At the beginning of most of my classes, I tell students that if someone says something that upsets you, assume they didn't mean to. Let's start with that. Evidence can mount up that that's not what's going on. But that should be our presumption in a college classroom..."
Kwame Anthony Appiah on Identity in an Age of Essentialism
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-professor-of-pluralism?bc_nonce=hpau1vwvsvdpy3tcevyy7a&cid=reg_wall_signup
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n22/terry-eagleton/pregnant-with-monsters
All the same, Gandalf, I cannot say enough about quiet nights, time for quiet, even solitude, and the wide, true world. One wonders what good anything would be to anyone if there were no good world to be in. And this Undying world! – where the shimmering, undulating hills of light melodize with the open expanse above and the fresh rushing rivers glide over the glassy rocks below, as if there were a glowing ageless twilight in each stone!"
Philosophy Now
Dec '25
Way better. Thanks, Rhys!
The AI farewell (below) is okay, but I want to leave you with WJ's near-terminal remarks to the gloomy historian and presidential scion Henry Adams (who thought the 2d law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy somehow entail the impossibility of human happiness). These words, delivered practically from his deathbed, capture a commitment to lifelong happiness I think we'd all do well to emulate.
To Henry Adams.Bad-Nauheim, June 17, 1910.
Dear Henry Adams,—I have been so "slim" since seeing you, and the baths here have so weakened my brain, that I have been unable to do any reading except trash, and have only just got round to finishing your "letter," which I had but half-read when I was with you at Paris. To tell the truth, it doesn't impress me at all, save by its wit and erudition; and I ask you whether an old man soon about to meet his Maker can hope to save himself from the consequences of his life by pointing to the wit and learning he has shown in treating a tragic subject. No, sir, you can't do it, can't impress God in that way. So far as our scientific conceptions go, it may be admitted that your Creator (and mine) started the universe with a certain amount of "energy" latent in it, and decreed that everything that should happen thereafter should be a result of parts of that energy falling to lower levels; raising other parts higher, to be sure, in so doing, but never in equivalent amount, owing to the constant radiation of unrecoverable warmth incidental to the process. It is customary for gentlemen to pretend to believe one another, and until some one hits upon a newer revolutionary concept (which may be tomorrow) all physicists must play the game by holding religiously to the above doctrine. It involves of course the ultimate cessation of all perceptible happening, and the end of human history. With this general conception as surrounding everything you say in your "letter," no one can find any fault—in the present stage of scientific conventions and fashions. But I protest against your interpretation of some of the specifications of the great statistical drift downwards of the original high-level energy. If, instead of criticizing what you seem to me to say, I express my own interpretation dogmatically, and leave you to make the comparison, it will doubtless conduce to brevity and economize recrimination.
To begin with, the amount of cosmic energy it costs to buy a certain distribution of fact which humanly we regard as precious, seems to me to be an altogether secondary matter as regards the question of history and progress. Certain arrangements of matter on the same energy-level are, from the point of view of man's appreciation, superior, while others are inferior. Physically a dinosaur's brain may show as much intensity of energy-exchange as a man's, but it can do infinitely fewer things, because as a force of detent it can only unlock the dinosaur's muscles, while the man's brain, by unlocking far feebler muscles, indirectly can by their means issue proclamations, write books, describe Chartres Cathedral, etc., and guide the energies of the shrinking sun into channels which never would have been entered otherwise—in short, make history. Therefore the man's brain and muscles are, from the point of view of the historian, the more important place of energy-exchange, small as this may be when measured in absolute physical units.
The "second law" is wholly irrelevant to "history"—save that it sets a terminus—for history is the course of things before that terminus, and all that the second law says is that, whatever the history, it must invest itself between that initial maximum and that terminal minimum of difference in energy-level. As the great irrigation-reservoir empties itself, the whole question for us is that of the distribution of its effects, of which rills to guide it into; and the size of the rills has nothing to do with their significance. Human cerebration is the most important rill we know of, and both the "capacity" and the "intensity" factor thereof may be treated as infinitesimal. Yet the filling of such rills would be cheaply bought by the waste of whole sums spent in getting a little of the down-flowing torrent to enter them. Just so of human institutions—their value has in strict theory nothing whatever to do with their energy-budget—being wholly a question of the form the energy flows through. Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the millennium—in other words a state in which a minimum of difference of energy-level might have its exchanges so skillfully canalisés that a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer." You don't believe this and I don't say I do. But I can find nothing in "Energetik" to conflict with its possibility. You seem to me not to discriminate, but to treat quantity and distribution of energy as if they formed one question.
