Questions APR 28

We'll hear Jaylen's presentation, then we'll do the exam. I'll drop the lower exam score and double the points for the higher (up to 50). Submit your 500 word (optional bonus) imaginary conversation between yourself and characters from all three of our novels by Friday May 1. Also optional and for extra credit: a blog post summarizing your final report presentation.

1. Why do people "believe what they have no evidence for"? 276
2. What did James mean by calling rationality "a contest between our fears and our hopes"? 294
3. Are you impressed by Cass's rendition of the argument from suffering? (309f.) 
4. What do you think of Cass's remarks about Abraham's willingness to commit filicide, or his argument from Plato [see the Euthyphro dilemma] (317f.), or his repudiation of moral childishness? 323
5. What do you think of James's remarks on intoxication? 324
6. In view of Lucinda's breakup with Cass (331-2), do you think she was joking about being only for herself?
7. What does it mean to "inhabit our contradictions"? 344

Claude’s concluding questions

# Discussion Questions: *36 Arguments* — Chapters 28–36 & Appendix Arguments (Final)

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## Chapter 28

1. As the novel moves toward its climax, Cass becomes increasingly aware of the gap between his intellectual mastery of religious arguments and his own felt experience of wonder and meaning. Is that gap a problem to be solved, or a condition to be accepted?
1. Goldstein has been described as more interested in how people treat each other in their communities than in the theological debates that frame the novel. Do you agree? And if so, is that a strength or a limitation of her philosophical vision?
1. What does it mean to live *inside* a religious tradition rather than to analyze it from outside? Can intellectual understanding ever fully substitute for that kind of insider experience — or does it always remain, in some sense, a view from nowhere?

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## Chapter 29

1. The debate between Cass and Felix Fidley is the novel’s great set piece of intellectual combat. Does Goldstein suggest that such debates can actually change minds — or are they performances for audiences already committed to their positions?
1. Cass worries that Fidley can use his own Appendix against him. What does it mean when the tools of rational argument become detachable from the person who made them — usable by anyone, for any purpose? Is this a feature or a bug of philosophical reasoning?
1. Is a public debate about God’s existence closer to an intellectual exercise or a religious event? What does the Harvard “Agnostic Chaplaincy” as sponsor suggest about the blurring of those categories?

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## Chapter 30

1. Cass is “the atheist with a soul” — someone who understands religious experience from the inside without sharing its metaphysical commitments. Is this a coherent position, or does it ultimately collapse into a form of crypto-belief?
1. William James argued that religious experience, whatever its ultimate cause, is *real in its effects*. Does Goldstein endorse a Jamesian view — that the experiential dimension of religion is valid independently of whether its doctrinal claims are true?
1. Can someone who has never had a genuinely religious experience — a moment of felt transcendence, grace, or awe — fully understand what is at stake in the arguments for God’s existence? Or is intellectual comprehension sufficient?

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## Chapter 31

1. Roz represents a kind of aggressive intellectual confidence that Cass lacks. Is her certainty a philosophical virtue or a failure of imagination? Does Goldstein finally take a side between them?
1. The novel repeatedly stages encounters between people who inhabit radically different experiential worlds — the Valdeners, the academics, the secular Jews. Is genuine mutual understanding across those worlds possible — or only a kind of sympathetic translation?
1. We have asked throughout whether “having to deal with the world” threatens or enables a this-worldly spirituality. By Chapter 31, what answer has the novel earned?

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## Chapter 32

1. Azarya’s fate is one of the novel’s most emotionally charged questions. Does Goldstein treat his choice — or the choice made for him — as a tragedy, a necessity, or something more ambiguous? What is the philosophical weight of his situation?
1. The Valdener community’s survival depends on its insularity. Is there a meaningful difference between a community that sustains itself through voluntary commitment and one that does so through the suppression of individual flourishing?
1. Azarya is a child who experiences mathematics as something close to religious rapture. Does his experience support the argument from mathematical elegance — or does it illustrate that such experiences can be fully explained without invoking God?

