Happy Halloween

Meaning is up to us. Is that scary, in a good way - instructive and instigating?

Boo!

Exam 2 Extra Credit (Sisyphus Discussion)

DQ: Is anything worse than futile, hopeless labor?

    To me, I would think that being in a position where labor is not even an option would be a worse situation that being subject to endless toil. This is something I’ve thought about before. In today’s society, we find ourselves in the struggle of “working to live” turning into “living to work.” There are many days where my first thoughts of the day are, “Do I really have to go back to do this all day again?” On these days, my mother’s voice can be heard in my head, “At least you can get up and work.” I know that my toils in life have been nothing compared to conquering a mountain repeatedly with a boulder, nor are my days of labor innumerable, but, for an instant, my mountain is just as imposing. And yet, while I complain about having to wake up early and go make my meager amount of money, there are those on this Earth who have no choice but to stay in bed, simply because that is where they must live their lives. While I lament to myself about how nice it would be to just sleep all day, others pray that they can one day stand up and engage in some sort of labor. So yes, I believe that one thing worse than futile, hopeless labor would be eternal immobility. I would rather push a boulder for eternity than sit and stare at a ceiling for the same duration.  

Study Guide

Study Guide

Quiz Oct 1

1. Who said he was most at home with earthly happiness?

Voltaire

2. What does Lenoir see as the main difference between ancient and contemporary quests for happiness?

Separating individual good from common good

3. What are the novels of Michel Houellebecq about?

Narcissistic individualism

4. What obsession thwarts happiness?

Obsession with happiness

5. Depression is allegedly symptomatic of what?

A depressed individual is an individual free of all religious and social tutelage. Still trying to reach modern values.

6. What adaptive quality may be our greatest obstacle to happiness?

Dissatisfaction

Quiz Oct 6

1. Buddhist and Stoics agree: irritation comes not from other people but from what?

It aims to attack the source of the problem by proposing to eliminate the thirst, the attachment

2. Recognizing the First Noble Truth means admitting what about the world?

We cannot bend the world to our desire.

3. Is samsara an objective condition of reality?

No the world in itself is not suffering.

4. What did the Stoics invent?

Cosmopolitanism- All human beings are citizens of the world and have equal rights.

5. Montaigne and the Taoists agree: to be happy we must do what?

We need to learn to love life and adapt to it in accordance to our natures.

6. What are the paradoxes of Taoist wisdom?

The true nature of things contains both good and bad.

Quiz Oct 8

1. Spinoza's symbol of continuity was what?

The bed that he was born in.

2. From what "cruel illusion" did Spinoza want to free us?

Free Will

3. For Spinoza there's nothing more absurd than what?

Universal rules of actions or behavior

4. What is the role of reason in securing happiness, for Spinoza?

Humans are not born free they are made free through reason.

5. Beyond eliminating obstacles, what must we do to be happy?

Organize our life in tune with what makes us grow.

6. What does Spinoza mean by "joy"?

When an affection increases your power of acting.

Quiz October 15

1. David Hume's "really great" anti-Cartesian idea about the self, says Alison Gopnik, is that it does not require what?

No metaphysical foundations, experience is enough.

2. Like Hume, Gopnik says, she found her salvation where?

Curiosity and variety of human mind and experience

3. Hume's _____ (mitigated, exaggerated) skepticism aimed to counter the "overconfidence and dogmatism [that] led to intolerance, to faction, to a lot of the crimes of human history."

Mitigated

4. What is Hume's "pragmatic insight" about reason, the passions, and action, as summarized in his credo "be a philosopher, but... be still a man"?

We have to acknowledge our natures.

5. Hume's essays on happiness include the perspectives of a stoic, an epicurean, a platonist, and a what?

Skeptic

6. Hume believes that_____ is the medicine of the mind, an antidote to the miseries caused by superstition and false religion.

Philosophy

Quiz October 20

1. To what question did young J.S. Mill's "No!" result in (or reflect?) a personal crisis?

If you got everything you wanted would you be happy?

2. What does Mill say is the best theory of happiness for the great majority of us?

Treat something other than happiness as your goal

3. What poets and composers made Mill happy?

Wordsworth, Coleridge, Weber, Mozart

4. What are we unwarranted in saying to one another?

People shall not do with their life what they want.

