PHIL 3160 – Philosophy of Happiness

What is it, how can we best pursue it, why should we? Supporting the study of these and related questions at Middle Tennessee State University and beyond. "Examining the concept of human happiness and its application in everyday living as discussed since antiquity by philosophers, psychologists, writers, spiritual leaders, and contributors to pop culture."

Up@dawn 2.0

Wednesday, October 22, 2025

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).


OCT 

28 Flanagan 8-11 Final report presentations begin

30 Flanagan 12-15 -p.248. 


NOV

4 Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks Intro, ch1

6 Burkeman ch2 

11 Burkeman 3-6 

13 Burkeman 7-9

18 Burkeman 10-13

20 Burkeman 14, afterword, appendix -p.245

25 Conclude final report presentations OR tba

True cosmopolitans, living gracefully and at home in the cosmic forest

I mentioned Jennifer Michael Hecht's discussion of the Epicurean notion that we can either consider ourselves lost in the forest (or the cosmos), as it were, OR we can "hang a sign on a tree that says HOME" and resolve to make ourselves at home... wherever we find ourselves in the "vast and sprawling" universe. That would make us true cosmopolitans, citizens of the cosmos or (as Diogenes the Cynic said) the world.


Hecht:

"Where the Hellenistic philosophies excelled was the production of what could be called secular religions. They were based on self-help–oriented doctrines often borrowed from the earlier philosophers but interpreted and presented in a way that made more direct sense to a lot of people. I'm calling them graceful-life philosophies to distinguish them from other philosophy. Their goals were practical happiness, and they were not merely theoretical about it: they provided community, mediations, and events. In this they were more like religions, but they did not identify themselves as religions and they had remarkably little use for God or gods

The Hellenistic graceful-life philosophies had a lot in common. The experience of doubt in a heterogeneous, cosmopolitan world is a bit like being lost in a forest, unendingly beckoned by a thousand possible routes. At every juncture, with every step, one is confronted with alternative paths, so that the second-guessing becomes more infuriating even than the fact of being lost. After a direction is chosen, one is constantly met with another tree in one's path. What do you do if you come from a culture that had a powerful sense of home and local value, and now you are lost in something vast and sprawling, meaningless and strange? The stronger your belief in that half-remembered home, the more likely you are to panic, to grow claustrophobic among the trees and beneath their skyless canopy. Hellenistic men and women felt a desperate desire to get out of the seemingly endless, friendless woods. 

The graceful-life philosophies of this period were able to achieve an amazing rescue mission for the human being lost in the woods and bone-tired of searching for home. They did this by noticing that we could stop being lost if we were to just stop trying to get out of the forest. Instead, we could pick some blueberries, sit beneath a tree, and start describing how the sun-dappled forest floor shimmers in the breeze. The initial horror of being lost utterly disappears when you come to believe fully that there is no town out there, beyond the forest, to which you are headed. If there is no release, no going home, then this must be home, this shimmering instant replete with blueberries. Hang a sign that says HOME on a tree and you're done; just try to have a good time. Thus the cosmopolitan doubter looks back on earlier generations with bemused sympathy—they were mistaken—and looks upon believing contemporaries with real pity, as creatures scurrying through the forest, idiotically searching for a way out of the human condition. After all, it isn't so bad if you just settle in and accept a few difficult ideas from the get-go."

— Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson by Jennifer M. Hecht



Fwd: Presentation



---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Nicholas Bagwell <nwb2w@mtmail.mtsu.edu>
Date: Tue, Oct 21, 2025 at 5:15 PM
Subject: Presentation
To: Phil Oliver <Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu>


Me too, Laurie

Laurie Santos:
"I've been reflecting on gratitude lately, and today I'm especially grateful for the Yale undergrads I'm working with this semester.

Their curiosity and energy remind me why I love teaching. They push me to be better every day, and I'm so lucky to learn alongside them.

As I work on building my own gratitude practice (it's a process!), I'm reminded that taking a moment to appreciate the people around us can make all the difference."

Simone de Beauvoir on the art of growing older

How to keep life from becoming a parody of itself –

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/07/31/simone-de-beauvoir-coming-of-age/

Against doom-scrolling

Good advice from a pedaling & early-rising Brit: "…moving forward is what makes me happy"-

https://www.threads.com/@johnoverity/post/DQFDY1GE7zo?xmt=AQF00uC1kMs0mKXTHn5HEtGsRERAJGscXBjT4iqnItMTBg&slof=1

intentional presence

(A reflective species must work at being present… unlike 🐕🐕‍🦺)

Do you ever feel like time is moving faster?

Here's why.

When we're young, everything is new. The brain records each moment in rich detail, creating more "memory markers," which make time feel full.