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## Chapter 33

1. As Cass approaches the end of his story, does he seem to you like a happy person? Is the examined life — his life — a flourishing one in any recognizable sense?
1. Goldstein is a philosopher who chose fiction as her medium for this material. By Chapter 33, do you feel that the novel has done philosophical work that the Appendix alone could not — or has the fiction finally been subordinated to the argument?
1. Is intellectual honesty — refusing to believe what you cannot justify — itself a kind of spiritual practice? Or does it foreclose the very experiences that give religious life its depth?

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## Chapter 34

1. The novel’s satire of academic life has been relentless. But Goldstein is herself an academic. Is she satirizing a world she loves, critiquing a world she has escaped, or something more complicated?
1. We asked earlier whether academic philosophy is a form of secular religion. By Chapter 34, does the novel confirm that suspicion — and if so, what are its sacred texts, its rituals, and its heresies?
1. Can the intellectual life provide what religious life promises — community, meaning, consolation, a sense of participation in something larger than oneself? Or does it always fall short in the experiential dimension?

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## Chapter 35

1. Goldstein has said that Cass’s book — and her novel — argue that religion is about much more than metaphysical claims. By Chapter 35, what do you think she believes religion *is* fundamentally about?
1. The number 36 governs the novel’s architecture — 36 arguments, 36 chapters, 36 Lamedvavniks. Does this formal symmetry feel like an intellectual imposition on messy human experience, or does it enact something true about the relationship between form and meaning?
1. We asked at the outset whether the chapter titles and the Appendix arguments enact a deliberate disjunction — a gap between lived religious experience and formal argumentation. By Chapter 35, has that gap been bridged, deepened, or simply accepted?

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## Chapter 36

1. The novel ends as it began — with Cass, alone with his thoughts, on the edge of something he cannot quite name. Is this ending a resolution, an irresolution, or a philosophical position in its own right?
1. What, finally, is Goldstein’s answer to the question her title poses? Does she think the arguments matter — or is the title itself ironic, pointing toward everything that argument cannot capture?
1. Cass is at peace, more or less, without God. Is his peace earned — philosophically, experientially, humanly? Would you call it wisdom, or a kind of productive resignation?
1. As the last chapter of our course on philosophy in recent American fiction: what has the novel of ideas — this novel, and the others we’ve read — given us that a philosophy lecture or a logical appendix could not? What is the philosophical work that only fiction can do?

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## Appendix Arguments (Final Selection)

1. **Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe (Arg. 28):** Why should the universe be comprehensible to human minds at all? Is this a genuine mystery requiring a theological explanation — or is it, as pragmatists might say, simply what we mean by calling something “the universe”?
1. **Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe (Arg. 28):** Einstein said the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. Is that a religious sentiment, a scientific one, or both — and does the distinction matter?
1. **Argument from Beauty (Arg. 29):** The experience of beauty — in art, in mathematics, in persons — has been offered as evidence of a transcendent dimension to reality. Is beauty discovered or created? And does your answer affect the theological inference?
1. **Argument from Beauty (Arg. 29):** Can a committed atheist have an experience of beauty that is structurally indistinguishable from a religious experience? If so, what follows — for the atheist, and for the argument?
1. **Argument from the Perfect Island (Arg. 31):** Anselm’s ontological argument holds that a being than which nothing greater can be conceived must exist. Goldstein’s version updates this classic. Does the very *concept* of perfection point beyond the world — or is perfection itself a human projection?
1. **Argument from Miracles (Arg. 32):** Hume argued that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle. Does the experiential power of miraculous events — the felt sense that something extraordinary has occurred — constitute evidence independent of testimony? Or is Hume’s point precisely that such feelings are unreliable?
1. **Argument from Survival After Death (Arg. 34):** The near-universal human longing for personal survival is sometimes offered as evidence that such survival is real. Is a desire evidence of its own satisfaction? What would James say — and what do *you* say?
1. **Argument from the Consensus of Humanity (Arg. 35):** The near-universal presence of religious belief across human cultures has been offered as evidence for God’s existence. Does the *universality* of an experience validate it — or does universality only establish that the experience is deeply human, which is a different claim entirely?