There! that's pretty good for a brain after 18 Nauheim baths—so I won't write another line, nor ask you to reply to me. In case you can't help doing so, however, I will gratify you now by saying that I probably won't jaw back.—It was pleasant at Paris to hear your identically unchanged and "undegraded" voice after so many years of loss of solar energy. Yours ever truly,
WM. JAMES.
...Let my last word, then, speaking in the name of intellectual philosophy, be his word.–“There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told, and there is no advice to be given.–Farewell!”
-A Pluralistic Mystic
As this run of Philosophy of Happiness winds down once more, I hope you’ll pause—just for a moment—before the noise of the semester spills back in. Look over the path you’ve walked. You’ve wandered through Epicurus’s calm garden, felt Haybron’s steady analytic pressure, listened to Waldinger’s reminders that relationships shape the very texture of a life, and wrestled with Flanagan’s bracing insistence that “happiness” is too simple a word for creatures as complicated as we are. Burkeman’s 4000 Weeks surely left its mark as well—its gentle but unflinching reminder that time is both brutally finite and strangely generous when we stop pretending we can manage it like a spreadsheet.
Solnit, in Wanderlust, urged you to trust the wisdom of your own footsteps—to see that walking isn’t just locomotion but a clarifying act, a way of letting the mind catch up to the body. She reminded us that movement through the world can loosen the knots we carry, and that sometimes the surest route to understanding is the one taken at three miles an hour.
Rowlands, through The Word of Dog, asked you to look at happiness with a creaturely humility—to recognize that joy often emerges from simple, unguarded presence. His canine teachers, in their unpretentious intelligence, pushed back against our human habit of overthinking everything. They nudged us toward a happiness grounded in loyalty, companionship, and a kind of moral candor we too often forget we’re capable of.
And Bregman’s Moral Ambition refused to let happiness shrink to mere contentment. He challenged you to connect your well-being with the work you choose to do in the world—to imagine that purpose, decency, and impact are not luxuries but part of a fully realized life. If he was right, then happiness grows in proportion to the courage we muster to aim ourselves at something larger than our private satisfactions.
Taken together, these three "recommended" voices offered a quiet counter-current to the noise of the age: keep moving, stay present, and let your life lean toward the good. They’re not shortcuts—they’re invitations. And like everything else worth learning, they ask only that you continue, step by step, into whatever comes next.
None of these authors promised easy comfort. Why should they? The world has grown no softer in the past two years—its uncertainties still swirl, its crises still test our patience, our courage, and our hope. Yet you’ve seen that happiness isn’t about sealing yourself off from difficulty; it’s about turning toward life with a fuller kind of attention. A willingness to stay awake. A discipline of noticing the small good things, and making room for them.
William James once wrote that our faith in life is a kind of wager—an imaginative leap toward possibility when the evidence is mixed. That wager feels even more necessary now. So carry what you’ve learned into your own days: that meaning and joy aren’t delivered fully formed; they’re built, reclaimed, and sometimes salvaged. That connection matters. That your weeks—however many of them remain—are worth spending on things that let you become more fully yourself.
You don’t need to have it all figured out. You do need to keep going. Stay curious. Stay generous. Stay alert for delight, even in hard weather. And as you trace the semester’s arc, remember the other companions who walked beside us.
Farewell for now—and onward through the fog.
"It is far too easy to attribute failure to a generation, way too simplistic to blame those with the power to change society for the better who did not exercise such power. Most of the people I have worked with did the best they could under circumstances over which they felt little control. But the stark reality—as I have traced it in these pages and lived it over the past seventy-eight years—is that the richest and most powerful nation in modern history, the America that emerged victorious from World War II and whose democracy was a beacon for much of the rest of the world, is now coming up short. Trump and Trumpism are consequences, not causes. As I hope I've made clear, the causes have been growing for more than forty years. We could have addressed them. We did not. The responsibility to remedy this—to restore genuine opportunity, strengthen democracy, and contain the bullies—now falls to those who come after us. They include my wonderful, brilliant students."
— Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America by Robert B. Reich
PHIL 1030 – Introduction to Philosophy
3 credit hours Basic philosophical problems suggested by everyday experience integrated into a coherent philosophy of life through comparison with solutions offered by prominent philosophers.
PHIL 2110 – Elementary Logic & Critical Thinking
Principles of deductive and inductive reasoning, problem solving, and the analysis of arguments in everyday language.
Dr. Bombardi
PHIL 3150 - Ethics
Examines major ethical theories, the moral nature of human beings, and the meaning of good and right and applies ethical theories to resolving moral problems in personal and professional lives.