5. How is "utility" commonly misunderstood?

Utility comes without pleasure

6. What is Mill's reply to the criticism that there's not time to calculate the impact of specific actions on happiness?

We can draw on the history of human species.

Nietzschean happiness pre-empted

Interesting discussions yesterday!*

Caroline asked if the last one was typical of what we talk about in Bioethics? Yes, frequently. Our reading list: Bioethics: The Basics (Campbell-”...the word ‘bioethics’ just means the ethics of life…”); The Case Against Perfection (Sandel-“When science moves faster than moral understanding, as it does today, men and women struggle to articulate their unease…”); On Immunity (Biss-“If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity"); Being Mortal (Gawande-We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think it is to ensure health and survival. But really it is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.”)

So, we'll catch up with Nietzsche on Tuesday, and hear from Crystal, Jesse, and (I hope) Misty/Dilyse on Haybron's Pursuit of Unhappiness. That may push Camus to Thursday before (or do you prefer after?) the exam, but I'm still interested in your suggestions for what else we might wish to do on exam day as well. (Looks like we'll be finishing midterm reports then, too.)

*My dawn post this morning:

We never even got to Nietzschean happiness yesterday - did he? - when, at a reporter's request, we flipped our usual process and did reports first. And that was the ballgame, so positively provocative were our reporters' questions. But it's ok, Nietzsche recurs.

I wonder: what would Nietzsche say, in reply to the questions that pre-empted him?

1. Are you interested in illusory happiness?
2. Can you be happy in an unhappy environment?
3. Would you allow or regulate genetic engineering intended to make people happier?

I suspect he'd evade the first question, with talk of masks, perspectives, and rhetorical shots at the very concept of "real" happiness as a pleasure-seeking convention of weakness.

To the second, he'd disingenuously boast of his own icy and superior state of flourishing amidst the warm-hearted herd.

To the third, he'd insist - perhaps rightly - that to truly enjoy and appreciate one's ascent and arrival at the peak, one must have endured the arduous climb. So, no to Happy designer-genes.

And what would Fritz have said about one of the more heated peripheral topics to arise in our free-flowing response to #3, on GMOs? "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger," maybe?

	TED Talks (@TEDTalks)
10/24/15, 7:06 AM We can now edit our DNA. But let's do it wisely: t.ted.com/jUtRCzU

Headspace

A former monk has turned tech entrepreneur, creating a meditation app called Headspace. He notes the irony in that, but insists that's the best way to make the world happier and more mindful in this device-besotted age.

British-born Andy Puddicombe spent 10 years studying in Buddhist monasteries in India, Nepal and Burma, and then another three in a Tibetan monastery in England. So why is his name now synonymous with Silicon Valley? Puddicombe found a way to combine his passion for mindfulness and meditation with a technology that can bring it would-be-meditators around the world.

The Headspace app, which he co-founded, costs about $70 for a yearly subscription and includes hundreds of meditations, for everyone from beginners to life-long devotees. It also includes specialized meditations for cooking, cycling, running – even people having a melt-down.

The wildly successful app has been been downloaded more than 3 million times, Virgin Atlantic has added an in-flight Headspace channel and Goldman Sachs and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute are among the companies which have purchased bulk subscriptions for their employees.

What would Mathieu Ricard say? Or Nietzsche? Ricard's new book Altruism marks him as the AntiNietzsche, as regards ego-driven will... a very different concept of "self-overcoming" indeed!

William Lane Craig

He pushes Dawkins' buttons, too. (But we'd all probably be happier, wouldn't we, if we took our "buttons" off-line and spent more time articulating  and defending our affirmative beliefs, rather than attacking others'? That's going to be the approach in "Atheism & Philosophy" next semester.)
==

"Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig" - Richard Dawkins

This Christian 'philosopher' is an apologist for genocide. I would rather leave an empty chair than share a platform with him.

Don't feel embarrassed if you've never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name either. Perhaps he is a "theologian". For some years now, Craig has been increasingly importunate in his efforts to cajole, harass or defame me into a debate with him. I have consistently refused, in the spirit, if not the letter, of a famous retort by the then president of the Royal Society: "That would look great on your CV, not so good on mine".