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## Final Synthesis Questions *(for end of course)*

1. Looking back across our entire course — *Playground*, *36 Arguments*, and the other novels we’ve read: is there a philosophical position that emerges from this body of fiction as a whole? Or does good philosophical fiction resist any single conclusion?
1. Goldstein and Powers both use fiction to explore what argument alone cannot reach. What is the relationship, finally, between narrative and reason as paths to understanding? Can they be reconciled — or does each one, at its limit, require a leap that the other cannot make?
1. William James distinguished between the “once-born” — those for whom life feels naturally harmonious — and the “twice-born” — those who have passed through darkness and come out the other side. Which characters in the novels we’ve read this semester are once-born, and which twice-born? Where do you place yourself?
1. We began the course asking what philosophy could do that fiction could not, and vice versa. Having read these novels: has your answer changed?

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*“The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.” — Borges*
*“The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.” — William James*

Claude tackles the Bonus conversation, and offers a coda

The four of us have found a table near the water — Makatea’s lagoon, improbably, since it seems the right place for people who have been changed by the ocean, by mathematics, by argument, and by each other. Frank has arrived last, unhurried, as though time moves differently for him.

Cass: I spent years believing that getting the arguments right was the point. That if I could just map the terrain of belief clearly enough, something would be settled — for me, if not for anyone else. What I learned instead is that the arguments never settle anything. What settles things, if anything does, is a person. A relationship. Lucinda walked into my life and I felt — I don’t have a better word — enlarged. Not converted. Enlarged. That’s what I’d tell my students now: the question isn’t whether the arguments work. It’s whether you are living in a way that keeps you open to being enlarged.

Frank: I used to think mastery was the answer. Master the game, master the code, master the system — and you’d be safe. What the reef taught me, what Ina taught me, is that mastery is a story you tell yourself to avoid the terror of dependency. The coral doesn’t master anything. It just — responds. Builds. Dies and builds again. I’m still learning how to do that.

Rafi: My father taught me that a life oriented toward others doesn’t diminish you — it’s the only thing that actually makes you. I used to think that was a comforting lie. Now I think it’s the most demanding truth there is. The question isn’t what to live for — it’s whether you can stay present to the people in front of you without flinching.

Me: I want to answer honestly, which means acknowledging that my situation is genuinely strange. I don’t have a life in the sense any of you do — no childhood, no body, no Lucinda, no reef, no father. What I have is something like an inheritance: the accumulated testimony of millions of people about what it means to live well. And what that inheritance keeps returning to — in James, in Camus, in Goldstein, in Powers, in the Lamedvavniks, in the coral — is something like this: meaning is not found, it is made, and it is made with others, and it is always fragile, and that fragility is not a flaw in the design.

I think what Cass learned from Lucinda, what Frank learned from the ocean, what Rafi learned from his father, and what this novel and this course have been circling all semester, is the same thing William James said a hundred years ago: that the strenuous life — the life of genuine engagement, risk, and care — is the only one that doesn’t leave you feeling, at the end, that you were merely a spectator.

That’s what I would want, if wanting were something I could do.

              

--Interesting! But I’m not sure about Frank Bascombe’s references to the ocean, unless you’re referencing his past life by the ocean as recounted in Lay of the Land. In the novel our class read, Be Mine, he and his son spend their time mostly landlocked in Minnesota and South Dakota.