Dr. Johnson, Mr. Easley
PHIL 3170 - Ethics and Computing Technology
Exposes students to the fundamentals of ethical theory and familiarizes them with some of the practical, ethical, and legal issues with which they would have to deal as computer scientists.
Dr. Johnson
PHIL 3600 – Philosophy and Film
Examination of the cinematic expression of philosophical issues and development of philosophical issues in cinema.
Dr. Newman
PHIL 4020 – History of Modern Philosophy
The development of philosophical thought from Hobbes to Hegel. Offered spring only.
Dr. Bombardi
PHIL 4100 – Aesthetics
The nature of art, aesthetic experience, and artistic creation.
Dr. Magada-Ward
PHIL 4400 – Analytic Philosophy
Examines twentieth-century analytic movement including logical atomism, logical positivism, indeterminacy semantics, ordinary language philosophy.
Dr. Slack
PHIL 4550 – Philosophy of Mind
Classical philosophy of mind (emphases: the mind-body problem, theories of consciousness) and contemporary applications of philosophy to psychology (emphases: logic and cognition, emotion and reason, artificial intelligence).
Dr. Bombardi
MALA 6050 – Philosophy in Recent American Fiction [undergrads welcome to audit, meeting Tuesdays 6 pm]
We'll read three novels together (Richard Ford, Be Mine. Richard Powers, Playground. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 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 or on a specific author's life and works.
Dr. Oliver
"Imagine some mad scientists trying an experiment out on you. While you sleep, they hook you up to a Matrix-like experience machine without you realising it, then feed you preprogrammed experiences that resemble the kinds of experiences you would have had anyway if you’d lived your life in the real world. They leave you in the machine for the rest of your life. From the inside, nothing seems amiss; your subjective state is unchanged. Yet surely they have harmed you. By denying you a connection to reality – genuine achievements, real relationships with real loved ones – they have caused your life to go less well for you."
Final posting is now concluded, I hope you'll all read one another's posts and offer your insights. It ain't over 'til it's over, as a wise Yogi once said... See you Thursday for the exam.* jpo
These are just a few thoughts I had while reading Woman in the Dunes that wouldn't have fit it my time slot, so I apologize if it reads like a series of disparate verbal spasms. Without further ado:
Mind-Body Duality
The mind-body problem in Western philosophy has always struck me as a little ridiculous, and I think Abe's mode of philosophical analysis explains why. In Western philosophy, we have a tendency to look for a third thing (r) that connects two phenomenon - an external similarity or noumenon that leaves the two objects fundamentally unchanged by the acknowledgement of this connection but establishes a relationship between the two. In Abe's philosophical analysis, and Japanese philosophical analysis by extension, the two objects overlap and similarity (r) exists in that overlapping, which is to say that all connection is intrinsic, that all things are interrelated and cannot be separated without losing a piece of each object.
In the same way, the mind and body are discrete, true, but their interconnection is part of the definition of each, and as such they cannot be isolated. The mind would not be the mind without the body, just as the body would not be the body without the mind.
Coming Unstuck from the World
While the sand is dreadful, just as time is, and is a reminder of impermanence that gets everywhere, it too is inseparable from life. Humans are defined by not just their invention but also their limitation, and death is the limitation that births human experience. In Abe's world, sand equalizes everything, brings all injustices to a tepid end, forces one to face down life without distraction and attentively stare at death. In this world of sand, this ever present mirror that reflects the emptiness of all that appears before it, every ethic and all certainty crumbles before the 1/8mm grains - or, as Pascal would say, this sand puts reason in its place.
In this way, Woman in the Dunes almost reads like The Stranger: just like Meursault, Jumpei seems innocent in everything he does because the sand so thoroughly eliminates rationalism. No matter the crime he commits, it's impossible to hate this creature who pays his taxes, fills out insurance forms, boards the train every Sunday, goes to the theatre every Saturday, laughs like an idiot at newspaper comics and cries at the image of an oak tree's leaves fluttering in the wind.
Only, unlike The Stranger, Abe doesn't need to strip meaning from Jumpei's actions as Camus did. Where Camus expressed absurdity by showing man from behind a pane of glass - a comic philosophy - Jumpei simply exposes us to the world as it is, a plain world unadorned by nightly specials and concerts. The reader comes unstuck from the world by dint of this exposure alone. Even so, the sand is what ultimately drives Jumpei to embrace the woman; it is while dusting the sand from each other's bodies that they find companionship.
