is truly inspired. Inspiring.
Like J&M's, the Scientologists' ears ring too when I tell my students I don't respect anyone's belief in "dianetics" and Xenu the inter-galactic volcano-smasher. Sorry.
But thanks to the local chapter of the C of S for the set of L. Ron Hubbard's writings they sent over to my colleagues and me last week. I'll do my best to keep them out of general circulation.
His Will Barrett went to Lost Cove cave (in Second Coming) to pose a God question he thought would have to yield a definitive answer. But a clear yes or no answer may not be forthcoming, after all. The answer may be a muddy maybe. Indeed. And so my colleagues and I are gratefully still in business.
Found it, tucked away in a box in a drawer: the Brinkwood "tea-house" near the University of the South at Sewanee, TN, constructed by Walker Percy and Shelby Foote in the '30s, visited by me in 1996, & mentioned in yesterday's post.
I'm still trying, without total success, to see how the world (or the cove, at least) looks through the eyes of a southern Roman Catholic-Existentialist novelist and a Civil War historian (& star of Ken Burns' "Civil War") who appreciated fine bourbon-- "boih-buhn," in Shelby's mouth.
It was a cave in just such a cove as lies beneath this perch, Lost Cove cave, into which Percy sent his protagonist in The Second Coming to search for God.
No single point of view is privileged, all contribute to the whole.
But the view from this pavilion is absolutely spectacular. I have that picture somewhere too, I'm pretty sure. I'll keep looking.
The novelist Walker Percy died twenty years ago today. Twenty! Tomorrow and tomorrow may creep at a petty pace, but yesterday flies.
I was a Percy fan, though I was no fan of his Catholicism or his jabs at my hero Carl Sagan. "Vulgar scientism," really?!
But weird though it may be, Lost in the Cosmos is worth a look if (like me) you're a naturalist and humanist with a "spiritual" feeling for the stars. We need critics like Percy to keep us sharp.
He was a lifelong pal of the Civil War historian Shelby Foote. They built a stone "teahouse" pavilion together on a hill in Sewanee, Tennessee in the 1930s. I'll see if I can dig up the photo I took there, what, fifteen years ago already?
Another earnest treasure from the '50s "This I Believe" vault. There are many ways to light a candle. Louise ("We Took to the Woods") Rich:
So now I have grown up. I don’t believe in myself anymore, not in myself alone. I do believe in myself as a member of the human race. I believe in the decency and sympathy and kindness of every man and woman and child that I meet. Nobody, not even Big Louise, can walk the trail alone. I know that now.
I believe also that I have an obligation. Whenever I see one of my brothers or sisters in trouble—a car off the road, the need of a cup of tea in my shabby living room by the elderly lady down the road who is lonesome—I am privileged to have the opportunity to repay, in a small measure, my debt.
I don’t know about God. He’s too big for me to understand. But I have seen his visage reflected in the faces of the people who have helped me through my hard times. I hope to live so that someday, someone will say, “Louise Rich? Oh sure, I know her. She isn’t so bad. She’s human.”
The great thing about living in a place visited by a natural catastrophe that's been widely reported: calls and emails from out-of-towners from whom one rarely hears. Thanks to you all for checking in, we're fine.
I'm actually more bothered by how quickly we resume "normal life" than by the precipitating event, now that the water line is dropping. No, not bothered... bemused, struck, bewildered, sobered. I just wonder how much else we fail to extract the full meaning of, when we can so quickly turn the page on a thousand-year flood. For better or worse, we've learned to live in the specious present. Better, probably.
Wonderful line in Dean McDaniel's obit (which sounds like a product of his own pen):
Teaching Shakespeare’s tragedies for four decades left him with the distinct impression that almost everyone dies in the end, though he had hoped that perhaps in his case an exception would be made
Many now entertain this "hope," and I'll be teaching a course in the Fall (The Future of Life) that will take a closer look at it. Wish the Dean could be there.
Distressing news from our interim Dean this morning:
It is with great sadness that we announce the death this morning of John McDaniel. In his fortieth year of service to MTSU, he had served as dean of the College of Liberal Arts for more than a quarter century, and was widely known for his intelligence, wit, and wisdom. He leaves behind his wife Jean, sons Scott (Donetta) and Craig, and three granddaughters.
Dean McDaniel was a great friend and lifeline to our department, at a time when many of his "superiors" would have been pleased to lose the philosophy program entirely. He stood with us.
He was a great friend and unstinting source of encouragement to me personally, and a special breed of academic administrator-- equally at home in the worlds of literary scholarship and of the great American pastime (he was once a hot Pirates' prospect).
When word of his latest, now sorrowfully last, illness got around last Fall he held his head high and resolved to "take this one on like all the other afflictions that have come my way in recent times: one step at a time."