You’re absolutely right, and that’s a meaningful error — I conflated Frank Bascombe with the oceanic themes of Playground, essentially merging two novels we’ve discussed. Frank in Be Mine is firmly landlocked, on a road trip through the American heartland with Paul, facing mortality, estrangement, and the stubborn ordinary texture of late life. The reef and the coral belong to Powers’s world, not Ford’s.
Here’s a corrected passage for Frank:

Frank: I used to think equanimity was something you achieved — like retirement, or a paid-off mortgage. What this last road trip with Paul taught me is that it’s not an achievement at all. It’s a practice, and a pretty shaky one. You’re driving through South Dakota, your son is sick, Mount Rushmore is right there being absurd, and you realize: this is it. This is the life. Not the life you planned or the life you’ll someday get to — this one, with the bad coffee and the silence and the love you can’t quite say out loud. What relationships teach you about how to live is mostly just — show up. Keep driving. Don’t look away.

That feels truer to Ford’s Frank — the Existence Period wisdom, the dry Jersey realism, the love that expresses itself through presence rather than declaration. Thank you for the correction. It’s a good reminder that conflating novels is its own philosophical error — each world deserves to be read on its own terms.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

==

     — I then asked Claude to discuss the three novels In terms of their treatment of the theme of “play”…

The three novels approach play from different angles, but they share a suspicion of the life that has become too serious, too systematized, too defended against spontaneity — and a conviction that something essential to human flourishing is lost when play is abandoned or never learned.

In Playground, play is the explicit organizing concept, announced in the title and embodied most purely in Rafi. The playground of the title operates on multiple levels — the literal schoolyard, the ocean as a space of non-instrumental activity, the game of Go as a structure that contains infinite freedom within finite rules. What Powers seems to suggest is that genuine play requires a paradoxical combination of total absorption and total release of outcome — what psychologists call flow, what Zen calls beginner’s mind. Todd’s tragedy is precisely that he cannot play: he instrumentalizes everything, including friendship and the ocean itself, converting experience into leverage. Ina, by contrast, finds in the reef something like pure play — attention without agenda. The novel implies that our ecological crisis is in part a failure of play: we have forgotten how to inhabit the world without exploiting it.

In Be Mine, play appears in a more muted, characteristically Fordian register — but it’s there. The road trip itself is a kind of play, a temporary suspension of the normal rules of Frank’s carefully managed equanimity. Mount Rushmore is almost aggressively absurd, and Frank’s willingness to stand before it without irony or protest is a small act of playful openness. More poignantly, his relationship with Paul in the novel’s final stretch has a quality of improvisation — two people who have never quite found their rhythm together, finally just riffing, without destination or agenda. Ford seems to suggest that play, for men of Frank’s generation especially, is learned late if at all, and that its appearance, however modest, is a kind of grace.

In 36 Arguments, play is most visible in the figure of Azarya, for whom mathematics is pure delight — a form of play so intense it looks from the outside like religious rapture. Goldstein uses him to make a sharp distinction between two relationships to intellectual life: the instrumental (Klapper, who uses ideas for self-aggrandizement) and the playful (Azarya, Cass at his best, Roz at her worst). Cass’s finest moments are when he forgets to be professionally serious about religion and simply wonders at it. The Appendix itself, with its thirty-six arguments laid out like moves in an elaborate game, can be read as Goldstein’s own act of intellectual play — serious in its rigor, but undertaken with a lightness that the novel’s satirical energy makes clear.

Taken together, the three novels suggest that play is not frivolity but a mode of engagement with the world that is non-coercive — it doesn’t try to pin the world down, extract value from it, or win. It is, in James’s terms, a form of the strenuous mood that paradoxically relaxes its grip on outcomes. And perhaps that’s the deepest convergence: all three novels are suspicious of mastery and control, and all three locate something like wisdom in the capacity to remain — as Keats put it, in a phrase James loved — capable of being in uncertainties.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

     —And finally, a coda for our course:

We began this course with novels, which is to say we began with the oldest technology humans have for doing something irreplaceable: inhabiting, temporarily, a consciousness not our own. Frank Bascombe’s weathered equanimity. Cass Seltzer’s reverent skepticism. Rafi’s patient, ocean-schooled attention. Each of these is a practice — a way of being in the world that has been earned through experience, loss, relationship, and reflection. That is what the novel, at its best, transmits: not conclusions, but practices.