Craig's latest stalking foray has taken the form of a string of increasingly hectoring challenges to confront him in Oxford this October. I took pleasure in refusing again, which threw him and his followers into a frenzy of blogging, tweeting and YouTubed accusations of cowardice. To this I would only say I that I turn down hundreds of more worthy invitations every year, I have publicly engaged an archbishop of York, two archbishops of Canterbury, many bishops and the chief rabbi, and I'm looking forward to my imminent, doubtless civilised encounter with the present archbishop of Canterbury.

In an epitome of bullying presumption, Craig now proposes to place an empty chair on a stage in Oxford next week to symbolise my absence. The idea of cashing in on another's name by conniving to share a stage with him is hardly new. But what are we to make of this attempt to turn my non-appearance into a self-promotion stunt? In the interests of transparency, I should point out that it isn't only Oxford that won't see me on the night Craig proposes to debate me in absentia: you can also see me not appear in Cambridge, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow and, if time allows, Bristol.

But Craig is not just a figure of fun. He has a dark side, and that is putting it kindly. Most churchmen these days wisely disown the horrific genocides ordered by the God of the Old Testament. Anyone who criticises the divine bloodlust is loudly accused of unfairly ignoring the historical context, and of naive literalism towards what was never more than metaphor or myth. You would search far to find a modern preacher willing to defend God's commandment, in Deuteronomy 20: 13-15, to kill all the men in a conquered city and to seize the women, children and livestock as plunder. And verses 16 and 17 are even worse:

"But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them"

You might say that such a call to genocide could never have come from a good and loving God. Any decent bishop, priest, vicar or rabbi would agree. But listen to Craig. He begins by arguing that the Canaanites were debauched and sinful and therefore deserved to be slaughtered. He then notices the plight of the Canaanite children.

"But why take the lives of innocent children? The terrible totality of the destruction was undoubtedly related to the prohibition of assimilation to pagan nations on Israel's part. In commanding complete destruction of the Canaanites, the Lord says, 'You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons, or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods' (Deut 7.3-4). […] God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. […] Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God's grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven's incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives."

Do not plead that I have taken these revolting words out of context. What context could possibly justify them?

"So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgment. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli [sic] soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalising effect on these Israeli [sic] soldiers is disturbing."

Oh, the poor soldiers. Let's hope they received counselling after their traumatic experience. A later post by Craig is – if possible – even more shocking. Referring to his earlier article (above) he says:

"I have come to appreciate as a result of a closer reading of the biblical text that God's command to Israel was not primarily to exterminate the Canaanites but to drive them out of the land.[…] Canaan was being given over to Israel, whom God had now brought out of Egypt. If the Canaanite tribes, seeing the armies of Israel, had simply chosen to flee, no one would have been killed at all. There was no command to pursue and hunt down the Canaanite peoples.
It is therefore completely misleading to characterise God's command to Israel as a command to commit genocide. Rather it was first and foremost a command to drive the tribes out of the land and to occupy it. Only those who remained behind were to be utterly exterminated. No one had to die in this whole affair."

So, apparently it was the Canaanites' own fault for not running away. Right.

Would you shake hands with a man who could write stuff like that? Would you share a platform with him? I wouldn't, and I won't. Even if I were not engaged to be in London on the day in question, I would be proud to leave that chair in Oxford eloquently empty.

And if any of my colleagues find themselves browbeaten or inveigled into a debate with this deplorable apologist for genocide, my advice to them would be to stand up, read aloud Craig's words as quoted above, then walk out and leave him talking not just to an empty chair but, one would hope, to a rapidly emptying hall as well. Guardian

Want to be happier? Stay in the moment.

As part of my group I will be speaking about happiness and being aware in the moment. This video http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_killingsworth_want_to_be_happier_stay_in_the_moment is what I will be going over today. I will talk about mind wandering, tracking happiness, and the causal direction of happiness. How does mind wandering affect happiness? What does tracking of happiness reveal about happiness?