He told me how lucky I was to have been mentored by John Lachs. I was also very lucky to have learned from John McDaniel.
We’re brought up to think we’ll enter middle age and it will be kind of gloomy. But as scientists look at real people, they find out the contrary. One study of men found that well-being peaked at age 65. Over and over they find that middle age, instead of being a time of depression and decline, is actually a time of being more optimistic overall.
So what kinds of things does a middle-aged brain do better than a younger brain?
Inductive reasoning and problem solving — the logical use of your brain and actually getting to solutions. We get the gist of an argument better. We’re better at sizing up a situation and reaching a creative solution. They found social expertise peaks in middle age. That’s basically sorting out the world: are you a good guy or a bad guy? Harvard has studied how people make financial judgments. It peaks, and we get the best at it in middle age.
Best of all:
Exercise is the best studied thing you can do to your brain. It increases brain volume, produces new baby brain cells in grownup brains. Even when our muscles contract, it produces growth chemicals. Using your body can help your brain.
Speaking of pagan holidays: some events just totally defy rational explanation, J&M know.
Henceforth the creation of Boobquake: A day of action that calls on women worldwide to dress scandalously and prove wrong the Iranian cleric who blames natural disasters on immodest cleavage. Led by US's Purdue University student Jennifer McCreight, a 24-hour protest was staged, codenamed Boobquake on Monday. -"Boobquake Protest"
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
"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.-his last speech, April '07
"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind." God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater(and see Mr. Rogers, below)
The only real "you" is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For "you" is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new... when you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actually feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life.”Alan Watts "The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." Carl Sagan
A net for catching days
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.” Annie Dillard, The Writing Life... Popova on Dillard
“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.” Vita Sackville-West
“I’m a full-time believer in writing habits, pedestrian as it all may sound. You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away. I see it happen all the time. Of course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place. This doesn’t mean I produce much out of the two hours. Sometimes I work for months and have to throw everything away, but I don’t think any of that was time wasted. Something goes on that makes it easier when it does come well. And the fact is if you don’t sit there every day, the day it would come well, you won’t be sitting there.” Flannery O'Connor
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.”
After the birth of his third child, he had rented an office above a restaurant in Ipswich, and spent several hours each morning writing there. Throughout his 50-year career, he remained devoted to that schedule, writing about three pages every morning after breakfast, sometimes more if things were going well. He said: “Back when I started, our best writers spent long periods brooding in silence. Then they’d publish a big book and go quiet again for another five years. I decided to run a different kind of shop.” WA
Baseball by John Updike
It looks easy from a distance, easy and lazy, even, until you stand up to the plate and see the fastball sailing inside, an inch from your chin, or circle in the outfield straining to get a bead on a small black dot a city block or more high, a dark star that could fall on your head like a leaden meteor.
The grass, the dirt, the deadly hops between your feet and overeager glove: football can be learned, and basketball finessed, but there is no hiding from baseball the fact that some are chosen and some are not—those whose mitts feel too left-handed, who are scared at third base of the pulled line drive, and at first base are scared of the shortstop's wild throw that stretches you out like a gutted deer.
There is nowhere to hide when the ball's spotlight swivels your way, and the chatter around you falls still, and the mothers on the sidelines, your own among them, hold their breaths, and you whiff on a terrible pitch or in the infield achieve something with the ball so ridiculous you blush for years. It's easy to do. Baseball was invented in America, where beneath the good cheer and sly jazz the chance of failure is everybody's right, beginning with baseball.
“Every morning," reported his friend Miles Malleson, "Bertie [Russell] 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." Gymnasiums of the Mind
"...from his university days he would walk at least 20 miles every Sunday, and recounts how some of his peers at Cambridge walked much more." The Connection Between Walking and Thinking
"...thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals. After all those years of walking to work out other things, it made sense to come back to work close to home, in Thoreau’s sense, and to think about walking.
Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts." Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust... On a childhood of reading and wandering
"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.
“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
“At the core of every habit is a neurological loop with three parts: A cue, a routine and a reward. To understand how to create habits — such as exercise habits — you must learn to establish the right cues and rewards.” nyt
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.
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
"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
...but I'll be your friend. “The thing I remember best about successful people I've met all through the years is their obvious delight in what they're doing and it seems to have very little to do with worldly success. They just love what they're doing, and they love it in front of others.” Mr. Rogers, echoing Mr. Vonnegut (above), also said “There are three ways to ultimate success: The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.” ― Fred Rogers
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...
Great nickname for the pitcher who shut out Hillwood in the postseason opener!
It's her time
The clock on my office wall
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."
"It cannot be always seaside...
...even as it cannot be always May, and through the gaps thought creeps in." H.G. Wells
Charles Darwin (
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