As we get older, the brain gets efficient. It groups repeated experiences together—less novelty, fewer memories, and time seems to collapse.

The antidote?

Each act of intentional presence slows life down again.

—gratitude mind

Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Questions OCT 23

  1. The authors say proponents of the happiness agenda "only want to know" what? 97
  2. What kind of property, implied by the averaging and ranking of happiness scores, do the authors insist does not exist? 100-101
  3. By which metrics are Finland, The Netherlands, and Vietnam (respectively) the world's happiest countries? 103-4
  4. With what sorts of outcomes are positive and negative emotions correlated? 107 How do Anglophone and East Asian cultures differ on them? 114
  5. What did J.S. Mill say about people who are inappropriately happy? Do you agree? 110-11
  6. Who said "much laughter deadens the heart." Agree? 112-3
  7. What groups do the authors offer as examples of people who are happy "for the wrong reasons"? 117
  8. The cultural fit of emotions contributes to subjective well-being and to what? 122
  9. What did Edward Slingerland say about the Chinese concept of Tian? 138
  10. Chinese feminism is mostly about what? 145

Monday, October 20, 2025

Position Vacant: a Leader

However heartening the massive No Kings demonstrations last weekend, the problem is that there is no leadership and no stated programme for opposition to Trump. The United States is in danger, severe danger, and this rudderlessness is fatal. The wish that a handful of Republicans would stand up against Trump in Congress – which is all that it would take; but the staggering degree of cowardice infecting the GoP makes this currently a no-hoper – means that the will of the millions who took to the streets has to aggregate into a voice and a definite agenda for protecting the state and halting its precipitous slide into ugly authoritarian dictatorship.

Trump is out of control; neither reason nor decency, neither a sense of constitutional principle nor care for the American people, matters to him. His aggressive and brutal exercise of power, allowed by an utterly supine Congress and a lickspittle Supreme Court, has given him as much opportunity to do what he wants as any absolute monarch in history.

In the ideal, a constitution should be so ordered that no individual or clique can do what Trump is doing. But the US constitution has failed its people at last, so what its founders hoped it would do – prevent rule by a power-mad greedy unprincipled man – has left the US at Trump's feet. Even George III in the tea-party days did not have as much power as Trump is wielding – know your history, and compare; you will be shocked...

A.C. Grayling, continues

Facing facts, living well, grieving aptly, being happy

A mantra for the philosophy of self-help: feeling happy is not the same as living well. Philosophers make the case with “experience machines” that offer streams of blissful, meaningless illusion; but this is extravagant and metaphysically contested. Better to cite the mundane reality that, other things equal, we should feel bad when we hear bad news. This is what it means to face the facts, as we do when we grieve the lost; and it is part of living well...

Kieran Setiya (continues)

Friday, October 17, 2025

Jayden's "Against Happiness" presentation

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TMjcYE73j5EeeEHuxJKKEEwQ9yQw9Qj1i7TC1kQpOMk/edit

Questions OCT 21

  1. What alternative "businesses" might be appropriate to governments? Does this really have to be an exclusive disjunction? 43-4
  2. What do "philosophers call 'content'"? 50 What does this suggest to you about the relation between evidence and experience?
  3. It seems obvious that "it is one thing to be happy, another to be good" (51) but in Pragmatism William James asks if we can "keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart?" * COMMENT?
  4. "True happiness...might not involve feeling happy at all." 57 Which famous happiness author is referenced in connection with this claim? Do you think he'd entirely agree? At all seems excessive, doesn't it?
  5. Why do you think 40% of American teens suffer "persistent sadness and hopelessness"? What would you advise they do?
  6. What's special about age forty? 63
  7. Do we need a Ministry of Happiness? 73 (Or perhaps for the Future?)
  8. How does English differ from other languages in the relation of happy to happiness? 86
  9. What sort of happiness "involves no smiling or laughing"? 90 Do serenity and contentment not make you ever smile or laugh?
  10. About what is Haybron 100% clear? 94

*...truth is ONE SPECIES OF GOOD, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. THE TRUE IS THE NAME OF WHATEVER PROVES ITSELF TO BE GOOD IN THE WAY OF BELIEF, AND GOOD, TOO, FOR DEFINITE, ASSIGNABLE REASONS. Surely you must admit this, that if there were NO good for life in true ideas, or if the knowledge of them were positively disadvantageous and false ideas the only useful ones, then the current notion that truth is divine and precious, and its pursuit a duty, could never have grown up or become a dogma. In a world like that, our duty would be to SHUN truth, rather. But in this world, just as certain foods are not only agreeable to our taste, but good for our teeth, our stomach and our tissues; so certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also helpful in life's practical struggles. If there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really BETTER FOR US to believe in that idea, UNLESS, INDEED, BELIEF IN IT INCIDENTALLY CLASHED WITH OTHER GREATER VITAL BENEFITS.

