Study Abroad in July: American Philosophy, British Roots

American Philosophy, British Roots
Earn 3 credit hours for Philosophy
Dates:  July 12 - 23, 2016
For more details: Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu or http://bit.ly/1P83Q3Q
To apply for this program, request pre-approval by clicking the "apply now" button above and then complete this application and return it to Dr. Phil Oliver.

Dates / Deadlines:

Term	Year	App Deadline	Decision Date	Start Date	End Date
Summer	2016	03/04/2016 **	Varies	07/12/2016	07/23/2016
** Indicates the Office of Education Abroad pre-approval deadline. Students will also need to meet the actual program application deadlines, which may be earlier. See the Getting Started page for more details.

MTSU Office of Education Abroad Peck Hall Room 207 educationabroad@mtsu.edu

Creative movement

Today marks the release of The Geography of Genius, Eric Weiner's sequel to The Geography of Bliss. It is a moving geography, in the peripatetic sense.

Recently, researchers have begun to investigate scientifically the link between walking and creativity. In a recent study, Stanford University psychologists Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz divided participants into two groups: walkers and sitters. They then administered something called Guilford's Alternative Uses test, in which participants come up with alternative uses for everyday objects. It's designed to measure “divergent thinking,” an important component of creativity... The results, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, confirm that the ancient Greeks were onto something. Creativity levels were "consistently and significantly” higher for the walkers versus the sitters.

Weiner reported this morning, on npr, on Big History, which employs the Big Picture kind of thinking walkers tend to run into. It diverges from the old-school, facts-and-dates, dry-and-musty scholastic style of history that's soured so many, so sadly, to the recorded annals of human attainment that in their largest (but usually neglected) context are so gripping. [Transcript]

But, to the student who capped the story with his errant conclusion that Big History construes life as intrinsically meaningless - "It just makes you think that really everything will be meaningless soon" - no. Understanding human affairs as part of a much larger cosmic narrative has precisely the reverse implication. Dates and facts have a chance to mean something because they're linked to a cosmic calendar, our lives matter because they're links in a chain stretching remotely backward and forward. Big History restores continuity to the continuous human community.