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
Monday, April 13, 2026
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
RECOMMENDED (& on library reserve):
- 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
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...
==
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
- 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?
- 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?
- 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?
- What does "spiritual purity" mean to you? Does it signify an "immaterial soul distinct from [y]our bod[y]"? 127
- Are "lost paradises... the only paradises there are"? 135 (We might relate this to Makatea.)
- Comment? "Whether God is a metaphoror a fact cannot be reasonably argued." 136
- What's the significance of Klapper's observation that the number 36 "is of a hiddenness that sustains existence"? 137
- 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?
- 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
- 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
- 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?
- 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
- 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"?
- 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
- What are your thoughts about tikkun olam? 156 Is it analogous to pragmatic meliorism?
- 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...)
- 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?
- 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?
- Is "genius" a genetic disorder? 169
- 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
- Are you personally affronted by mathematics? 171 Or intimidated? Or disinterested?
- What is a current example of "junk ideas on American campuses"?
- 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?
- Should it be the goal of our education system to minimize the role of "blessed confluence" in allowing brilliant humans to shine? 176
- Is life a zero-sum game? 179f.
- Comment?: "It isn't always sensible to be rational." 181
- If you love someone, should you be first to say so?
- Would you ever sit through a four and a half hour lecture without a break? 183
- What does it mean to say that the tree of life has its roots in "the pure negativity of absolute unity"? 184
- Can belief be prescribed? 187 Should it be?
- What do you think of Maimonides' Aristotelian marriage?
- Do you credit your mother for your "genius" (or your talents)? 188
- What do you make of the chicken story? Is it less absurd if you substitute cattle? 189
- Is the extraordinary implicit in the ordinary, and vice versa? 190
- Do you try to practice Zen and just let your thoughts go? 195 Or Zen laughter? 198
- What do you think of William James's experiments with nitrous oxide? 199
- Should Cass be embarrassed to be labeled a philosopher? 201
- Is intellectual achievement a zero-sum game? 204
- Do you think there are good arguments (in the philosophical/logical or the colloquial/everyday sense) against atheism?
- 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?
Sunday, April 12, 2026
Bloom = Klapper?
“One day there will have to be a biography of Harold Bloom. It is inevitable. And rightly so. No other critic was so forceful and passionate a presence in the minds of so many readers. Even today, while I was reading the new book of letters written between Bloom and a series of poets, my neighbour came and chatted with me on the decking, and immediately upon seeing The Man Read Everything she said, ‘Oh I love Harold Bloom.” Until readers get the biography, these letters shall have to suffice. I could only wish for the book to be several times longer. Inevitably, whatever else is said about these letters, the usual debates will recur, about whether Bloom was a fraud, a nonsense monger, so crazy that one imagines him, as John Carey once said, convinced that there are death rays coming from the television. Many others have more muted and reasonable objections to Bloom’s avowedly anti-rationalist style. It is for each reader to decide such things—a principle Bloom would have insisted upon throughout his career...” Henry Oliver https://open.substack.com/pub/commonreader/p/the-man-who-read-everything?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios
Friday, April 10, 2026
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