'What would be better for us to believe'! This sounds very like a definition of truth. It comes very near to saying 'what we OUGHT to believe': and in THAT definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought we ever not to believe what it is BETTER FOR US to believe? And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart?And this, also from Pragmatism, is relevant to our discussion last time about different levels of discourse that shouldn't be "reduced" or "eliminated":

Common sense is BETTER for one sphere of life, science for another, philosophic criticism for a third; but whether either be TRUER absolutely, Heaven only knows. Just now, if I understand the matter rightly, we are witnessing a curious reversion to the common-sense way of looking at physical nature, in the philosophy of science favored by such men as Mach, Ostwald and Duhem. According to these teachers no hypothesis is truer than any other in the sense of being a more literal copy of reality. They are all but ways of talking on our part, to be compared solely from the point of view of their USE. The only literally true thing is REALITY; and the only reality we know is, for these logicians, sensible reality, the flux of our sensations and emotions as they pass.
==

Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy

As mentioned in class…
"Edward Bellamy's 1888 classic look at the future has been translated into over twenty languages and is the most widely read novel of its time. A young Boston gentleman is mysteriously transported from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century -- from a world of war and want to one of peace and plenty. This brilliant vision became the blueprint of utopia that stimulated some of the greatest thinkers of our age."  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/296977.Looking_Backward


An excerpt:

""To borrow a phrase which was often used in your day, we should not consider life worth living if we had to be surrounded by a population of ignorant, boorish, coarse, wholly uncultivated men and women, as was the plight of the few educated in your day. Is a man satisfied, merely because he is perfumed himself, to mingle with a malodorous crowd? Could he take more than a very limited satisfaction, even in a palatial apartment, if the windows on all four sides opened into stable yards? And yet just that was the situation of those considered most fortunate as to culture and refinement in your day. I know that the poor and ignorant envied the rich and cultured then; but to us the latter, living as they did, surrounded by squalor and brutishness, seem little better off than the former. The cultured man in your age was like one up to the neck in a nauseous bog solacing himself with a smelling bottle. You see, perhaps, now, how we look at this question of universal high education. No single thing is so important to every man as to have for neighbors intelligent, companionable persons. There is nothing, therefore, which the nation can do for him that will enhance so much his own happiness as to educate his neighbors. When it fails to do so, the value of his own education to him is reduced by half, and many of the tastes he has cultivated are made positive sources of pain.

"To educate some to the highest degree, and leave the mass wholly uncultivated, as you did, made the gap between them almost like that between different natural species, which have no means of communication. What could be more inhuman than this consequence of a partial enjoyment of education! Its universal and equal enjoyment leaves, indeed, the differences between men as to natural endowments as marked as in a state of nature, but the level of the lowest is vastly raised. Brutishness is eliminated. All have some inkling of the humanities, some appreciation of the things of the mind, and an admiration for the still higher culture they have fallen short of. They have become capable of receiving and imparting, in various degrees, but all in some measure, the pleasures and inspirations of a refined social life. The cultured society of the nineteenth century—what did it consist of but here and there a few microscopic oases in a vast, unbroken wilderness? The proportion of individuals capable of intellectual sympathies or refined intercourse, to the mass of their contemporaries, used to be so infinitesimal as to be in any broad view of humanity scarcely worth mentioning. One generation of the world to-day represents a greater volume of intellectual life than any five centuries ever did before.

"There is still another point I should mention in stating the grounds on which nothing less than the universality of the best education could now be tolerated," continued Dr. Leete, "and that is, the interest of the coming generation in having educated parents. To put the matter in a nutshell, there are three main grounds on which our educational system rests: first, the right of every man to the completest education the nation can give him on his own account, as necessary to his enjoyment of himself; second, the right of his fellow-citizens to have him educated, as necessary to their enjoyment of his society; third, the right of the unborn to be guaranteed an intelligent and refined parentage.""

  • “There is no such thing in a civilized society as self-support. In a state of society so barbarous as not even to know family cooperation, each individual may possibly support himself, though even then for a part of his life only; but from the moment that men begin to live together, and constitute even the rudest of society, self-support becomes impossible. As men grow more civilized, and the subdivision of occupations and services is carried out, a complex mutual dependence becomes the universal rule. Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support...”
  • “They were not serving the public interest, but their immediate personal interest, and it was nothing to them what the ultimate effect of their course on the general prosperity might be, if but they increased their own hoard, for these goods were their own, and the more they sold and the more they got for them, the greater their gain. The more wasteful the people were, the more articles they did not want which they could be induced to buy, the better for these sellers.”
  • “Moreover, the excessive individualism which then prevailed was inconsistent with much public spirit. What little wealth you had seems almost wholly to have been lavished in private luxury. Nowadays, on the contrary, there is no destination of the surplus wealth so popular as the adornment of the city, which all enjoy in equal degree.”
— Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (Illustrated) by Edward Bellamy

==
AND, there's a British version from 1890...


