Lyceum (What’s the plural for Lyceum?)

                         

Questions APR 21

 Chapters/Arguments #19-27.  Presentation: Markeem. [NOTE: Markeem is presenting an alternative text/topic.]

1. Which chapter this week do you find most interesting? Which argument most compelling? 
2. Does Cass seem to be losing his infatuation with Klepper and Lucinda? How would you describe the arc of his character development and personal growth?
3. More from me soon... meanwhile, here are some questions from Claude:

## Chapter 19

1. Is academic celebrity a form of charisma that substitutes for genuine intellectual authority? How does Goldstein use Roz to probe the relationship between brilliance, ambition, and moral seriousness?
1. Does Cass’s relationship with Roz sharpen or complicate the question of whether intellectual achievement is a zero-sum game?
1. Roz is a public intellectual who thrives on controversy and visibility. Is there something philosophically suspect about wanting a wide audience — or is the desire to persuade many people a mark of genuine philosophical commitment?
1. What does the Cass-Roz dynamic suggest about the relationship between romantic love and intellectual rivalry? Can two people who compete for the same kind of recognition sustain genuine intimacy?

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## Chapter 20

1. Goldstein’s novel is itself an extended argument — yet its most powerful moments resist argumentative form. Does the novel enact its own thesis about the limits of rational persuasion?
1. Can you construct an argument that *arguing* is sometimes irrational — and does that argument refute itself?
1. Is there a difference between being *convinced* by an argument and being *moved* by one? Which matters more in questions of religious belief?
1. Goldstein is herself a philosopher writing fiction. Does that dual identity give her special authority on the question of reason’s limits — or does it create a conflict of interest?

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## Chapter 21

1. Klapper is brilliant, charismatic, and morally catastrophic. Is this combination accidental, or does Goldstein suggest something structurally dangerous about a certain kind of intellectual grandiosity?
1. Does Klapper’s fall resolve or deepen the tension between his regard for women and his interest in “gynecologico-cosmogony”?
1. Klapper’s students are drawn to him despite — or because of — his excesses. What does this say about the psychology of discipleship? Is there a meaningful difference between a great teacher and a charismatic cult leader?
1. Is intellectual hubris a specifically philosophical vice, or is it equally at home in religion, politics, and science?

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## Chapter 22

1. Cass lacks “snarky anti-theological ire” and genuinely respects religious sensibility. Does his respectful atheism make him a better or worse critic of religion than a Dawkins or Hitchens? What does Goldstein seem to think?
1. Does Cass’s position on God as metaphor vs. God as fact implicitly take a side — or does it deliberately float above the question?
1. Is it possible to respect a belief you think is false? Or does genuine respect require remaining genuinely open to the possibility that the belief is true?
1. Cass is professionally invested in the arguments for God’s existence without personally accepting any of them. Is this a form of intellectual integrity — or a kind of bad faith?

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## Chapter 23

1. Does Azarya’s dilemma — genius vs. community obligation — suggest that intellectual gifts carry moral weight? Do the Lamedvavniks have a claim on him?
1. Is it ethical to sacrifice one person’s extraordinary potential for the preservation of a community’s way of life? Is this a utilitarian question, a deontological one, or something else entirely?
1. Azarya’s situation inverts the usual story of the gifted child escaping a limiting environment. Does Goldstein want us to see the Valdener community as a prison, a paradise, or something more ambiguous?
1. What obligations, if any, do we have to communities that shaped us — even when we have outgrown them, or when their values conflict with our own?

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## Chapter 24

1. The academic conference scene is one of Goldstein’s sharpest satirical set pieces. Is she suggesting that the institutional forms of intellectual life are themselves inimical to genuine philosophical inquiry? What would James or Dewey say?
1. Does Goldstein’s conference satire offer an implicit answer to the question of what counts as a “junk idea” — and do you agree with her diagnosis?
1. Is academic philosophy a form of secular religion — with its own orthodoxies, heresies, and rituals of belonging?
1. The conference brings together people who disagree profoundly but share a professional language and set of conventions. Is that common ground philosophically valuable, or does it paper over deeper incommensurabilities?

