Experience & Rationality: Syllabus, Summer 2022 (under construction)

Tuesday, May 10, 2022

Syllabus, Summer 2022 (under construction)

MALA 6050 (crn 51937) Rationality w/ Phil Oliver web assist Tuesdays 6-9 pm in JUB 202 B-term 6 weeks 6/29-8/7.

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu -- 300 James Union Building (JUB)

TEXT: Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (R)

WEEKLY ASSIGNMENT: Prior to class, read the assigned chapters, listen to the assigned podcasts, and post at least two comments in response to discussion questions posed by me, your classmates, or yourself; and post as many questions for discussion as you can come up with. (If you post additional comments and questions you can indicate that on our Scorecard, which I'll explain in class... extra participation is the grade tie-breaker.)

REPORT: Present a report on one of the weekly report topics (to be announced).

FINAL POST: Summarize your takeaway from the course, revisiting the questions we'll begin with on Jy 5 (What does rationality mean to you? Do you consider yourself rational? Do you generally intend to be rational? Does it matter to you that some others do not? Why does rationality matter?) and noting any changes or refinements in your thinking.

GRADES: 50% Participation (attendance, weekly assignments), 25% REPORT, 25% FINAL POST.

Tue July 5. R preface, ch1-2 (How Rational an Animal? Rationality and Irrationality). *LISTEN 1-2. Introducing the course and one another. Who are you? Why are you here? What does rationality mean to you? Do you consider yourself rational? Do you generally intend to be rational? Does it matter to you that some others do not? Why does rationality matter? Post your responses in the comments space below OR in an original author post.
Tue July 12. R 3-4 (Logic and Critical Thinking, Probability and Randomness). *LISTEN 3-4. REPORT(S) tba
Tue July 19. R 5-6 (Beliefs and Evidence, Risk and Reward). *LISTEN 5-6. REPORT(S) tba
Tue July 26. R 7-8 (Hits and False Alarms, Self and Others). *LISTEN 7-8. REPORT(S) tba
Tue Aug 2. R 9-11 (Correlation and Causation... Why Rationality Matters). *LISTEN 9-11. REPORT(S) tba
Fri Aug 5. Final post due. *LISTEN 12-13.

*LISTEN-

Think With Pinker podcast (BBC 4)...

Welcome to Think with Pinker. Professor Steven Pinker’s guide to thinking better.

Think Twice. Can formulas predict how well an athlete will perform?
Methinks it is a weasel. Looking for patterns in the random kaleidoscope of everyday experiences can be dangerous.
Nudges and noise. Why the way we think makes us vulnerable to bad decision making, and what to do about it.
In touch with reality. Why do so many of us believe in quackery and conspiracy?
Don’t expect a zebra. Why medical students are advised if you hear hoofbeats behind you, don't expect a zebra
You Can’t Think That! Are some thoughts too evil to think?
Future you. Should we eat, drink and be merry or make sacrifices now to benefit our future selves?
The Climate Game. How flaws in the way we think make it harder to tackle climate change.
Rational soothsaying. Why making predictions can be hard, especially about the future.
Sentence first, verdict afterwards. Life and death decisions in the courtroom.
Headlines and trendlines. How we can stop the news distorting our understanding of the world.
Being right. Why getting it right might mean admitting you're wrong.

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Coming Fall 2022/Spring 2023

MALA 6010-Foundations of Liberal Arts II: "Experience"... Thursdays 6–9 pm, WPS 310... Oliver's block SEP 1, SEP 8. "In the western philosophical tradition, Empiricists like John Locke and David Hume historically defended experience as the touchstone of all knowledge and action. American philosopher William James (1842-1910) called himself a Radical Empiricist, but also on occasion defended experience (including religious experience) "against philosophy." In our time, working scientists sometimes express disdain for both philosophy and religion. But the late astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan (of "Cosmos" and the "pale blue dot") had great respect for both, at least in their better representations. In this block we'll explore ways in which philosophical, religious, and scientific experience support and complement (as well as diverge from) one another." NOTE: This block previews MALA 6050, Spg '23: Experience. Tuesdays 6 pm.

Experience

“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt... “Accept what life offers you and try to drink from every cup. All wines should be tasted; some should only be sipped, but with others, drink the whole bottle.” ― Paulo Coelho, Brida... “Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.” ― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture... “We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.” ― John Dewey... “Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.” ― Oscar Wilde

"my religious act"

The problem I have set myself is a hard one: first, to defend (against all the prejudices of my "class") "experience" against "philosophy" as being the real backbone of the world's religious life—I mean prayer, guidance, and all that sort of thing immediately and privately felt, as against high and noble general views of our destiny and the world's meaning; and second, to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean its creeds and theories), yet the life of it as a whole is mankind's most important function. A task well-nigh impossible, I fear, and in which I shall fail; but to attempt it is my religious act... William James, To Miss Frances R. Morse. Apr 12 1900

Darwin's "grandeur"

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. "On the Origin of Species," conclusion (1st edition, 1859)

Love the questions, exclude no experience

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day... Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

"critical faculties in decline"

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or my grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance." Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Star-stuff

"You are here" - That's here, that's home, that's us... "The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." == "Two billion years ago, our ancestors were microbes; a half-billion years ago, fish, a hundred million years ago, something like mice; then million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening." == “We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.” Carl Sagan

The experience of connection: "we saw each other"

"We lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.” ― Ann Druyan

BIO--Phil Oliver

BIO. The author of William James's Springs of Delight: The Return to Life, Phil Oliver specializes in the American philosophical tradition with supporting interests in applied ethics (particularly Bioethics and Environmental Ethics), Anglo-American literature, history, humanism, naturalism, science and exploration, peripatetic ("walking & talking") philosophy, baseball, cycling, swimming, the pursuit of happiness, and the perpetual dawn of day. One of his favorite MTSU courses is The Philosophy of Happiness. He is academic advisor for minors in American Culture (American Studies). You can follow him on Mastodon (@osopher@c.im) and on his blogsite Up@dawn but of course, as Immaneul Kant and Monty Python's Brian Cohen agreed: You don't have to follow anybody. "Sapere aude," have the courage to think for yourself. But not by yourself. Good philosophy collaborates and converses.

Previously

Aug 2: R 9-11... *LISTEN 9-12... REPORTS: Abigail, Correlation & causation; Gary, Motivated reasoning. (Report presentations should be at least 10-15 minutes plus discussion--reporters, give us a couple of discussion questions to kick us off)... JOIN US AT THE BOULEVARD BEFORE CLASS at 4:30, if you like... Post an EARLY DRAFT of your final BLOG POST (due Aug 5) if you'd like potentially-consructive feedback... COURSE EVALUATIONS Jy 29 thru Aug 4... MALA 6050 (crn 51937) "Rationality"- Tuesdays 6-9 pm in JUB 202 B-term 6 weeks 6/29-8/7... TEXT: Steven Pinker, "Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters"...

Experience & Rationality

The vital question

Tuesday, May 10, 2022

Syllabus, Summer 2022 (under construction)

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