  • News from Nowhere (1890) is the best-known prose work of William Morris and the only significant English utopia to be written since Thomas More's. The novel describes the encounter between a visitor from the nineteenth century, William Guest, and a decentralized and humane socialist future. Set over a century after a revolutionary upheaval in 1952, these "Chapters from a Utopian Romance" recount his journey across London and up the Thames to Kelmscott Manor, Morris's own country house in Oxfordshire. Drawing on the work of John Ruskin and Karl Marx, Morris's book is not only an evocative statement of his egalitarian convictions but also a distinctive contribution to the utopian tradition. Morris's rejection of state socialism and his ambition to transform the relationship between humankind and the natural world, give News from Nowhere a particular resonance for modern readers. This text is based on the 1891 version, incorporating the extensive revisions made by Morris to the first edition.
  • "If others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream".
  • "It is real learning, knowledge cultivated for its own sake—the Art of Knowledge, in short—which is followed there, not the Commercial learning of the past".
  • "We are only the trustees for those who come after us".
  • "Have nothing in your house you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. Nothing useless can be truly beautiful".
  • "The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life".
 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/189746.News_from_Nowhere

 


Believing in "the continuous life of the world"

     "...and consequently we are happy."

"More akin to our way of looking at life was the spirit of the Middle Ages, to whom heaven and the life of the next world was such a reality, that it became to them a part of the life upon the earth; which accordingly they loved and adorned, in spite of the ascetic doctrines of their formal creed, which bade them contemn it.

But that also, with its assured belief in heaven and hell as two countries in which to live, has gone, and now we do, both in word and in deed, believe in the continuous life of the world of men, and as it were, add every day of that common life to the little stock of days which our own mere individual experience wins for us: and consequently we are happy."

News from Nowhere by William Morris

==
The conclusion of "News from Nowhere"—

"I lay in my bed in my house at dingy Hammersmith thinking about it all; and trying to consider if I was overwhelmed with despair at finding I had been dreaming a dream; and strange to say, I found that I was not so despairing.

Or indeed WAS it a dream? If so, why was I so conscious all along that I was really seeing all that new life from the outside, still wrapped up in the prejudices, the anxieties, the distrust of this time of doubt and struggle?

All along, though those friends were so real to me, I had been feeling as if I had no business amongst them: as though the time would come when they would reject me, and say, as Ellen's last mournful look seemed to say, "No, it will not do; you cannot be of us; you belong so entirely to the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you. Go back again, now you have seen us, and your outward eyes have learned that in spite of all the infallible maxims of your day there is yet a time of rest in store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship—but not before. Go back again, then, and while you live you will see all round you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives—men who hate life though they fear death. Go back and be the happier for having seen us, for having added a little hope to your struggle. Go on living while you may, striving, with whatsoever pain and labour needs must be, to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness."

Yes, surely! and if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream."

— News from Nowhere(Annotated & illustrated) by William Morris
https://a.co/0MkT3QW

Edward Bellamy would not be happy about this


Moral holidays

Following up our discussion of "moral holidays" as a way of reconciling the pursuit of happiness with the perennial fight against injustice and pursuit of meaning and purpose etc.--
...[For those who believe in a divine providence, or a rationalistic/Hegelian Absolute] we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business.

The universe is a system of which the individual members may relax their anxieties occasionally, in which the don't-care mood is also right for men, and moral holidays in order—that, if I mistake not, is part, at least, of what the Absolute is 'known-as,' that is the great difference in our particular experiences which his being true makes for us, that is part of his cash-value when he is pragmatically interpreted. Farther than that the ordinary lay-reader in philosophy who thinks favorably of absolute idealism does not venture to sharpen his conceptions. He can use the Absolute for so much, and so much is very precious. He is pained at hearing you speak incredulously of the Absolute, therefore, and disregards your criticisms because they deal with aspects of the conception that he fails to follow...

I said just now that what is better for us to believe is true UNLESS THE BELIEF INCIDENTALLY CLASHES WITH SOME OTHER VITAL BENEFIT. Now in real life what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours most liable to clash with? What indeed except the vital benefits yielded by OTHER BELIEFS when these prove incompatible with the first ones? In other words, the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of self-preservation and of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them. My belief in the Absolute, based on the good it does me, must run the gauntlet of all my other beliefs. Grant that it may be true in giving me a moral holiday. Nevertheless, as I conceive it,—and let me speak now confidentially, as it were, and merely in my own private person,—it clashes with other truths of mine whose benefits I hate to give up on its account. It happens to be associated with a kind of logic of which I am the enemy, I find that it entangles me in metaphysical paradoxes that are inacceptable, etc., etc.. But as I have enough trouble in life already without adding the trouble of carrying these intellectual inconsistencies, I personally just give up the Absolute. I just TAKE my moral holidays; or else as a professional philosopher, I try to justify them by some other principle. --William James, Pragmatism II
==  ==
...let me explain why 'moral holidays' were the only gift of the absolute which I picked out for emphasis. I was primarily concerned in my lectures with contrasting the belief that the world is still in process of making with the belief that there is an 'eternal' edition of it ready-made and complete. The former, or 'pluralistic' belief, was the one that my pragmatism favored...

...If, as pluralists, we grant ourselves moral holidays, they can only be provisional breathing-spells, intended to refresh us for the morrow's fight...

...The pragmatism or pluralism which I defend has to fall back on a certain ultimate hardihood, a certain willingness to live without assurances or guarantees. To minds thus willing to live on possibilities that are not certainties, quietistic religion, sure of salvation any how, has a slight flavor of fatty degeneration about it which has caused it to be looked askance on, even in the church... --William James, The Meaning of Truth 11

==

John Lachs at Harvard, 2014--

Saints everywhere

Too much talk

"What an awful trade that of professor is--paid to talk, talk, talk!

It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words."

https://bsky.app/profile/wjsociety.bsky.social/post/3m3fauk4ids2r

Portion control: too much of a good thing is bad

Ever notice how your favorite song starts feeling less special after you've played it on repeat?

When we consume good things constantly, our brains quickly adapt and the enjoyment fades. But there's a simple way to reset this process.

You can use the latest psychprotip from my Yale happiness class: Interrupt your consumption of good stuff.

Laurie Santos https://www.threads.com/@lauriesantosofficial/post/DP4ja8YDWzY?xmt=AQF0QTuwOPVwLWr1Q90y9i5k0egLqBlHUKgRCgpbbNxSgA&slof=1

Wednesday, October 15, 2025

Confusing eudaimonia with “self-care and personal pleasure”

I cannot tell you how depressing I find it that this new study about human values reduces the Greek concept of eudaimonia, or complete happiness, to self-care and personal pleasure. Are you kidding me? The Greek word means human flourishing in the sense of fully activating our ability to live well-- to have healthy stable lives where we are materially secure, act justly in community, enjoy friendships that help us be better people, and contribute to the safety and happiness of our society.

Head buried in hands. Calling it quits for the day.
—Danielle Allen

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/is-gen-z-unemployable-288d2ec9?st=VxHViF

https://substack.com/@daniellerenovator/note/c-159518935?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

Tuesday, October 14, 2025

Questions OCT 16

  1. How did the "Against Happiness" authors/editors begin the project of this book? Of what is it an assessment? What are their goals?
  2. Do you agree with Emerson about the purpose of life?
  3. Why should we be humble about happiness as a goal? What's WEIRD? 3-4
  4. What's missing from the way social sciences currently conceive of happiness? 10-11
  5. What concept is "much more capacious" than happiness? 16 Do you agree that "there is no kind of happiness that everyone wants"? 17
  6. In April 2022 the CDC reported what about teens? 30 Does this surprise or sadden you? What can be done about it?
  7. What kind of happiness does Martin Seligman promote? 32
  8. Can Callicles be happy? 36
  9. What's the meta-happiness paradox? 41

Awe
…is "the absence of self-preoccupation."

This is especially critical in the age of social media. "We are at this cultural moment of narcissism and self-shame and criticism and entitlement; awe gets us out of that," Dr. Keltner said. It does this by helping us get out of our own heads and "realize our place in the larger context, our communities," he explained.

The good news? Awe is something you can develop, with practice. Here's how…

William James Society autumn newsletter

 Autumn 2025 Newsletter

President’s Message from Dr. Phil Oliver

LISTEN (audio file on Google Docs)

Autumnal season’s greetings, fellow friends of William James.

I first began to think of WJ in casually-friendly terms back in the Fall of my first year of grad school at Vanderbilt in the ’80s. One of my new mentors, the late John Compton (accurately described by a classmate as the very epitome of our Platonic Idea of a philosophy Prof), sidled up to me in the campus bookstore one afternoon and remarked of the text I happened at that moment to be browsing–it was John J. McDermott’s Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition– “Willy James!”
...

Sunday, October 12, 2025

Purposeful

https://www.threads.com/@wisdomnotess_/post/DPoL_3sAbT3?xmt=AQF0JBx7CuNMxQhDbAFkLIwMkUdTMYapSSNU3IJO_uzX8w&slof=1

The ❤️ of Dog

"It came to me that every time I lose a dog, they take a piece of my heart with them and every new dog who comes into my life gifts me with a piece of their heart. If I live long enough, all the components of my heart will be dog and I will become as generous and loving as they are". - Diane Keaton 🩶

https://www.threads.com/@janecataniastylist/post/DPsfms1k0NK?xmt=AQF0z1IlFvN81F7-m7Rn8idYWV0DIKzNOPib0uGO6VXxvg&slof=1

(also remembering what she (Mary) said about her dachshund in Manhattan*…)

Saturday, October 11, 2025

Think like a dog?

"Dogs don't dwell on the past or stress about the future. They don't expect the worst, become filled with regret, or exaggerate the consequences of their actions. They live in the moment. Here's what happens when we think more like our canine friends."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-minute-therapist/202509/think-like-a-dog

For humans, though, some moments are capacious enough to include thought of past and future. They have their place, and their point.So have the moments of pure presence. Thinking the right thoughts at the right time (and knowing when to stop thinking): that's the challenge.

Wednesday, October 8, 2025

Pilgrimage

[On Substack...]

 Since Jacob's and Avery's reports yesterday on Wanderlust, and Gary's mention of his recent trip to his old alma mater, I've been thinking of my own periodic "pilgrimages" to Columbia MO where I was an undergrad in the '70s...

The first house I lived in, on Westmount, partly constructed of materials salvaged from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair:

 

On the Mizzou campus:
 

You can go home again, Thomas Wolfe. Happily.

Also thinking about the long journey from our earliest steps to another world. We're still taking baby steps, who knows how far we can go?

  
"We humans have set foot on another world in a place called the Sea of Tranquility, an astonishing achievement for creatures such as we, whose earliest footsteps three and one-half million years old are preserved in the volcanic ash of east Africa. We have walked far." Carl Sagan, Cosmos

And the further we walk, the more we feel at home.

Also: the guy I mentioned who recently finished his walk across America for men's mental health: Tim Perreira.

And: MTSU's convocation speaker a few years ago did his own walk across America and wrote about it in Walking to Listen, Andrew Forsthoefel.

==

Is this also "pilgrimage"?

The Simple Pleasure of a Long Walk and a Fun Meal
Charlotte Ward just wanted to share photos with family and friends, but she has built a community of people documenting their journeys, and the food they eat afterward.

The concept behind Charlotte Ward’s X account is simple. Every day, Ms. Ward, 22, goes for a long walk, usually through the lush woods near her home in Yorkshire, England, before she sits down for dinner. And every night she posts three photos of the scenery from her walk along with a photo of what she ate.

Sometimes she heads to the Yorkshire Dales to hike the highlands, other days she traverses the streets of London, but the result is always the same: three photos of the walk, and one of what she ate. It has been a perfect recipe for her growing audience.

Since starting her @hikingshawty account in April 2024, Ms. Ward has amassed more than 170,000 followers and has built an audience of nearly 200,000 in an X community she created called “today i walked…” Many of the people who come across her posts express their desire to live a quieter life like hers, spending time in nature and baking cakes from scratch.

For Ms. Ward, who originally started her account to share photos of her hikes with friends, the attention has been surprising... (continues)

Nietzsche on walking and creativity

"The best thoughts come while walking…"

https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/12/12/nietzsche-walking/

A good life

What makes a good life – revelatory learnings from Harvard's 75-year study of human happiness

https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/08/23/harvard-grant-study-robert-waldinger-ted/

Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Fwd: Avery Eaton - Phil of Happiness PP



---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Avery Eaton <aae3n@mtmail.mtsu.edu>
Date: Tue, Oct 7, 2025 at 4:02 PM
Subject: Avery Eaton - Phil of Happiness PP
To: Phil Oliver <Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu>


Hello Prof here is my power point for my presentation!

The .pptx File is prefered! 


Fwd: Fw: [EXTERNAL] Presentation

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0?ui=2&ik=1ae14f9128&attid=0.1&permmsgid=msg-a:r-1309311798004922385&th=199bf902f91a3689&view=att&disp=safe&realattid=199bf8f424bccd248e31&zw

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Carol Edwards <cde2i@mtmail.mtsu.edu>
Date: Mon, Oct 6, 2025 at 8:22 PM
Subject: Fw: [EXTERNAL] Presentation
To: Phil Oliver <Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu>

Monday, October 6, 2025

Harvard Students Skip Class and Still Get High Grades, Faculty Say

(Are MTSU students more studious than Harvard's?)

Many students don't do the reading and don't speak up in class, according to a report. Now, professors are trying to change a campus culture they say hurts achievement and stifles speech.

Harvard University is one of the most difficult schools to gain admission to, with the school turning away some 97 percent of applicants every year.

But once they get in, many of its students skip class and fail to do the reading, according to the Classroom Social Compact Committee, a group of seven faculty members that produced a report on Harvard's classroom culture that has been fueling debate since it was released in January.

When they do show up for class, they are focused on their devices, and are reluctant to speak out. Sometimes it is because they are afraid of sharing ideas that others will disagree with. But often, they have not read enough of the homework to make a meaningful contribution, the report continued.

Rampant grade inflation allows them to coast through anyway, it concluded.

That means many students graduate without having benefited from talking very much with their teachers and peers, and they stay stuck in ideological bubbles, unwilling or unable to engage with challenging ideas...


https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/us/harvard-students-absenteeism.html?smid=em-share

How to Save a Book Festival

The Southern Festival of Books in Nashville has been one of the highlights of October for me for decades. Trump's & Elon's DOGE tried to kill it. The owner of my favorite bookstore helped save it. It'll be back weekend after next. Thank goodness!

"… a festival where tens of thousands of people come together to celebrate books — books of all kinds, for all ages — tells us something about the power of storytelling. Especially in a time of terrible fear and sorrow and vitriol, stories remind us of who we are and of how we belong to one another.

It's too soon to say how long the public arts and humanities, among so many other facets of the public good that are now in profound peril, will survive. Will people part with enough $20 bills to save them forever? Will philanthropic organizations support endangered cultural assets indefinitely? Will a lawsuit by the Federation of State Humanities Councils restore funding until the federal budgeting process returns to normal?

I don't know the answer to any of these questions. What I do know is that we need the humanities now, perhaps more than we have ever needed them, because we live in a time when so many of us have forgotten this crucial truth: We are a fangless, clawless, furless species, and we survive only in community."
— Margaret Renkl 

The 37th annual Southern Festival of Books will be held in Nashville Oct. 18-19. As always, it is free and open to the public.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/opinion/how-to-save-a-book-festival.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare



All the lonely people

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxbYPk1MIyw

In 1966, Paul McCartney famously sang of “all the lonely people,” wondering aloud where they come from. Nearly six decades later, their numbers seem only to have increased; as for their origin, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and Zen priest Robert Waldinger has made it a longtime professional concern. “Starting in the nineteen fifties, and going all the way through to today, we know that people have been less and less invested in other people,” he says in the Big Think video above. “In some studies, as many as 60 percent of people will say that they feel lonely much of the time,” a feeling “pervasive across the world, across all age groups, all income groups, all demographics.” (continues)

Banned Books Week

On this first day of Banned Books Week, we consider again the importance of libraries.

https://bit.ly/4lAz2M0

Sunday, October 5, 2025

“rather than feel happy”

False dichotomy from Japan's prospective PM:


Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
👣Solvitur ambulando
💭Sapere aude

Jane’s last message of hope

And who she'd put on Elon's 🚀

https://www.threads.com/@ginnanekaren/post/DPbBOARjy96?xmt=AQF07zP0Bi1aSOOQQiM0f8xGYJ0Wty731CZb-9R9nZO_iw&slof=1

Cosmic perspective

“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”

"It's the birthday of American astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958), who once said, "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you." Tyson is the host of the popular shows Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and Star Talk. He grew up in the Bronx and remembers visiting the Hayden Planetarium's Sky Theatre on a school field trip, which inspired his interest in astronomy and science. He said, "So strong was that imprint [of the night sky] that I'm certain that I had no choice in the matter, that in fact, the universe called me." He's now the director of the Planetarium. Tyson's television shows, podcasts, and books have inspired millions of people to see the universe with new eyes.

He's so popular that he has appeared as himself in television shows and movies like The Big Bang Theory, The Simpsons, and Zoolander 2. He's also been featured as himself in comic books like Action Comics #14, in which he discusses Superman's home planet of Krypton.

On the importance of explaining complex science to the layman, Tyson once said: "Humans want to think that they're the center of the world. Children think this way. Then you come into adulthood and it's a little disappointing to learn that's not the case. We still think of events happening locally, in our lifetimes, as significant in a way that is out of proportion with reality. This can be depressing to some people, if you come into it with a high ego. If you go into it with no ego at all, you realize that you can be special not for being different, but for being a participant in life on Earth. That participation, if you're open to it, can be quite illuminating, even sort of spiritually uplifting. You're a part of all of life on Earth. Earth is part of all the planets that exist in the galaxy. The galaxy is part of an entire system of the universe."
Tyson's books include Death by Black Hole (2007) and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (2017)." WA
==
Elsewhere NdT has characterized the cosmic perspective this way:
  • The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it’s not solely the province of the scientist. The cosmic perspective belongs to everyone.
  • The cosmic perspective is humble.
  • The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious.
  • The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small.
  • The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we’re told.
  • The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place.
  • The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote, but a precious mote and, for the moment, the only home we have.
  • The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them.
  • The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and sex.
  • The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave—an indication that perhaps flag waving and space exploration do not mix.
  • The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.
And see https://rationalitymt.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-varieties-of-scientific-experience.html