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## Chapter 25

1. The novel resists clean resolution. Is this a philosophical or an aesthetic choice — or are those the same thing for Goldstein?
1. Does the novel’s ending confirm, complicate, or subvert the idea that “lost paradises are the only paradises there are”?
1. What does it mean for a novel about arguments to end not with a conclusion but with a mood? Is Goldstein making a point about the relationship between philosophy and literature?
1. Does irresolution in fiction model something important about how we should hold our deepest beliefs — or is it an evasion of the very rigor the novel seems to demand?

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## Chapter 26

1. Does Goldstein ultimately endorse a form of “secular grace” — a this-worldly analog to religious transcendence? If so, what are its sources and conditions?
1. How does Goldstein answer, by the novel’s close, whether “having to deal with the world” threatens spirituality or is actually its proper condition?
1. Can wonder survive the death of God? What would it be wonder *at*, and wonder *for*?
1. Is the experience of beauty — in persons, in ideas, in the world — a sufficient basis for a life well lived, in the absence of religious conviction?

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## Chapter 27

1. What, finally, does Goldstein mean by the novel’s title? Are the 36 arguments for God’s existence analogous in any way to the 36 Lamedvavniks — hidden sustainers whose hiddenness is precisely the point?
1. If you were Cass, would you be at peace with your position at the novel’s end? Is philosophical clarity a form of happiness — or its obstacle?
1. Goldstein ends with Cass rather than with any of the novel’s more conventionally “dramatic” characters. What does this choice imply about where she locates moral and philosophical seriousness?
1. Is the examined life — Cass’s life — a happy one? Does the novel finally endorse Socrates, or quietly mourn him?

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## Appendix Arguments 19–36 (Selected)

1. **Argument from Moral Truth (Arg. 20):** If objective moral truths exist, does God provide the best explanation for them — or does pragmatic moral philosophy (James, Dewey, Addams) offer a secular grounding that is equally robust?
1. **Argument from Moral Truth (Arg. 20):** Is the existence of moral disagreement across cultures evidence *against* objective moral truth — or simply evidence of our imperfect access to it?
1. **Argument from Personal Identity (Arg. 23):** Does the persistence of a “self” across time require a soul? Or does William James’s stream of consciousness offer a naturalistic account that renders the theological inference unnecessary?
1. **Argument from Personal Identity (Arg. 23):** If there is no enduring self, who — or what — is it that seeks God, or rejects God? Does the argument from personal identity presuppose what it sets out to prove?
1. **Argument from Qualia (Arg. 25):** The “hard problem” of consciousness — the felt quality of experience — has been called a gap that science cannot close. Is that gap an opening for theology, or simply an invitation to philosophical humility?
1. **Argument from Qualia (Arg. 25):** Is the felt quality of religious experience itself a form of qualia — and if so, does that make it more or less credible as evidence for God’s existence?
1. **Argument from the Existence of Philosophy (Arg. 27):** The very impulse to ask ultimate questions has been offered as evidence of a transcendent dimension to human life. Do you find this persuasive — or is the impulse sufficiently explained by evolutionary or pragmatic accounts?
1. **Argument from the Existence of Philosophy (Arg. 27):** If asking ultimate questions is distinctively human, does that make philosophy a spiritual practice — even in its most secular forms?
1. **Argument from Sublimity (Arg. 30):** Does the experience of the sublime — in mathematics, music, or nature — point beyond itself, or is its this-worldly character precisely what makes it sublime?
1. **Argument from Sublimity (Arg. 30):** Edmund Burke and Kant distinguished the beautiful from the sublime. Is God, if God exists, more beautiful or more sublime — and does the distinction matter theologically?
1. **Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness (Arg. 33):** Does Damasio’s embodied feeling framework dissolve this argument, or does it relocate rather than resolve the mystery?
1. **Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness (Arg. 33):** If consciousness is genuinely inexplicable by physical science, does that make panpsychism, theism, or agnosticism the most reasonable response?
1. **Argument from Moral Responsibility (Arg. 36):** Does holding humans morally responsible require libertarian free will — and does libertarian free will require God? Or can a pragmatic, naturalistic account of agency bear the full weight of moral life?
1. **Argument from Moral Responsibility (Arg. 36):** If we cannot be held ultimately responsible for who we are — our genes, our upbringing, our neurology — what remains of the concepts of praise, blame, guilt, and forgiveness?