Home and Venereal Disease
In Zen Buddhism, the process of taking one's vows and committing to enlightenment is referred to by a single word. This term literally means "to leave one's home," and this is a useful way of understanding Abe's philosophy. In modern Japanese philosophy especially, I've noticed that one's ego, one's world of perspective, is also symbolized by "home." When Abe says that, knowing the meaningless of existence, we center our "compass on...home," he means that we necessarily take shelter in ourselves and our relationships with others to be insulated from the indifferent world. The village is, for Jumpei, also a kind of flight - his escape from the village is no different from his escape to the village after leaving his daily life. Both are characterized by a new perspective, by a hint of something more.
On the topic of venereal disease. I didn't bring this up in class because the term is a bit impolitic, but sex is a core feature of Abe's work and worth discussing. He writes that "venereal disease is the greatest proof against the existence of soap opera," essentially meaning that this transmitted, almost banal form of disease thwarts what people might call passion. The world always presents something that precludes us from letting ourselves go. Onward from this point, Abe presents sex invariably as a clinical, almost nightmarish affair, a disorienting sandstorm characterized by leaden muscles and headaches and sweat and orange. There is never a refuge from the sand, not even in sex, where the person that engages in the act is a different person from the one who existed before the act and is left behind afterward. Before the sands, sex is no different from the moths' flight toward light - illogical, spastic, impulsive. In a word, mad.
Radios, Mirrors, and Baths
Abe writes that "radios and mirrors must touch something at the core of humanity." Regarding radios, it isn't too difficult to understand. They enable us to communicate with others, to hear all about the world, to separate ourselves from the sand for a time by listening to something other than its hiss. Mirrors are a little trickier. For Abe, they are worthless without somebody else to perceive you in them.
I'll approach this from a few different angles. The first: there was a French psychoanalyst named Jacques Lacan who generated a great many theories during his lifetime. One of these is called the mirror stage. Without going into gratuitous detail, the gist is that we are introduced to alienation upon seeing ourselves in a mirror. We are forced to identify the specular image as "me," all the while feeling as if that "me" is not really "I." We are introduced to the separation between our ego and the actual "me" (the "me" in the world). However, while we make the claim that the thing in the mirror is "me" all by ourselves, Lacan asserts that another must be present to say "yes, that is you," that we require another to ratify our existence. Sartre asserts the same; we discover ourselves in the presence of the other, we are just as certain of them as we are of ourselves and we gain no intimate self-knowledge without the other as a mediator.
I was playing an old game recently, an RPG from 1998 called "Xenogears." In this game, one character asserts to another that sacrifice is always noble on the grounds that "two is one." When one sacrifices themselves for another's true happiness, even if some sadness is left behind, the act is itself ethical because there is no such thing as a single person. Hearkening back to relation being intrinsic rather than external, interrelationship fundamentally changes both of the relatives - in fact, this game goes on to claim that the "meaning of humanity is interconnection," and I'm inclined to agree. For Abe, too, this must be the case: the mirror has no meaning without a subject and an other.
Abe does also mention mirrors when talking about sex. He describes the "infinite consciousness of the sexual act," a person looking at another, a person looking at themselves looking at another, a person looking at another looking at themselves looking at another, an infinite sequence of mirrors, a dance of masks.
One of the most impactful sections of the story for me was the night Jumpei returned to the woman after his botched escape attempt. He feels everything is over, that this defeat is total, that his "dignity...shriveled up like the ash of a dragonfly's wing." Though most of Jumpei's despair in the novel was attached to rage and, through rage, hope, this despair is lucid and watery, devoid of anger and maybe even holding a little affection. Though he acknowledges that their tongues will be worn down in licking each other's wounds, it's no reason to stop the nursing, just as the inevitability of death was no reason for Rieux to quit administering medicine. And, amidst the sand, upon transience and impermanence, all the woman asks Jumpei is "shall I wash you?" He undresses without another word. It doesn't matter how profound the defeat is. Life always waits.
Responsibility
A staple of the existentialist novel is a discussion of responsibility - either its supremacy or, more commonly, its irrelevance, and very few books take a middle ground.
Abe commits to none of these three. He refuses to offer his reader any stability, any belief, any assurances, but his refusal is just so gentle. Unlike Kafka, though Abe never allows his characters to retreat, never leads them back home, he always affords them a clumsy step forward. To Abe, it seems that answers lie in taking a single step, and that the meaning of responsibility lies in this step. And while he says nothing about a moral obligation to be kind to others, the relentless humanity of his novel can't help but imply it. If two truly is one, then to harm another would be to gnaw off your arm. If everything is sand, then one is not obliged to hurt others, and in a philosophy where movement is everything (literally everything), committing to the unobliged movement of causing injury is nothing short of a sin. For Abe, one might say that responsibility is living, without illusions, among the sands.
