MLK National Memorial

I've been asked to post some links about the effort to build a memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This is the sort of project that Quakers tend to support, and several members of my meeting (Roanoke Monthly Meeting) have been talking about Dr. King this month, the 42nd anniversary of his death and 43rd anniversary of his declaration of opposition to the war in Viet Nam. However, I don't have much to add beyond providing a couple links with resources both about Dr. King and the proposed memorial.

http://mlkmemorialnews.org

http://www.mlkmemorial.org/

The fault, dear Brutus, ...

The course has not gone as well since I left classical philosophy and started on the modern period. I continued to relate the issues to contemporary times, but this didn't seem to have much effect. I think the main thing is the switch from a focus on ethics and the good life to epistemology and metaphysics. It just doesn't grab them in the same way. Is the external world composed of material objects having primary qualities that affect our senses with color and sound? Or is the external world composed of sensible objects that consist of patterns of ideas caused by God? My students don't care.

When we find something interesting it is hard to understand why someone else would not find it so. The temptation is to assume that the person is disinterested because they just don't understand it. Many philosophers give in to the temptation of thinking this but it seems self-serving and false to me. As a side note did you see the piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed by a philosopher bemoaning the fact that philosophy has become marginalized. The possibility that we are doing something wrong is not considered. It is assumed that people are just too lazy to make the effort to read what we write. I don't buy this explanation.

Ethics, at least ancient ethics, still engages the interest of contemporary Americans when it is well-presented. But equally well-presented discussions of modern epistemology and metaphysics do not.

At the moment I don't have an answer to the question that interests me in all of this: what kind of epistemology and metaphysics would interest people now? Any suggestions?

update on Intro class

I haven't posted about the Intro class in a couple of weeks because I have been distracted by working on the truth paper. But now that the paper is practically done, I will resume updates.

Today's class didn't go well. The reason seems pretty clear to me. I got news last night that a friend of mine has cancer and the news doesn't look good. This has been on my mind and I'm sure it affected my mood and classroom demeanor. I just couldn't be as energetic and upbeat as I normally am. It really seems to me that it affected the students. They tried to engage in discussion but it seemed flat. Nothing felt right.

Unfortunately I can't just choose to feel upbeat and optimistic under the circumstances. And knowing that I hadn't done a good job teaching today just made me feel worse. I'm wondering if I shouldn't have just told my students what had happened and how it was affecting me. I would hesitate to get that personal with my students. I fear it would almost sound like I was asking for their sympathy. So I don't know what I should have done. I think I just have to accept that sometimes class isn't going to go well for reasons beyond my control.

Paper on Truth

I finished my paper on truth this afternoon (thanks to Spring Break). I plan to let it sit awhile before rereading it to see what I'm missing or messing up. At the moment it doesn't contain any notes or references, I suppose it will take me another day of work to insert them, but I did want to keep it rather informal so that it could be read by a wider audience than just professional philosophers.

I'd like to share it with any interested Quaker philosophers. I'll email it to you if you want it.

More on Truth

OK, here's a new paragraph. Does this sound fair and reasonable?

Moreover, when concerned people looked at inequality it seemed to be no temporary or accidental phenomenon. Inequality seemed to be deliberately maintained by those who profited from it. The powerful kept control of society in part by the use of crude physical violence but also, and more importantly, by control of information. John Stuart Mill had argued that the free flow of information and the interplay of rational argument would ensure that in the long-run the truth would emerge victorious over falsehood and superstition. On the contrary, in the 20th century people began to argue that what emerged as victorious in the marketplace of ideas were the ideas that had the backing of the moneyed classes. Wealth and not the objective worth of arguments determined what books were published and how many copies; what movies were produced and where they were distributed; etc. The world-picture painted by mass education, mass entertainment and mass communications seemed deliberately designed and controlled to justify existing inequalities. Wealth is the natural result of hard work. So the explanation of poverty is laziness. Thus, the rich deserve to be rich and poor deserve to be poor. This is the picture that the rich ensure is overwhelmingly reinforced in popular culture as being the truth. If the Enlightenment represented a new cosmopolitan faith, then the history of the 20th century represented a crisis of faith. Recognizing that the powerful manipulate ideas to protect their interests is enough to give truth a bad name. Thus, the most radical postmodern response is to reject the most central notion of the Enlightenment: truth itself.

Postmodernism

I would really appreciate some reaction to these four sentences on postmodernism. As you know I'm an Analytic guy so I'm struggling to understand postmodernism. If these four sentences aren't on the right track then I may just have to give up.


We live in a postmodern age and what this means is that there is a consensus that the intellectual synthesis that was the Enlightenment is no longer acceptable and must be replaced. But the consensus does not go much farther than that. The Enlightenment is a complex phenomenon and the debate does not become substantive and interesting until we have identified which elements of the complex we intend to reject and what we intend to offer in their place. The Enlightenment variously stood for many things: laissez faire capitalism, democracy, human rights, the scientific method, individualism, mass education, free speech, cosmopolitanism and progress.

Stoics, Epicureans and Buddhists

I haven't been keeping up with reports on Intro lately so here's a quick update.

The essay exams took me approximately nine hours to grade. It got pretty tedious towards the end. They did pretty well though and that's encouraging.

Since then I have been talking about late classical philosophy. I introduced it will a quick synopsis of the 4 Noble Truths of Buddhism. The similarity as I see it is that original Buddhism is rather like Stoicism and Epicureanism in that 1) the goal is ataraxia and 2) there is an analysis of human psychology that leads to conclusions about how we should pursue it.

I do the Epicureans first and central to my account of them is the distinction between moving pleasure and static pleasure. A cat sitting contentedly on a sunny windowsill while I go to work embodies static pleasure. I summarize the Epicurean preference for static pleasure as the advice to "be the cat." Then I ask them to imagine trying to follow this philosophy today. They would drop out of school, get a job at Starbucks, and find a cheap apartment to live in with a couple close friends.

Next lecture I introduce the Stoics. They seem to like the idea of holding themselves to high moral standards while simultaneously not blaming other people for their behavior. I can see that a few of them really come to appreciate the Stoic philosophy.