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## Synthesis Questions *(for end of novel)*

1. Looking across all 36 arguments: which one do you find most intellectually serious? Which most emotionally compelling? Are those the same argument?
1. Does Goldstein think any of the 36 arguments *work* — or is the Appendix itself an elaborate act of secular mourning for arguments that almost, but never quite, close?
1. Cass is a philosopher of religion who neither believes nor dismisses. Is that a stable position — philosophically, existentially, personally? Is it *your* position?
1. The novel is dedicated to argument, yet it is also a love story, a coming-of-age story, and a comedy of manners. Do these genres finally support or undermine each other — and what does their coexistence say about the limits of any single mode of truth-telling?
1. If Goldstein were to add a 37th argument — one she finds most compelling, or most honest — what do you think it would be? What would yours be?

Lyceum Apr 17

 

MTSU’s April 17 Applied Philosophy Lyceum speaker to explore the ‘fractured self’

Some fractured facts in this story: we did not begin as "two separate departments," the Dept of Philosophy added Religious Studies to its title and mission a few years ago. Previously, there was no Department of Religious Studies at MTSU. Their speaker series is called a Colloquium, not a Lyceum, a name which has its specific roots in the ancient Athenian school of Aristotle called the Lyceum.

But we're grateful for the publicity. All good. Looking forward to the event.

https://mtsunews.com/dianda-philosophy-lyceum-dianda-2026/

Claude’s take on some of this week’s questions

Another conversation with the only “student” who answers my every question: a role-model, in that regard at least! 😉 https://claude.ai/share/d8099634-f9a2-4f24-9a28-804b3bc4a745

For example:

1. Great question to start with — and I'll take Chapter 1, "The Argument from the Improbable Self," paired with Appendix Argument 1, the Cosmological Argument.

The Cosmological Argument has the classic logical architecture the question asks about. Premises: everything that exists has a cause; the universe exists; therefore the universe has a cause; that cause must itself be uncaused — and we call that God. The inference is clean, the conclusion follows (if you grant the premises), and the whole thing fits on half a page. It's argument in the philosopher's sense: explicit, structured, vulnerable to precise objection. And Goldstein's rebuttal is equally precise — if everything requires a cause, what caused God? The argument either proves too much or stops arbitrarily.

Chapter 1 is something else entirely. Cass stands on Weeks Bridge at 4am, overwhelmed by the sheer improbability of his own existence — that out of all the possible configurations of matter and circumstance, he is here, this particular self, marveling at itself. It's not an argument in any formal sense. There are no premises marching toward a conclusion. It's closer to what James called a "noetic" experience — a felt apprehension of something significant that carries its own sense of revelation.

Could you reconstruct it as an argument? Something like: my existence is cosmically improbable; improbable things that exist seem to demand explanation; therefore something — God? — explains me. But that reconstruction already falsifies the experience. The logical version loses exactly what makes the moment on the bridge powerful: its immediacy, its first-person irreducibility, its quality of being struck rather than being convinced.

Which brings us to your real question — is the chapter's "argument" what most people mean when they say they have an argument for their beliefs? I think honestly, yes. Most people, when they say they believe in God because of "arguments," mean something much closer to Chapter 1 than to Appendix 1. They mean: I have had experiences, felt intimations, known moments of awe or gratitude or terror that seem to point beyond themselves. The formal philosophical arguments are typically rationalizations after the experiential fact, not the actual causal story of how belief arose.

Should they call these arguments? That's the sharpest part of your question. There's something honest about insisting on the distinction — calling a felt intuition an "argument" can be a kind of intellectual overreach, claiming more logical force than the experience actually delivers. But there's also something impoverishing about restricting "argument" to formal logical structure, as if only what can be syllogized counts as a reason. James would say the felt experience is evidence — data from the full range of human experience that any adequate philosophy must reckon with, even if it resists formalization.

So perhaps the answer is: we should be more careful about what we claim when we say "argument," but we should also be more generous about what counts as a reason. The bridge moment isn't a proof. But it isn't nothing either.