In this sense, Jumpei is us - an unwitting thing plucked from the chamber of contingency and thrust into an unintelligible world without consent. A being cursed and blessed with the ability to wish beyond our means. An escapee, a fugitive, eventually forced to fathom the world from within it. An illusory creature that clutches the arm of a loved one in the boundless empty sea and, in that random, insignificant movement, becomes human.
And so, Jumpei's nasty hope, his extravagant hope, his hope for a world without sand for himself alone - because one wishing for the conditions of man to change must always wish all on their own - becomes a doctor. His hope is converted, through the sand, into a vessel of water from which every convict drinks.
*P.S. Nietzsche keeps talking about how people look to metaphysics for security and the world as substances for certitude which further confirms my suspicion that he's the white Shankara.
Four Thousand Weeks is an incredible amount of time, in fact as of yesterday I’ve only been alive for 1095.9 weeks which is just over a quarter of the time described and it feels odd to count a lot of the early years as I was developing and didn’t have the agency to make many of my own decisions. I wasn’t hit by the cultural pressure to maximize every moment because my moments were already maximized by the milestones one reaches in early childhood. Things like walking and speaking.
I’m lucky in a way that my parents have never stressed an attempt to c
ontrol time, they’ve always encouraged me to spend my time as I see fit. To do what I enjoy and simply push further than they are in life. My mom works incredibly hard for one main reason, so I don’t have to. She wants me to be able to focus on my schooling and my passions, and she works so hard for that to happen.
The most pressure I ever fell into where I felt like I really had to make the most of every second of every day was done to myself. My first two years of college I worked about 40 hours a week on top of being in school full time and attempting to hang out with my friends constantly. I felt like I had no time to waste, I had to get ahead, I had to make sure my moms effort wasn’t being wasted. And I felt myself burning out, my grades suffered for it, my work suffered for it, and I suffered for it.
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| Even on Relatively Fun Days I think you can see how tired I was |
I felt completely trapped by the idea of the grind the idea that I should be working that hard and that if I can just tank through that strife then I can come out the end way sooner and way better than I would have going at my own pace. But I couldn’t escape the burnout, I was moving too fast. Doing too much.
I felt like I sho
uld and it wasn’t until a very very long conversation with my mom that I determined that I don’t need to do that. Anytime I wasn’t actively grinding, when I was resting I Felt this guilt like I was being lazy or throwing away my moms effort. I had to take the time to make my plans as intentions and to embrace uncertainty. I had to make sure that I understood I needed to go at my own pace and that wanting certainty would only cause me anxiety. The most I can ever do is my best.
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| Absolutely Dead Eyes, and I loved my Job. |
I still struggle with this idea, the idea that I’m not doing by best because I have done so much before. And it took me a long time to come to terms with the idea that rest is a PART of me doing by best. And not something that stops me from doing my best.
I also had to remind myself that gaining life and world experience is just an important as a paycheck when I can swing it. Making the time after I’d saved up to take me and 2 friends to New York just because we could and to make the most of it and it’s something we talk about all the time. Being able to go on a beach vacation with my large friend group again just because we can, it improves life so much and by being happier and being rested my work quality is so much higher it’s insane.
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| We <3 NYC |
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| The picture of just the guys for the beach trip. #mogged |
I’ve had to accept that my time in this world is limited and that’s something I understand. I need to make the most of the time I do have, I think it’s something that I learned a lot from talking with my parents because as proud as they are of me I don’t believe they are truly happy. It hurts to know I’m somewhat of a cause of that because I do have higher ambition that they instilled into me to go beyond the station they became trapped in in life. They push me to go further however because of that their time is dedicated to work and rest. They work the entire day and return home exhausted and aren’t able to find much that they want to do with their time.
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| Me and Cutter for Halloween |
It took me time to get past the guilt or the idea that it is my fault that they do that. Not that they’ve ever even implied something like that but because of my own doubts being pushed forward that I began to feel that way. Now I make it a point to intentionally experience every moment of my life, even writing this out within the last hour of it being available because my friends decided they wanted to take me out last night for my birthday so I wasn’t able to get this completed any earlier.
My friends have been such a saving grace throughout, even when I was so tired they always encouraged my to go out with them. There's no one on the earth I love more than my friends, they are genuinely amazing and always have been.
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| The Happy Fits (My favorite band) Concert Recently |
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| A Cotton Office in New Orleans - Edgar Degas |
What Heidegger Can Teach Us About Time.docx