Are You Happy Documentary Trailer

https://youtu.be/vOLXMiQXSGU?si=wMDaQGLr0HL0Vcw6

From MTSU student to Philosophy professor, Kaity Newman finds her way home – MTSU News

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — When Kaity Newmanwalks into Room 202 of the James Union Building on the campus of Middle Tennessee State University, she can't help but smile.

Dr. Kaity Newman 

The room feels familiar. Not just because she's taught here this semester, but because it's the same classroom where she sat wide-eyed as an undergraduate student taking Introduction to Philosophy at MTSU more than a decade ago.

"Standing at the front of that room now, where I once sat as a student, it's surreal," said Newman, a new lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. "It feels really good being back on campus."

…

https://mtsunews.com/philosophy-professor-mtsu-alumna/

FINAL REPORT PRESENTATION/POST - Request your topic

Indicate your topic preference in the comments space below. We'll do two (or three) presentations per class. Select a topic pertaining to something in the assigned reading on your designated date, OR select a topic in one of the recommended/reserved texts (Moral Ambition, Word of Dog, Wanderlust) that hasn't already been covered; OR suggest another happiness-related topic of  your choosing. The blog post complementing your presentation is due to be posted on our site no later than Dec.5, but post earlier for potentially-constructive feedback or to support your presentation (you can continue to edit until the due-date).

UPDATE Oct 29: Let's fill all our slots with at least one scheduled presentation before scheduling any more 2d or 3d presentations on any given date, please.

OCT 

28 Flanagan 8-11 Final report presentations begin

30 Flanagan 12-15 -p.248. 


NOV

4 Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks Intro, ch1 - Jonathan, Basil

6 Burkeman ch2 - Amanda, 

11 Burkeman 3-6 - David, Jacob

13 Burkeman 7-9 - Carol, Adeline, Kendal

18 Burkeman 10-13 - Nick, Tyler, Sophie

20 Burkeman 14, afterword, appendix -p.245 - Landon, Jayden

25 Conclude final report presentations OR tba

Happy Halloween

https://bsky.app/profile/osopher.bsky.social/post/3m4iclswh5s24

Questions NOV 4

Commencing Burkeman's 4,000 Weeks (Intro, 1-2 (p.55)

1. How long must you live to reach 4,000 weeks? 6,400? Does this surprise or disturb or motivate you in any way? How would you feel if you had less than 800 weeks left (to reach 4,000)?
2. What do you think of Seneca's lament? And Nagel's observation? 4
3. Do you wage a daily battle against online distraction? 6 Or have you surrendered?
4. What's the "maddening truth about time"? 9
5. Have you found your "larger cause"? 12
6. Does time feel to you like a conveyor belt you can't keep up with? What does this analogy suggest is wrong with our relation to time? 20 Would we be wise to rethink that relation, in terms of the time it takes to actually complete specific tasks (like a "pissing whyle" for instance)? Have you had an experience of timelessness like Jung's? 22
7. What's the Pomodoro Technique? Have you ever tried it, or anything like it? How'd that go? 27
8. Have you conquered FOMO? Are you trying? Are you comfortable with COMO (Certainty...)? 33
9. Does Busytown appeal to you?
10. What was Arnold Bennett's dubious assumption? 40
11. Have you experienced "existential overwhelm"? 45 If you believe in an afterlife, does that help?
12. Do you send e-cards? 52 Will you still? How about letters, notes, postcards?

 

Boo!

To[morrow] is Halloween, or All Hallows’ Eve, a day in which the dead are traditionally believed to walk among the living. Communities all across the country throw Halloween parties and parades, but Salem, Massachusetts, goes all out...trying to make everyone happy...”*

Bring candy to class, if you want. Best costume(s) get extra bases on the scorecard.

 

* It started with “Haunted Happenings” in the 1980s, a celebration that took place over a single weekend. But more and more happenings were added to the events calendar every year until they filled the entire month of October and now a quarter of a million tourists flock to Salem to celebrate the monthlong Festival of the Dead. There’s a psychic fair and witchcraft expo every day. Psychic mediums deliver messages from departed loved ones — or an expert can teach you how to communicate with the dead on your own. Witch doctors and hoodoo practitioners explain the art of graveyard conjuring. There are séances and cemetery tours. You can solemnly honor your lost loved ones at the Dumb Supper, a feast with the dead. And the whole thing culminates with The Official Salem Witches’ Halloween Ball at the historic Hawthorne Hotel.