2. I'll take Chapter 13, "The Argument from the Remembering of Childhood" — partly because it strikes me as one of the most personally accessible chapters for students, and partly because it poses the language problem most acutely.

The chapter circles around the way childhood experience has a quality that adult memory can gesture toward but never quite recover. There's something in the child's unmediated encounter with the world — its colors, textures, the particular weight of an afternoon — that seems, in retrospect, almost numinous. Wordsworth's "intimations of immortality" hover nearby. The grown Cass touching those memories feels something that exceeds what he can say about it.

So: can I summarize the argument? Something like — early experience carries a phenomenal intensity that later reflection recognizes as significant; that significance feels like it points beyond the merely physical; therefore ordinary experience contains intimations of something transcendent. But even as I write that I feel it going flat. The summary is accurate and empty simultaneously. It's like describing music by specifying its frequencies.

This is the language problem the question is really driving at. And I think it forks into three responses, none of which fully satisfies.

The mystic says: yes, words fail here, and that failure is itself the pointer. What exceeds language exceeds ordinary categories, which is precisely what we'd expect if genuine transcendence is real. The ineffability is evidence, not embarrassment. Rudolf Otto called this the numinous — the mysterium tremendum that resists conceptualization by its very nature.

The philosophical skeptic says: the failure of words is not evidence of transcendence but evidence of the limits of introspection. We shouldn't infer metaphysical realities from phenomenological intensity. The fact that an experience feels profound doesn't mean it is tracking something real beyond itself. Feelings of ineffability may be neurologically explicable without remainder.

But I find myself drawn to a third position — the Jamesian one — which refuses both moves. The mystic overclaims by converting felt ineffability into metaphysical conclusion. The skeptic underclaims by dismissing the experience as mere feeling. James would say: the experience is real data; its significance is genuine; what it ultimately points to remains genuinely open. We should neither rush to supernatural interpretation nor explain it away. We should sit with it honestly.

And perhaps that honest sitting — that willingness to be arrested by what exceeds our vocabulary without immediately resolving the arrest into doctrine or dismissal — is itself a philosophical posture worth cultivating. Not mysticism, not skepticism, but something like radical empirical humility.

Which might be exactly what Goldstein is modeling in these middle chapters. The argument from remembered childhood isn't an argument you can win or lose. It's an invitation to notice something, and then to think carefully about what noticing it obliges you to say — or not say.

3. This question sits right at the heart of one of the oldest tensions in Western intellectual history — and Goldstein knows it, which is why she keeps returning to it through Klapper, Azarya, and the Valdener community.

The Hellenism/Hebraism opposition has a long pedigree — Matthew Arnold made it famous in Culture and Anarchy, framing it as sweetness and light versus strictness and conscience. But Goldstein complicates the binary. The quest for Hellenism in the novel isn't simply worldliness against piety. It's more specifically the pull toward a this-worldly fullness — beauty, embodiment, intellectual range, aesthetic pleasure, civic participation — against the kind of religious purity that requires withdrawal, boundaries, and the subordination of the particular self to communal and divine demands.

Does Hellenism necessarily repudiate religious purity? I don't think "necessarily" is right. Historically the answer is complicated — medieval Jewish thinkers like Maimonides (who appears in your question list) spent enormous energy trying to marry Aristotelian philosophy to Torah, and Aquinas did the same for Christianity. The project wasn't always violent. But there is a genuine tension that can't be fully dissolved: Greek philosophy, at its best, follows the argument wherever it leads, respects no inherited authority simply as authority, and treats embodied human experience as intrinsically valuable. Religious purity traditions tend to subordinate all of that to revealed truth and communal discipline. Those aren't easily reconciled, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of intellectual dishonesty.

The cosmopolitanism question is equally interesting. Hellenism does tend toward cosmopolitanism — the philosophical life has historically been one that crosses boundaries, engages difference, refuses the merely parochial. The Stoics made this explicit: we are citizens of the world before we are citizens of any particular city or tribe. Religious purity traditions tend in the opposite direction — they require boundaries, distinctions, the maintenance of a particular identity against dilution. The Valdeners in the novel are an extreme version of this, but the logic runs through many religious communities.