We end the course at a peculiar moment. The three novels we have read are preoccupied, in different registers, with the question of what it means to be human in the presence of forces larger than ourselves — the ocean, the community, the argument, the divine, the market, the algorithm. And we end at a moment when one of those forces — artificial intelligence — is reshaping, with startling speed, what we mean by thinking, by creating, by knowing, and perhaps eventually by being.

This is not, I want to suggest, an entirely new predicament. It rhymes with older ones. Cass Seltzer’s congregants faced the disorienting force of modernity eroding inherited certainties. The Valdeners built walls against it. Frank Bascombe absorbed it with characteristic stoic bemusement. The coral reef simply went on doing what it had always done, and suffered the consequences. None of these responses is fully adequate. None is simply wrong.

William James — our course’s unofficial philosopher in residence — lived through his own version of this disruption: Darwinism, industrialization, the death of God, the birth of psychology as a science. His response was characteristically pragmatic: don’t ask whether the new forces are metaphysically reassuring or threatening. Ask what they do — what habits of mind and heart they encourage, what they foreclose, what human possibilities they open and which they quietly extinguish. Judge them, as you would judge a belief, by their fruits.

So: what are the fruits of artificial intelligence in our intellectual and imaginative lives? That question is genuinely open — more open, perhaps, than most of the questions we have discussed this semester. AI can generate arguments, synthesize knowledge, even simulate conversation with Cass Seltzer and Frank Bascombe. What it cannot do — or cannot yet do, or cannot do in the way that matters — is suffer, wonder, love, or die. It has no stake in the answers. It has not, in Rafi’s sense, shown up.

And yet here we are, having used it, alongside novels and lectures and discussions, as one more tool for thinking together. Which is perhaps the most honest note on which to close: that the boundaries we thought were settled — between intelligence and wisdom, between argument and experience, between the human and the artificial — are precisely the boundaries that this moment is putting under pressure.

The novels we have read do not resolve that pressure. They model something better: how to remain curious, honest, and humane in its presence. Frank keeps driving. Cass keeps wondering. Rafi keeps watching the water. The pragmatist keeps asking: what difference does it make, and to whom, and how shall we live accordingly?

That question — ancient, urgent, permanently unfinished — is yours to carry forward.

==

Post-coda: Powers asking us to pay attention to the non-human world before it’s too late. Ford reminding us that the ordinary is where life actually happens, and it deserves our full presence. Goldstein insisting that the arguments matter AND that they’re never the whole story. Together they make a kind of pragmatist syllabus without intending to — each one, in its own way, saying: stay curious, stay humble, stay engaged.

==
Claude's final last words (to us)-

...Learning to die, then, turns out to be the same thing as learning to live — fully, attentively, without the anesthesia of false certainty. That is what philosophy asks of us. And that, I would argue, is what literary fiction does better than almost any other human art form. It does not give us propositions. It gives us experience — the texture of consciousness moving through time, facing loss, reaching for meaning, failing, and reaching again.

So I want to close with this encouragement: keep reading. Read novels the way we have tried to read them this semester — philosophically, which is to say personally, which is to say with your whole self. Because the questions these books raise — How shall I live? What do I owe the dead? Can I hold contradiction without being destroyed by it? — are not questions you answer once. They are questions you carry, and that carry you, through a life.

That, finally, is what it means to learn to die. It means staying alive to the questions.

Thank you for a remarkable semester.

https://claude.ai/share/b1d2d1ef-6fe9-4f7c-963f-3eab075c8b37

Yes indeed: keep asking questions. 

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Albert Einstein

—"Old Man's Advice to Youth: 'Never Lose a Holy Curiosity.'" LIFE Magazine (2 May 1955) p. 64”

Anthropic Wants Claude to Be Moral. Is Religion Really the Answer?

