Thursday, October 3, 2013

Balancing act

NEXT. For some reason my digital sticky notes in the upper right margin are frozen, so here's the latest:

Tue Oct 8 Group #2 report. Read "The Color of Happiness" (BB) T 8 Group #2 midterm report presentation; Color of Happiness (BB)

Thur Oct 10 Group #3 midterm report. Read "Buddhist Epistemology" (BB)

Fall Break

Th 17 "Selfless Persons" (BB)
==

PHILOSOPHY CLUB/HAPPY HOUR meets regularly right after class, at Boulevard B&G.

PREVIOUS ANNOUNCEMENTS below.
==

Oct.3-
Group #1 will make their case for "Balance" as the meaning of happiness today in HAP 101, with respect to cycles of change, eastern and western approaches, brain science, coexistence, slavery, human and civil rights.

Not sure if this is anything like what they have in mind, but what seems most unbalanced in many of our lives is time.

1 ==

Today we'll grade Tuesday's exam in class before Group #1's "balance" report. I'll bring a stapler.

Group reports continue thru next week. Groups, please print your summaries & turn them in, signed, when you begin your presentation.

The other thing everybody needs to do today, since we're finishing our first scorecard: tally your TOTAL BASES since the 5th inning, and write that number in the appropriate right-hand column (which I'll point out).

We begin a new scorecard next week. If anyone want to try a new group, join it then. (Obligations to your old group still apply, of course.)

If you still can't find your way to 1st base please speak up now. I won't judge you. (It's not your fault if you were raised by footballers and deprived of your "national pastime" heritage.)

While we're doing group reports we all need to continue posting questions, comments, and links pertaining to the report topics and to Flanagan (Bod.'s Brain). Reply to your group's posted summary, or wherever.

And one more little thing: if anybody wants coffee or tea, from now on, please send an emissary/barista to my office upstairs (307B) a few minutes before class to help me schlep it down. I'll need help getting it back upstairs after class, too. Any time you do that, consider it a "comment" and score it accordingly.

3 comments:

Leigh KogerOctober 3, 2013 at 12:41 PM
Factual question: what did Dharma Life Magazine call scientists Richie Davidson and Paul Ekman? - joy detectives.
discussion question - there is usually the automatic assumption that all Buddhist are happy? do you agree or disagree?
link for the day is a tv commercial that makes me laugh out loud at my television every time it comes on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbRVMua0HUc
ReplyDelete
Replies
UnknownOctober 4, 2013 at 5:53 PM
Congratulations to Group 1 for an awesome report! Lots of need for balance to deal with so much change. Your power points were good and you collaborated well. Thanks for all the work you put into it. And thanks for the opportunity to choose my happiness rock!

Flanagan's book is right on time as we prepare our group report on Ricard. Serendipity makes me happy.

FQ for Ch 2: Has the pursuit of happiness been an aim of classical Buddhism? No. While the 14th Dalai Lama says "happiness is the sole universal aim," most Buddhologists tell Flanagan it is not what the Buddha taught. p.42

DQ: Why might an enhanced ability to "read faces" contribute to increased happiness? Is it the value of the human connection and empathy?

Link: Here's a Sisyphus video on youtube in honor of Group 1:

http://youtu.be/LRJ-RsxVvuA

Have a great weekend!
ReplyDelete
Replies
PhilOctober 7, 2013 at 12:25 PM
I agree!
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Happiness returns to the MTSU campus (on ground!) August 24 2021, TTh 2:40, Peck Hall 206.

TEXTS:

Also recommended:

Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790
The Art of Happiness, by Epicurus
How to Be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living Well
Stoicism: A Very Short Introduction
The Conquest of Happiness, by Bertrand Russell
William James, tba

"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment." George Santayana

“If one can’t be happy, one must be amused, don’t you agree?” Nancy Mitford

But, beware "amusing ourselves to death"...

Previous announcements posted at the bottom of this page.

Natural happiness

“It is a scientific fact that the occasional contemplation of natural scenes of an impressive character, particularly if this contemplation occurs in connection with relief from ordinary cares, change of air and change of habits, is favorable to the health and vigor of men and especially to the health and vigor of their intellect beyond any other conditions which can be offered them, that it not only gives pleasure for the time being but increases the subsequent capacity for happiness and the means of securing happiness.” Frederick Law Olmsted

Happy Quotes

“Happiness depends upon ourselves.” ― Aristotle

They are fools who live without enjoyment of life
- Democritus

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work." -Soren Kierkegaard

"To pessimism and despair, the healthy-minded respond: 'stuff and nonsense, get out into the open air!'" -William James

"If we were to ask the question: 'What is human life's chief concern?' one of the answers we should receive would be: 'It is happiness.' How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure." William James

	Albert Einstein (@SaidByEinstein)
A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy? #Einstein

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” ― Albert Camus

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.” -Dr. Seuss (Or Vin Scully, or...)

"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment." George Santayana

"Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared." - Buddha

Happiness: A History

“Like Rousseau, Hegel appreciated quite early on that in modern commercial societies, individuals' desires and needs were generated by the desires and needs of others. Implanted by advertising, dictated by fashion, and determined by style, individual desire was always socially determined, shaped by the particular contexts in which we live. [..] Hence the need for greater comfort does not exactly arise within you directly; it is suggested to you by those who hope to make a profit from its creation.”

“No one could work harder to be happy," Tocqueville observes of Americans, marveling at the ceaseless, restless energy they expand in search of a better life. Rushing from one thing tho the next, an American will travel hundreds of miles in a day. He will build a house in which to pass his old age and then sell it before the roof is on. He will continually change paths "for fear of missing the shortest cut leading to happiness.”

“What if virtue, work, all our striving and sweat was simply not enough to make the animal man a happy creature?”

Darrin M. McMahon

"Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence." Aristotle

"There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity... The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you." Montaigne

"Formula for our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal." Nietzsche

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” Camus

"A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so." Christopher Hitchens

The Meaning of Life

"The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing,— the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man's or woman 's pains.—And, whatever or wherever life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage to take place." William James

“The chances of finding out what’s really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied.” Douglas Adams

"Well, it's nothing very special. Try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations." M. Python

I can't stand it

Though the ULTIMATE state of the universe may be its extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the PENULTIMATE state might be a happy and virtuous consciousness...

In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer."

William James

There are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism.

Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation inevitable.

Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism...(continues)

whanging & skimming

Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about

you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil moods over one's way of looking at the cosmos.

Jefferson the Stoic-Epicurean

"Before he attained domestic happiness he had probably worked out his enduring philosophy of life; it was marked by cheerfulness not gloom, and he afterwards described it as Epicurean, though he hastened to say that the term was much misunderstood. He came to believe that happiness was the end of life, but, as has been said, he was engaged by the "peculiar conjunction of duty with happiness"; and his working philosophy was a sort of blend of Epicureanism and Stoicism, in which the goal of happiness was attained by self-discipline."

Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian

The Philosophy of Happiness

Up@dawn 2.0

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Balancing act

3 comments:

Upload to Google Docs

That's

Five Books (@five_books)
The eternal question: how to be happier? Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, passed us some tips buff.ly/2txxMnv