And yet — and this is where I think Goldstein is most interesting — the novel doesn't straightforwardly endorse Hellenism over religious purity. Azarya's situation is genuinely tragic precisely because something real would be lost if he left the Valdener community for the wider world. His mathematical genius might flourish, but the particular form of life that nurtured him, that gave him his identity, that constitutes his community's meaning — that would be diminished or destroyed. Goldstein doesn't let us feel simply good about the cosmopolitan option.

As for whether philosophy and religion can peacefully coexist — I think yes, but only under certain conditions, and the conditions are demanding. It requires religious traditions willing to hold their doctrines with some degree of tentativeness, open to revision in light of argument and experience. And it requires philosophers willing to take religious experience seriously as data rather than dismissing it as pre-scientific confusion. Neither condition is easily met. Fundamentalism on either side — whether theological or scientistic — forecloses the conversation.

What gives me some hope is exactly the Jamesian model we keep returning to. James genuinely believed both things: that philosophical rigor matters, and that religious experience carries real cognitive weight. He didn't resolve the tension so much as inhabit it productively. That seems to me the most honest available posture — not a forced synthesis, but a genuine ongoing conversation conducted in good faith by people who respect what they don't fully share.

Which is, perhaps, what a well-taught philosophy course can model for students who arrive already believing, and students who arrive already skeptical. The classroom itself as a small experiment in Hellenism and Hebraism coexisting — not without friction, but without contempt.

...

8. What a delightfully provocative question — and the fact that Goldstein plants it in the novel with a straight face is itself a kind of philosophical joke that rewards close attention.

On the surface the pairing seems absurd. Emerson and Thoreau are the great apostles of American individual self-reliance, anti-institutional religion, and the sovereign self encountering the Over-Soul directly, without rabbis, without communal obligation, without the dense network of mitzvot and halachic observance that structures Hasidic life. Thoreau went to Walden precisely to escape community. The Valdeners go to their Hudson Valley enclave precisely to intensify and preserve it. These seem like opposite impulses wearing similar clothes.

And yet — and this is where the question gets genuinely interesting — the surface opposition conceals some deep structural similarities that Goldstein is clearly alert to.

Both Transcendentalism and Hasidism are fundamentally reactions against a perceived spiritual deadness in the dominant culture. Emerson was rebelling against the cold rationalism of Unitarian Boston — against exactly the kind of Maimonidean intellectualism we were just discussing, transplanted into New England Congregationalism. The Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism in 18th century Eastern Europe, was rebelling against a Judaism that had become too legalistic, too focused on Talmudic scholarship, too remote from the felt experience of the divine. Both movements wanted to recover immediacy — the direct encounter with something larger than the merely institutional.

Both also locate the sacred in the ordinary. Emerson's transparent eyeball moment — that famous dissolution of self into the ALL on a bare common — has a genuine structural resemblance to the Hasidic doctrine of panentheism, the idea that God is present in every particular thing, that the extraordinary is implicit in the ordinary. The Hasidic master finds God in the sparks hidden within material existence — what the Kabbalists called the nitzotzot. Emerson finds the Over-Soul in a New England snowstorm. The grammar is surprisingly similar.

And both traditions privilege intensity of experience over doctrinal correctness. The Hasid who prays with his whole body, who sings and dances his way to devekut — cleaving to God — is doing something not entirely unlike what Thoreau was doing at Walden, stripping away the superfluous to find what is essential. Both are, in their different idioms, practicing a kind of radical attention.

So could a Hasidic sect deliberately pattern itself on Transcendentalism? Goldstein's suggestion is that the convergence might be less deliberate than structural — that both traditions are drawing from a similar deep well of Romantic reaction against Enlightenment rationalism, and that the similarities are therefore not coincidental but symptomatic.

What would the Valdeners think of it if they knew? This is where it gets fun. I suspect the reaction would be layered and not entirely negative — at least among the more intellectually adventurous members of the community.

They might find Emerson's anti-institutionalism deeply threatening, since the whole point of Valdener life is the preservation of communal structure as the vessel for spiritual meaning. Self-reliance in the Emersonian sense is almost the opposite of what Hasidic community demands — which is self-transcendence through communal obligation, not individual self-cultivation. Thoreau's solitude at Walden would strike most Hasidim as a kind of spiritual poverty, a missing of the point. You don't find God by going alone into the woods. You find God in the minyan, in the Shabbos table, in the rebbe's teaching.