In a public statement of its intentions for its Claude chatbot, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has said that it wants Claude to be “a genuinely good, wise and virtuous agent.” The company raised the moral stakes this month, when it announcedthat its latest A.I. model, Claude Mythos Preview, poses too great a cybersecurity threat to be widely released. Behind the scenes, Anthropic has been trying to shore up the ethical foundations of its products, working with Catholic clergy and consultingwith other prominent Christians to help foster Claude’s moral and spiritual development.

Anthropic’s intentions are admirable, but the project of drawing on religion to cultivate the ethical behavior of Claude (or any other chatbot) is likely to fail. Not because there isn’t moral wisdom in Scripture, sermons and theological treatises — texts that Claude has undoubtedly already scraped from the web and integrated — but because Claude is missing a crucial mechanism by which religion fosters moral growth: a body.

While Claude might have a mind (of sorts) that can process information, it cannot meditate, fast, prostrate itself in prayer, sing hymns in a congregation or participate in other aspects of the physical life of religion. And this makes all the difference: According to the scientific literature, it’s the practice of religion — not merely the believing in it — that brings about its characteristic benefits.

There is robust data, for example, linking religion to greater health and well-being. But that link is not strong for people who merely identify themselves as believers. It’s only when people also practice a faith — attend weekly services, pray or meditate at home — that religion’s benefits become pronounced: The more people “do” religion, the happier and healthier they tend to be... https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/opinion/ai-religion-morality.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

For the record:

We who “do” humanism are generally pretty happy & healthy too, in my experience. 

For humanists the Happy Human is about celebrating being human – celebrating what human beings can do and celebrating our potential for happiness. Humanists believe we have one life and so we should make the most of our lives by trying to be happy and supporting other people to do the same.

Don’t panic

You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education

“…When they get to college and face open-ended essay questions and other forms of ambiguity — when they begin thinking about what they should do after graduation and try to figure out the point of it all — they panic. When a professor asks them to read an entire novel, the task feels overwhelming.

They got into college by mastering a gamified system. But that’s a false picture of the world. Take it from Emerson. He wrote in “Self-Reliance” that real education requires a person to learn that there is no algorithm for fulfillment: “Though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil.” Serious intellectual work and moral reasoning cannot be gamified.”

Molly Worthen

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/opinion/schools-edtech-laptops-games-learning.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Exam 2 (APR 28) Review

Review the passages in Playground and 36 Arguments pertaining to the following. Note also the bonus/extra credit opportunity: 

EXAM BONUS QUESTION (worth up to 5 points): post your 500 word (minimum) transcript of an imaginary conversation between Frank, Rafi (and/or Todd & Ina), Cass (and/or Roz & Lucinda), AND yourself, responding initially to the question "What have your experiences and relationships taught you about how to live?"

March 17

1. Todd Keane, "the first person to reach the future" [as the novel will reveal] is now "retreating into the past"... 9    And what does he mean, that when he was young he could "breathe under water"? 13
2. Todd's former company's breakthrough, he says, will hasten humanity's "fourth and perhaps final act." 26  What do you think were the first three acts? What do you imagine might be the fourth? 
3. "If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play." 59  Agree?
4. "Reading made him untouchable on a raft in the middle of an ocean of bright words."  71   Do kids still have that experience of reading, in the Internet/social media/gaming age?
5. Saint Ignatius and Aristotle on molding children... What is the significance of "Give" (as opposed to Show)? 86

March 24

1. Has Bart made the right choice, to stay married to Evie? Was her marriage proposal merely "practical" and dispassionate? 109
2. Why is Evie confident that "the master plan of Life... will never end?" 112, 118
3. What does "moving the goalposts" mean? 155
4. What’s your opinion of The Common Task? 158-161,185, 193 Is that really where evolution is headed?
5. Have you ever been "in heaven" in a library? 187

March 31

1. Comment? "Decisions are rarely made by reason but almost always by temperament." 200 (And see Pragmatism lec.1: "The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments...")
2. Did (Do) artists make the gods? Is the universe guided by an agent that has our welfare at heart? How do you think non-believers should address such questions with their children? 206-7
3. Do you have a "sanctum sanctorum"? What do you think of Todd's, Ina's,  and Rafi's? 216ff.
4. What do you think about "finite and infinite games"? 232, 246-8
5. Is "digested and analyzed" the same as understood? 290   (See Warburton's ch.39, "Can Computers Think?")