Salem has had a complicated relationship with witches ever since the infamous witch trials of 1692. Over the course of a year nearly 200 residents of Essex County were falsely accused of witchcraft; 19 people were hanged and one man was tortured to death. For generations after the trials the residents of Salem Town and Salem Village just wanted to put the tragedy behind them — so much so that Salem Village changed its name to Danvers. But some modern-day pagans and Wicca practitioners have turned Salem into a pilgrimage site so the city ironically, and somewhat uneasily, has made witchcraft part of its marketing strategy. Author J.W. Ocker wrote about this phenomenon in A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts (2016). He says:

“The Witches, capital W, religious Witches, they balk a little bit at the Halloween witch, because it’s ugly and it’s a stereotype, and it has all these historical associations with it. Then there are people like the historians who balk at the religious witches, who kind of co-opt the cause of the accused witches by saying that they were almost martyrs for the cause. Then there’s the city trying to make everyone happy.” WA

🍕 party

We'll plan to dismiss class a little early, so any who want to attend can get over to the JUB before the pizza (and the people) get gone.

---

FYI, my Spring '26 upper division course:

MALA (Master of Liberal Arts) 6050-

Philosophy in Recent American Fiction

Meeting Tuesdays at 6 pm, James Union Building 202

We'll all read three recent (=21st century) novels together – Richard Ford’s Be Mine, Richard

Powers’s Playground, and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of

God: A Work of Fiction – and each of us will additionally read and report on either a fourth novel

of your choice, or on a specific author’s life and works.*

*Some possible fourth choices (to name just a few), for individual reports:

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (2022) - Explores themes of memory, connection, and

digital surveillance. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (2024) - Considers whether the path to

emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past. Demon

Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2024) - a new take on Dickens's Copperfield. Flight

Behavior by Kingsolver (2012) - Explores climate change, ecological disruption, and

human responsibility. Any of the other Frank Bascombe novels by Richard Ford. Any other

Richard Powers novels. Any other Rebecca Goldstein novels…

For more information:

● phil.oliver@mtsu.edu

● https://prafmtsu.blogspot.com/

 

A.I. Threatens Our Ability to Understand the World

Artificial intelligence threatens students' most basic skills. If they lose their ability to understand what they read, will they lose their ability to think?

Last spring, it became clear to me that over half the students in my large general education lecture course had used artificial intelligence tools, contrary to my explicit policy, to write their final take-home exams. (Ironically, the course was titled Contemporary Moral Problems: The Value of Human Life.) I had asked them about some very recent work in philosophy, parts of which happened to share titles with entirely different ideas in medieval theology. You can guess which topics the students ended up "writing" about.

My situation was hardly unique — rampant A.I. cheating has been reported all over the country. But I felt a dread I struggled to express until a colleague articulated the problem in stark terms: "Our students are about to turn subcognitive," she said. That was it. At stake are not just specialized academic skills or refined habits of mind, but also the most basic form of cognitive fluency. To leave our students to their own devices — which is to say, to the devices of A.I. companies — is to deprive them of indispensable opportunities to develop their linguistic mastery, and with it their most elementary powers of thought. This means they will lack the means to understand the world they live in or navigate it effectively.

A.I. is hardly the first technology to threaten our cognitive competence. Long before ChatGPT, the smartphone and the calculator, Plato warned against writing itself. Literate human beings, he foresaw, would "not use their memories." He was not entirely wrong. But few of us would consider this a bad bargain. The written word is, after all, the condition for the survival of these very same Platonic dialogues across two millenniums. Great gifts have often come at great cost. The question is always: Are they worth it?

As students' A.I. use has proliferated, many of its critics focused on intellectual gifts. "A.I. undermines the human value of attention," the poet Meghan O'Rourke wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion, "and the individuality that flows from that." Other endangered powers: "unique human expression," "the slow deliberation of critical thinking" and the "ability to write original and interesting sentences." As a humanities professor, all these concerns resonate with me...

Anastasia Berg
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/opinion/ai-students-thinking-school-reading.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xE8.cbCE.xWI9KNbZ3YzQ&smid=em-share

"Have you tried taking long walks?"

Which Is Better, One Long Walk or Many Short Ones?

A new analysis is one of the first to study whether spacing steps out or consolidating them was linked to better health outcomes.

"...Those who regularly walked longer than 15 minutes were 80 percent less likely to die from any cause and nearly 70 percent less likely to develop cardiovascular disease over a roughly 10-year period, compared with those who got most of their steps in walks of five minutes or less..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/27/well/move/long-short-walks-health.html?smid=em-share

Crash and recovery

The stock market crash of 10.29.29, the ensuing economic depression, the New Deal—and then 🎶Happy days were here again…

HCR
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/october-28-2025?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios