Students and alumni set aside rivalries at the 141st Harvard-Yale football game on Saturday to summon support against attacks on higher education under the Trump administration.
..“Do you want to stand up for academic freedom and the First Amendment?” Ms. Schwartz asked a group of students, shouting above a cacophony of portable sound systems, each playing songs with different beats. “How would you feel about doing that?”
... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/us/politics/yale-harvard-football-trump.html?smid=em-share
Concluding 4,000 Weeks... See audio review link for Dec. 2 exam below... Final draft of final report blogpost due Dec.5. Don't forget to add links etc.*
hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.Solnit may be right that action is impossible without hope: you cannot strive for what you care about, when success is not assured, without hoping to succeed or at least make progress. This is where the myth of hope's value starts. Hope is a precondition of what matters: the pursuit of meaningful change…"
The problem is that hope can be like clutching a lottery ticket and it needn't shove you out the door: as I know too well, you can hope intently as you stretch out on the sofa watching the news. The call for action comes from somewhere else.
By celebrating World Philosophy Day each year, on the third Thursday of November, UNESCO underlines the enduring value of philosophy for the development of human thought, for each culture and for each individual.
Philosophy is an inspiring discipline as well as an everyday practice that can transform societies. By enabling to discover the diversity of the intellectual currents in the world, philosophy stimulates intercultural dialogue. By awakening minds to the exercise of thinking and the reasoned confrontation of opinions, philosophy helps to build a more tolerant, more respectful society. It thus helps to understand and respond to major contemporary challenges by creating the intellectual conditions for change...
Have you found Burkeman's message of life's finitude, brevity, and imperfectability helpful, in thinking about what it might mean to live a happy, purposeful, meaningful, good life? How would you summarize that message and its practical application to your life?
"…if you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that being you get—you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time. (Or as the flow of time, a Heideggerian might say.) From an everyday standpoint, the fact that life is finite feels like a terrible insult, "a sort of personal affront, a taking-away of one's time," in the words of one scholar. There you were, planning to live on forever—as the old Woody Allen line has it, not in the hearts of your countrymen, but in your apartment—but now here comes mortality, to steal away the life that was rightfully yours.
Yet, on reflection, there's something very entitled about this attitude. Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality the outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it's so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it's so many more weeks than if you had never been born? Surely only somebody who'd failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take their own being as such a given—as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe it's not that you've been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it's almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all."
— Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis... (continues)
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.
UPDATE Nov 5 10: We still need at least a couple of you who've not yet requested a date to go before Nov 25.
OCT
28 Flanagan 8-11 Final report presentations begin
30 Flanagan 12-15 -p.248.
NOV
4 Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks Intro, ch1 - Jonathan
6 Burkeman ch2 - Amanda, Rhys
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, Basil
25 Conclude final report presentations - Air Mark, Moral Ambition ch1;
"There's an early memory from my childhood, representative of its peak happiness. I'm on a simple, iron child's seat on my father's bike. He's just picked me up from kindergarten and is taking me home through the forest on the way to our house. It is a spectacularly fluorescent Danish spring, and we're travelling through woodland illuminated, from above, by the light-green foliage of the tall beeches only just coming into soft leaves and, from below, by snow-white forest anemones spreading around us in dense, endless carpets.
Bringing this scene to my mind, I don't 'see' anything. I have aphantasia, the neurological condition of being unable to visualise imagery, also described as the absence of the 'mind's eye'. Still, I know that those visual elements were there; they're stored in my mind as knowledge and concepts; and I have particular and strong emotional responses to the thought of the light and colours.
Until very recently, I had always assumed that my experience of reality was typical, and that being able to see only things that are actually there – present and visible in the external surroundings – was normal. But discovering that I have aphantasia brought to my awareness differences in perception and self-conception between me and others that I'd always registered on some level, and felt disturbed by, but had never consciously thought about
.
The further I've delved into research on this neurological anomaly, the more extensive its explanatory reach has proven. It has been like finding the master key to my life and personality, and has significantly deepened my understanding of my psychology, my philosophical views, and my aesthetic and literary preferences…"
Dr. Montero is a philosophy professor who writes on mind, body and consciousness.