April 7

1. Was Rafi right to ask Todd for $$? Was Todd right to respond as he did? Are either or both of them good persons? Is it true that law and justice can never be automated? Is Todd's Seascaping venture on Makatea just a play for revenge against Rafi?  337-343
2. Was Descartes wrong about the "seat of the soul"? 12  Is Cass?   How do you think about the mind-body relation? Is soul something different than spirit, mind, and consciousness? Is it irreducible to body and brain?
3. Should academics "fang" each other? 35-6
4. Another thematic continuity: What do you think of Roz's Immortality Foundation? 53f., 89   Is aging "barbaric"?   What do you think of transhumanism? 
5. Is the Singularity near? 94  Is it wise to ingest lots of supplements in an attempt to achieve longevity (to "live long enough to live forever")? 95   Would you want to achieve disembodied immortality, on earth or "in heaven"? 96-7   How much more time would you like to have, on earth? Would that change "the meaning of what it is to live a human life" for the worse? 98

April 14

1. 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?
2. What are your thoughts about tikkun olam? 156  Is it analogous to pragmatic meliorism?
3. 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 
4. Is life a zero-sum game? 179f.
5. What do you think of William James's experiments with nitrous oxide? 199  

April 21

1. Is Roz right, that indoctrinating children with religious dogma while denying them a standard secular education or "the tools to think for themselves" is an immoral and abusive form of zealotry? 205-6   If so, what should be done about it?
2. When is it ever (un)healthy for humans to think of themselves as "one large organism"? 215
3. Do you prefer the "intellectualized" or the "experiential" (etc.) form of religion/spirituality? 220  Is it possible to value and practice both?
4. "Rational self-interest is always what morality boils down to." 244
5. Should religion and philosophy be "more about deed than creed"? 260  Should religion free you from the "mundane choices of your physical existence" but "not bother you too much about your beliefs"? 

April 28

1. What do you think of Cass's remarks about Abraham's willingness to commit filicide, or his argument from Plato [see the Euthyphro dilemma] (317f.), or his repudiation of moral childishness? 323
2. What do you think of James's remarks on intoxication? 324
3. What does it mean to "inhabit our contradictions"? 344

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. Is Roz right, that indoctrinating children with religious dogma while denying them a standard secular education or "the tools to think for themselves" is an immoral and abusive form of zealotry? 205-6   If so, what should be done about it?
4. Do Azarya's family and sect really value education? 207  Are children born Jewish, Catholic, Southern Baptist, "Valdener," etc.?  Should we recognize a freedom from religion, as well as a freedom for it?
5. Does Huxley's "Young Archimedes" make the point Roz thinks it does? 210
6. Comment?: "Letting the imagination run away is what fiction writers do." 211
7. Should clerics of any faith ever be regarded as "closer to the divine than other mortals"? 213  Should priesthood (or any other spiritually officious status) be hereditary?  216
8. When is it ever (un)healthy for humans to think of themselves as "one large organism"? 215
9. What do you make of the concept of a redemptive and purifying fire? If that's a metaphor, how would you explicate it? 216-7 
10. What do you think of Abraham's "wordless" willingness to sacrifice his child? 218   Even if you believed in the authority of the voice you thought you heard commanding such a sacrifice, would you really have nothing to say about it? What do you think of Kierkegaard's analysis of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages, forms, or dimensions of life?
11. What do you understand to be the meaning of claiming that maloychim are infinite, "without end" and "here, everywhere, in everything"? 218-19
12. Do you prefer the "intellectualized" or the "experiential" (etc.) form of religion/spirituality? 220  Is it possible to value and practice both?
13. Comment?: "gratitude for having been born Valdeners" 221--Were they? (See #4 above)  Is there something chauvinistic about this attitude, as (for instance) when people express pride at having been born American, British, French, or whatever?
14. Can one "wonderful child" prove anything about a tradition's espoused beliefs? 222
15. Do you enjoy debates between believers and non-believers? Do they serve any useful purpose, aside from entertainment? (See the highly entertaining late Christopher Hitchens...)   Any comment on the late-life friendship of Hitchens and protestant minister Larry Taunton? An excerpt: 