But they might find Emerson's insistence on the immanence of the divine — the sacred embedded in the natural world, accessible to direct experience — quite congenial. And his distrust of systematic theology, his preference for the living encounter over the doctrinal formulation — that has genuine Hasidic resonance. The Baal Shem Tov was also suspicious of arid scholasticism.

Thoreau they might find more troubling — too individualistic, too pagan, too comfortable with a natural world that has been drained of specifically Jewish content. Walden Pond is not the Shabbos. And yet — Thoreau's absolute commitment to living deliberately, to extracting the full marrow of life rather than sleepwalking through it — that has something of the Hasidic insistence on kavvanah, the fierce intentionality of directed attention in prayer and daily life.

The deepest irony is this: Emerson and Thoreau were, in their American Protestant way, trying to recover something that Hasidism had never lost — the sense that ordinary life is saturated with meaning, that the divine is not remote but present, that experience rightly attended to is itself a form of revelation. The Valdeners, if they could be brought to see it, might recognize in Transcendentalism a Gentile approximation of something they consider their birthright.

Which perhaps says something about the universality of the impulse — across very different cultural and theological containers, human beings keep reaching for the same thing: the assurance that this life, in its particularity and immediacy, is not merely secular. That it matters. That it points somewhere.

Which brings us, inevitably, back to Goldstein's mattering instinct — and to James, who read both the Transcendentalists and the mystics with the same generous, empirically humble attention, looking for the common experiential core beneath the different doctrinal surfaces.

All successful marriages do converge, as you said — without entirely reconciling. Perhaps that's true of intellectual traditions as well as human ones.

31. What a rich detour — and a genuinely important one for understanding the broader question of whether philosophy and religion can coexist, because Maimonides is perhaps the most ambitious attempt in the Western tradition to make that marriage work, and the strains in it are enormously instructive.

Maimonides — Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, the Rambam, 12th century Córdoba and Cairo — was working in a remarkable intellectual moment. Aristotle had been recovered and transmitted through Arabic commentators, particularly Averroes, and was reshaping everything. Maimonides saw in Aristotle not a threat to Judaism but potentially its most powerful philosophical ally. His Guide for the Perplexed is essentially a sustained attempt to show that the Torah, properly interpreted, and Aristotelian reason, properly understood, are not in conflict — that the apparent contradictions dissolve once you recognize that scripture often speaks metaphorically and that reason, pursued rigorously, arrives at truths compatible with revelation.

The core of the marriage is negative theology. Maimonides argued, following Aristotelian logic, that we cannot predicate anything positive of God — we cannot say God is good, powerful, or knowing in any sense that resembles what we mean when we use those words of human beings. All positive attributes would compromise divine unity and simplicity. We can only say what God is not. This is philosophically rigorous and theologically radical — and it put Maimonides in tension with ordinary believers who wanted a personal God they could relate to, pray to, feel heard by.

Which is exactly where the marriage shows its stress fractures.

Aristotle's God — the Unmoved Mover, pure actuality, thinking thinking itself — is magnificently rational and utterly indifferent to human affairs. It doesn't know particular things, doesn't intervene in history, doesn't hear prayers, didn't choose a people, didn't give a Torah. It is the logical terminus of cosmological reasoning, not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Pascal's famous distinction — the God of the philosophers versus the God of Abraham — names the problem precisely. Maimonides tried to bridge these, but the bridge requires such extensive allegorical interpretation of scripture that many felt he had quietly replaced the living God of the Hebrew Bible with a philosophical abstraction wearing Jewish clothing.

His critics within the Jewish tradition were fierce. The Kabbalists — and this connects directly back to Goldstein's novel and the Valdeners — felt that Maimonides had intellectualized the life out of Judaism, that his God was too cold, too remote, too Aristotelian to sustain the felt intimacy of religious life. The Hasidic tradition, which is the Valdeners' tradition, arose partly as a counter-movement — reasserting divine immanence, the presence of God in every particular thing, the value of ecstatic experience over philosophical reasoning. Where Maimonides elevated the intellectual elite who could follow the philosophical argument, the Baal Shem Tov democratized access to God through joy, prayer, and the intensity of ordinary devotion.

So will the marriage endure? I think the honest answer is: it endures as an ongoing argument rather than a settled union. Every generation that takes both philosophy and religion seriously has to renegotiate the terms. The Maimonidean project never fully succeeded — but it also never fully failed, because the questions it raised won't go away. Can a rationally defensible theology preserve what ordinary believers actually need from religion? Can religious tradition survive contact with rigorous philosophy without either capitulating to it or retreating into fundamentalism?

What's interesting from a Jamesian perspective is that Maimonides, for all his rationalism, was actually trying to solve a pragmatic problem — how do thoughtful people maintain religious commitment in a world where philosophical reasoning has become unavoidable? That's not so different from what Goldstein is doing in the novel, or what you're doing in the classroom. The Rambam would have understood the challenge, even if he'd have been startled by the secular humanist solution some of us have reached.

And there's something almost poignant about the negative theology in this light. Maimonides ends up, through rigorous philosophical reasoning, with a God about whom almost nothing positive can be said. That's not so far, structurally, from the secular humanist position of profound humility before the mystery of existence — affirming that something is there to be wondered at, while declining to specify its nature too confidently. The happy atheist and the great rationalist theologian, converging from opposite directions on a similar posture of epistemic restraint.

That might be the most the marriage of Aristotle and Moses can offer — not a settled answer, but a shared and honest question.

==

And there's more... Claude never tires of responding. 

Coming Fall '26: Existentialism

PHIL 4200 – Existentialism (3 credit hours)-"The nature, significance, and application of the teachings of several outstanding existential thinkers." Tue/Thur 4:20 PM, HONORS BUILDING #117, beginning August 25.

TEXTS

• Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir,Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others
• Mariana Allesandri, Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves through Dark Moods
• Irvin Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
• Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and other essays
• Jean-Paul Sartre, "Existentialism is a Humanism" and other essays
• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex & tba

RECOMMENDED (& on library reserve):

• Walter Kaufman, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre
• Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe
• Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters
• Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife
• William James, What Makes a Life Significant; Is Life Worth Living; On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings; & tba
• Soren Kierkegaard, tba...
• More tba

Lunar perspective, & the universe inside us

…Andrew Davison, a theologian at the University of Oxford who has written about the implications of extraterrestrial life, said in an interview that one of the “great provocations” of the cosmos is that, in it, “human beings seem unbelievably small, but also it bears witness to our greatness.”

He added, “We are a kind of being that can have that whole universe inside us, in our thoughts.”

For many astronauts, what begins as a scientific endeavor becomes something spiritual. Frank White, a space philosopher, coined the term “the overview effect” in 1987 to describe the shift in perspective that some astronauts said came from viewing Earth as merely one small sphere in an endless expanse...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/us/artemis-landing-splashdown-moon.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and you—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound— A
nd they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound
— Emily Dickinson, c. 1862

 

Questions APR 14

Chapters/Argument #s 10-18. Presentation: Amanda

1. Select one of the first 18 chapters and one of the first 18 Appendix arguments: compare, contrast, discuss, evaluate... Can you discern an "argument" (with explicit premises, inferences, & conclusions) in the chapter? Is that what most people mean when they speak of an argument they think supports their point of view? Should they? 
2. How would you summarize the "argument" in any of chapters 10-18? Do your words capture its essence? If words fail, is that sufficient grounds for a mystical approach to religion? Or for philosophic skepticism? Or what?
3. Does the quest for "Hellenism," the spirit of Greek philosophy that exalts art and embodiment, necessarily represent a repudiation of "religious purity" and an endorsement of cosmopolitanism? 126  More broadly, do you think philosophy and religion can peaceably coexist in mutual tolerance and respect?
4. What does "spiritual purity" mean to you? Does it signify an "immaterial soul distinct from [y]our bod[y]"? 127
5. Are "lost paradises... the only paradises there are"? 135   (We might relate this to Makatea.)
6. Comment? "Whether God is a metaphoror a fact cannot be reasonably argued." 136
7. What's the significance of Klapper's observation that the number 36 "is of a hiddenness that sustains existence"? 137
8. Do you think it likely that a mystical ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jewish sect (like the "Valdeners") might deliberately pattern itself on the transcendentalist philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau? What do you think they might think of it?
9. What do you think of the way Klapper and the Rebbe regard women? And how can we square that with Klapper's interest in "gynecologico-cosmogony"? 185
10. Comment?: [Cass] "doesn’t have the snarky anti-theological ire of a Dawkins, a Harris, or a Hitchens, because he understands the deep place from where belief arises, and he has a genuine respect for religious sensibility and commitment." tnr
11. Do you think the existence of bright and precocious children somehow supports the likelihood that an omnipotent (etc.) god exists?  Does the elegance and symmetry of mathematics, and the mystery of prime numbers, somehow support belief in God or any other theological/metaphysical speculation? At what age does having the concept of prime numbers cease to impress?
12. Do you agree that it is "a prejudice of temporalism" to discount or devalue religions of relatively recent invention? 141  Could that, btw, be the reason Klapper assigned Cass The Book of Mormon? 135
13. What "metaphysical mishap" might have "accompanied the creation of the world"? Might it have something to do with what Nietzsche (via Susan Neiman in Why Grow Up) called "the metaphysical wound at the heart of existence"? 
14. What do you think of the irony of bringing Heidegger's philosophy to bear on Jewish mysticism? What can it mean to say "We come too late for the gods" etc.? (Is that the flip-side of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, come too soon for "the death of God"?)  155
15. What are your thoughts about tikkun olam? 156  Is it analogous to pragmatic meliorism?
16. Is it true that we're all mathematically guaranteed to have famous people in our lineage? 160   (I claim Daniel Boone and signer of the Declaration of Independence John Hart... or my dad did. And I'd like to claim poet Mary Oliver, comic John Oliver, chef Jamie Oliver...)
17. Is "having to deal with the world" a threat to spirituality?  162  Or could it be the actual condition of a suitably this-worldly spirituality?
18. Have you read the "metaphysical fabulist" Jorge Luis Borges? He said “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” And: “To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.” And: “Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.” And: “The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.” And: “Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.” And: “A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” Comment?
19. Is "genius" a genetic disorder? 169
    
20. What do you think of the "Lamedvavniks" (or the fact that there are supposedly 36 of them)? Or of the idea that a small number of humans are saving the world from destruction? 170 
21. Are you personally affronted by mathematics? 171  Or intimidated? Or disinterested? 
22. What is a current example of "junk ideas on American campuses"?  
23. Are there children who are "born as if knowing"? 176  Is this what Plato had in mind by the theory of recollection, in his Meno?
    
24. Should it be the goal of our education system to minimize the role of "blessed confluence" in allowing brilliant humans to shine?  176
25. Is life a zero-sum game? 179f.
26. Comment?: "It isn't always sensible to be rational." 181
27. If you love someone, should you be first to say so?
28. Would you ever sit through a four and a half hour lecture without a break? 183
29. What does it mean to say that the tree of life has its roots in "the pure negativity of absolute unity"? 184
30. Can belief be prescribed? 187  Should it be?
31. What do you think of Maimonides' Aristotelian marriage?
32. Do you credit your mother for your "genius" (or your talents)? 188
    
33. What do you make of the chicken story? Is it less absurd if you substitute cattle? 189
34. Is the extraordinary implicit in the ordinary, and vice versa? 190
35. Do you try to practice Zen and just let your thoughts go? 195  Or Zen laughter? 198
36. What do you think of William James's experiments with nitrous oxide? 199  
37. Should Cass be embarrassed to be labeled a philosopher? 201
38. Is intellectual achievement a zero-sum game? 204
39. Do you think there are good arguments (in the philosophical/logical or the colloquial/everyday sense) against atheism?
40. A story in the Sunday NYTimes discussed the feelings of "reverence" evoked for many by the just-concluded Artemis moon mission. Others hear a more secular/humanist message in astronaut Koch's statement that planet Earth is a "crew"... What do you think? Are you inspired by Artemis, either in religious or humanist terms? ["Are you a humanist?"]  Do you share Edgar Mitchell's lunar perspective?