Pale Blue Dot, PBD text, PBD video, Who Speaks For Earth video, Cosmos, Cosmic Connection...Sagan@dawn...Contact opening scene... and Carl's & Ann's daughter Sasha's For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

NdT:
"We won the lottery"
    -Like Dawkins said, "we are the lucky ones... we privileged few." And like Sagan said... 




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO5FwsblpT8&t=20s

Friday, October 3, 2025

Questions OCT 7

Audio review for Thursday's exam...

You have enough questions to think about this week. Today I'll just add: 
  1. What did Madeleine L'Engle say it is to be alive? Do you agree? Can you illustrate with personal examples?
  2. What % of households lately have no married inhabitants? And why do you think that is? 166
  3. What is "ballroom culture," and what is its name for a "social sanctuary" for those who've been rejected by their families of origin? Why do we have so many dysfunctional and non-supportive families in this country? Again, sharing personal examples can be therapeutic and insightful. 202
  4. What are some powerful ways to connect with our immediate families? Have you had any firsthand experience with any? 220

"living on small sarcasms"

Is "living on small sarcasms" descriptive of the current generation of students? Or maybe of every generation? Is there a general fear of being perceived as too serious or solemn?

"Confronting what he considered reactionary arguments that shortening the college’s course would “lower the standard of its degree” and lead to “a general degradation of the higher education in America,” James argued the opposite case, that speeding up college was a way to combat the “listlessness, apathy, dawdling, sauntering, the smoking of cigarettes and living on small sarcasms, the ‘Harvard indifference,’ in short, of which outsiders have so frequently complained.” James thought this apathetic attitude was “the direct fruit of keeping these men too long from contact with the world of affairs.”"

"William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson: https://a.co/77ZUk1p


Family guy
Hope they'll say about me what Linda said about her dad Neal…

"It's not only older generations whose memories are valuable. If you have siblings, their memories of growing up can enrich your own. If your kids are grown, asking them what they remember about their childhood can give you a new perspective on them and on your own experiences as a parent. Shared memories deepen connections.

The Harvard Study, in a way, is a massive experiment in this kind of family inquiry. When we open up an individual file and get that nostalgic feeling of looking through a family photo album, we do it in the spirit of investigation. But you don't need grant funding and the support of an academic institution to mine the treasures that are there in your own family. It takes only curiosity and time. You might find some surprises, good and bad, that enrich your understanding of your family.

Neal McCarthy's kids took advantage of his memory in this way, and had several conversations with their father about his early life. He didn't tell them everything—not as much, it seems, as he told the Harvard Study—but he told them enough for them to know that he'd had both some great times and some incredibly hard times.

In the end, the most important thing was something they saw firsthand: when he formed a family of his own, he didn't run from challenges, he didn't perpetuate the things that made his childhood hard, and he gave his family the gift of his steady presence. Even if he made mistakes, he didn't turn away from them. He was there. When asked what advice she would give to the future generation, his daughter Linda gave an answer inspired by her father, telling the Study, "I'd just say never forget what this life is truly about. It's not about how much money you make. That's what I learned from my dad. It's about the person he was to me, to my child, my sisters and my brother, his seven grandchildren. If I can be half that I'll be all right.""

The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness by Robert J. Waldinger, Marc Schulz Ph.D


Open Your Eyes
"We are the lucky ones…" —Richard Dawkins https://youtu.be/58HlO3eQQpc?si=6jir0ULgm3UFZ3Ly



“We need to fight isolation”

"…I read Anne Frank's diary when I was in high school in Minnesota and I still remember being stunned by 'In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.'

But then I have to google it to get what followed it: "I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again."

It still moves me, that a 15-year-old girl locked with her family in an attic in Amsterdam could write such a thing.

Here in America we're locked in our own attics of social media, isolation, working from home, driving the freeways. "People are good at heart" is the basis of civil democracy; it's what allows us to speak decently to those who disagree with us. And we feel this goodness when we walk down the street or go to a ball game or a Taylor Swift concert. We need to fight isolation with festivals, parades, public events, door-to-door campaigning..." Garrison Keillor

https://open.substack.com/pub/garrisonkeillor/p/what-endures-is-decency-believe-me?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

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 t...