Experience & Rationality: Syllabus, Spring 2023

Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Syllabus, Spring 2023

(Under construction...)

MALA 6050-001 Topics in Science & Reasoning: Experience Tue 6-9 pm 202 James Union Building

We’ll read and discuss William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience VRE (978-1660034420), Carl Sagan’s Varieties of Scientific Experience VSE (978-0143112624), and Ann Druyan’s Cosmos: Possible Worlds CPW (978-1426219085). (These texts are all available in kindle and audible versions.)

… And we’ll all contribute regularly to the course blog site, on whatever facets or dimensions of experience anyone would care to address. The blog site, Experience & Rationality (https://rationalitymt.blogspot.com/), is NOT on D2L. It is a public site, though we're apt to be the only public to pay it any mind.

WJ's Varieties is in the public domain and can be found online in various formats and editions, including the Project Gutenberg version. But if you want to splurge on an attractive bound edition, I recommend the Library of America's William James: Writings, 1902-1910. The earlier LOA volume is also great.

RECOMMENDED: for an accessible overview of James's philosophy, I recommend John Kaag's Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life and its companion anthology Be Not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James. A good biography I recommend is Robert Richardson's William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. I recommend all of Carl Sagan's other books, his and Ann Druyan's Cosmos series, and the subsequent renditions of Cosmos hosted by Neil de Grasse Tyson. Here's Druyan's introduction to the 2000 DVD release...

We'll meet in James Union Building (JUB) 202 on Tuesdays at 6, focusing on James for the first half of the period and (after a 10 minute break) on Sagan and Druyan for the second half.

NOTE: Experience was originally conceived as a web-assisted course to meet 6-7:30 on Tuesdays and on Zoom 6-7:30 Thursdays. That was changed, to avoid a conflict for those taking MALA 6010 on Thursdays.

This course had a prequel last summer, Rationality...

And had (and has) a block in MALA 6010-Foundations of Liberal Arts II: "Experience"... Thursdays 6–9 pm, WPS 310... Oliver's block Sep 1-8, Jan 19,26: "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."

March 6-11 – Spring Break
April 26 – Last Day of Classes
April 27 – Study Day, No Classes/Exams/Mandatory Meetings
April 28 - May 4 – Final Exams as Determined by University Approved Exam Schedule
May 1 - Final report blog posts due
May 4 – Last Day of Term
May 6 – Commencement (Time(s) TBD), Official Spring Graduation Date

GRADES: Based equally on (1) participation (attendance, discussion, weekly posts/comments on our blogsite) and (2) a report presentation & final blog post (due May 1*) on a relevant topic of your choosing. The blog post can be based on and elaborative of your presentation, or you may select a different topic. More on the blog post coming soon. Everyone will need eventually to become an author on the site, let me know when you wish to do so.

*Post earlier draft(s) for potentially-helpful feedback.

...

Jan 17 - Introductions: Who are you? Why are you here? What does experience mean to you? How do you think it has influenced and shaped you? How do you think about your personal experience in relation to the collective experience of your various communities (school, work, neighborhood, church, civic organizations, etc.) and the historical experience of our time? If this is a scientific age, and an information age, is the totality of your experience consonant and compatible with that? Say, and post, whatever other introductory thoughts you'd care to share.

Jan 24 - VRE I-Religion and Neurology; VSE Introductions, 1-Nature and Wonder: A Reconnaissance of Heaven; CPW Prologue-One-Ladder to the Stars

Jan 31 - VRE II-Circumscription of the Topic; VSE 2-The Retreat from Copernicus: A Modern Loss of Nerve; CPW Two-Oh, Mighty King

FEB 7 - VRE III-The Reality of the Unseen; VSE 3-The Organic Universe; CPW Three-Lost City of Life

FEB 14 - [This is your professor's birthday, btw, as well as the Love Holiday, just in case anyone would care to bring celebratory--or at my age, compensatory--comestibles.] - VRE IV, V-The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness; VSE 4-Extraterrestrial Intelligence; CPW Four-Vavilov

FEB 21 - VRE VI, VII-The Sick Soul; VSE 5-Folklore and the Evolution of Religion; CPW Five-The Cosmic Connectome

FEB 28 - VRE VIII-The Divided Self; VSE 6-The God Hypothesis; CPW Six-The Man of a Trillion Worlds

MAR 14 - VRE IX, X-Conversion; VSE 7-The Religious Experience; CPW Seven-The Search for Intelligent Life on Earth

MAR 21 - VRE XI, XII, XIII-Saintliness; VSE 8-Crimes Against Creation; CPW Eight-The Sacrifice of Cassini

MAR 28 - VRE XIV, XV-The Value of Saintliness; VSE 9-The Search, Q & A; CPW Nine-Magic Without Lies

APR 4 - VRE XVI, XVII-Mysticism; CPW Ten-A Tale of Two Atoms

APR 11 - VRE XVIII-Philosophy; CPW Eleven-The Fleeting Grace of the Habitable Zone

APR 18 - VRE XIX-Other characteristics; CPW Twelve-Coming of Age in the Anthropocene

APR 25 - VRE XX-Conclusions and postscript; CPW Thirteen-A Possible World

MAY 1 - final report blog post due

2 comments:

KBJanuary 10, 2023 at 10:13 PM
Looking VERY forward to this class! :-)
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MAY 1 - final report blog post due... BEFORE EACH CLASS, post your comments on "Questions [date]" posed by me, your classmates, and/or yourself. I'm in class all day Tuesdays, I hope y'all will TRY to POST BY MONDAY each week so we'll get a chance to see them before class. ALSO, if anyone would care to join us for pre-class dinner at the Boulevard you're more than welcome. I recommend the Bam Bam shrimp, and the cheeseburger, and (if you must) the salads... MALA 6050, Spg '23: Experience. Tuesdays 6-9 pm James Union Building... Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu, JUB 300

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

Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Syllabus, Spring 2023

2 comments:

This is us (on the cosmic calendar)

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