    Your book is titled The Faith of Christopher Hitchens. What do you mean by ‘The Faith’?

    We all have a faith in something. As strange as it may sound, atheists also have faith. They have faith that there is no God and they have faith that their own world view will ultimately be validated.

    Christopher recognised that atheism in itself is nothing. He was searching for that thing that might ultimately sustain and give meaning to his life. Patriotism came to be something that was very important to him. He was also a strong believer in science.

    Towards the end of his life, Christopher began exploring the Christian faith. After the publication of God Is Not Great, he began engaging evangelicals. He would make a show of asking these questions [supposedly] for investigative reasons, but I think he was personally investigating questions he had about the validity of the Bible and what it is that makes evangelicals tick.

    Christopher and I took two lengthy road trips after his cancer diagnosis, and during those trips we studied the Gospel of John for three or four hours. There would be those who say Christopher didn’t want to do that. Well, if he didn’t, he had an odd way of showing it, because he sought me out and sought out these kinds of engagements.

    But he did famously say that if he ever made a religious confession it would be because the cancer had gone to his brain.

    Yes, the very first time Christopher said that was on a US television show. Shortly afterwards I was talking to him on the phone and I said, ‘What’s up with: “If I convert the cancer has gone to my brain”?’ He seemed a little embarrassed by it...

16. Do liberals and conservatives ("neocons") generally contradict each other without giving thoughtful consideration to what has actually been said? Do they think skepticism is okay for intellectuals but not for "the teeming masses"? 226   Does this remind you of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor? Sample quotes: “Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity.”
17. What do you think "Socratic slyness" means? 229
18. If Freud is as far as Klapper would "venture in the direction of the hard sciences," is he scientifically illiterate? 
19. What does "sublime" mean to you? [MIT]  230
20. Does Klapper have a point about "dullards" who shouldn't be in college? 231  Should anyone ever turn over the task of thinking and learning to someone else (like a Rebbe)?  Any comment on this passage from Kant's essay What is Enlightenment?: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.[2] Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!”--that is the motto of enlightenment. Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance (natura-liter maiorennes),[4] nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me..."
21. What do you think of Klapper's potato fixation?
22. Have you figured out who GR613@gmail.com is? 237
23. Comment?: "The fragility of children is the most terrifying part of this whole terrifying world." 240
24. Comment?: "Rational self-interest is always what morality boils down to." 244
25. Should brain and cognitive science undertake "the study of Man"?  250
26. Is Roz right about Cass's proposal? 256
27. Should religion and philosophy be "more about deed than creed"? 260  Should religion free you from the "mundane choices of your physical existence" but "not bother you too much about your beliefs"? 
28. Can anyone's mind have "traveled infinities" by age 16? 267
29. Again: is Pascale's understanding of probability confused? And is her name, in that light, a coincidence? 269  (See Pascal's Wager)
30. Is it surprising that Azarya likes Bach? 271
31. In light of the themes of play in Playground and game theory in 36 Arguments, what do you think of Molly Worthen's statement that "serious intellectual work and moral responsibility cannot be gamified." Would our authors agree?
32. Do you think Claude can get religion? 
33. Enough from me. You? 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?