This a funny video about being in the moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkwOrteyQtY

Matthieu Ricard, Spinoza, Quiz Oct8

Th 8 - Lenoir 21, epilogue (Spinoza...). LISTEN: Susan James on Spinoza on the Passions(PB)Reports: Happiness at TED-Dilvin, Jennifer, and Dustin; Happiest people-Shawn, Zach, & Lance

Great job introducing us to "the happiest man in the world," Damon, Caroline, and Jessica! Podcast... Spinoza @dawn

1. Spinoza's symbol of continuity was what?

2. From what "cruel illusion" did Spinoza want to free us?

3. For Spinoza there's nothing more absurd than what?

4. What is the role of reason in securing happiness, for Spinoza?

5. Beyond eliminating obstacles, what must we do to be happy?

6. What does Spinoza mean by "joy"?

More?

DQ:

1. Will you have any particular dying requests? 155

2. Can we freely choose to renounce free will? Or freely choose to affirm it? Or seek new desires? (Remember Schopenhauer's "We can do what we want, but not want what we want.")

3. Why shouldn't we expect a pantheistic universe to yield universal rules of behavior?

4. Can a rationalist pantheist endorse delusional sources of happiness? 178

5. Was Einstein being disingenous when he affirmed "Spinoza's God"?

6. Comment: "There isn't an inch of earth where God is not."

More?

==
Postscript. The anti-Ricard, novelist Michel Houellebecq - much closer to the French stereotype than Frederic Lenoir, who introduced us to him a few classes back - was interviewed in the Times. I prefer the Monk, myself.

PARIS — Michel Houellebecq was seated with his legs crossed in a chair in his publishers’ office here, chain-smoking and flicking away criticism that his latest novel, “Submission,” is Islamophobic, or at least critical of Islam. “I really couldn’t care less, to be honest,” said Mr. Houellebecq, France’s best-known world-weary bad-boy novelist, letting out a little laugh that interrupted his usual deadpan delivery.

Islam itself doesn’t interest him, he continued during a recent interviewbefore the novel’s release in the United States next Tuesday by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “What interests me is the fear that it creates, not the contents,” he said.

“Submission,” which is set in 2022 and imagines France under its first Muslim president, was published in France on Jan. 7, the day jihadists killed 12 people at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, whose cover that week featured Mr. Houellebecq (pronounced WELL-beck) in a magician’s hat, as if predicting the future.

Since then, he has been under 24-hour police protection, a fate that, he dryly said, “could be worse.” Among those killed was his friend the economist Bernard Maris. “It’s the first time someone I knew died for political reasons,” he added. Of the attack on the publication, he said, “I was sad, but I wasn’t surprised.”

A best seller across Europe, “Submission” hit a nerve in France, where it has sold an impressive 650,000 copies. Literary critics praised it. Feminists condemned its depiction of women (supine, in all senses of the word, including in not standing up to the imposition of Shariah law). The right called it prescient. The left called it a gift to the right-wing National Front. Prime Minister Manuel Valls denounced it, saying: “France isn’t Michel Houellebecq. It isn’t intolerance, hate, fear.” In August, France’s establishment dailies, Le Figaro and Le Monde, published five- and six-part series on him... (continues)

Quiz Oct6

T 6 - Lenoir 19-20 (Buddha, Epictetus, Montaigne, Chuang Tzu. LISTEN:Sarah Bakewell on Michel de Montaigne (PB). WATCH: Montaigne. Grade exam 1 Midterm group report presentations continue: Happiness east and west-Damon, Caroline, and Jessica

1. Buddhist and Stoics agree: irritation comes not from other people but from what?

2. Recognizing the First Noble Truth means admitting what about the world?

3. Is samsara an objective condition of reality?

4. What did the Stoics invent?

5. Montaigne and the Taoists agree: to be happy we must do what?

6. What are the paradoxes of Taoist wisdom?

DQ:

1. In what sense do you agree or disagree that "the world is One"? (114) Isn't it also many? Are all relations ultimately internal? Are there realities we ought not simply to accept, but should attempt to change? Is it ethically responsible to reframe one's perception of reality so as it accept it as a totality?

2. Is it really true that we cannot change the world in deference to our wishes?

3. Don't the Buddhists also attempt to change the world, insofar as they attempt to minimize the impact of suffering?

4. Are you a cosmopolitan? What is your highest allegiance, if not to a specific local community or nation?

5. "Stop worrying and enjoy your life." Is happiness as simple as this (granting the relative difficulty for some of displacing worry and embracing joy)?

6. Is wu wei, non-acting ("trying not to try"), profoundly spiritual or merely self-indulgent?

5 Life-stages of happiness

“Our meaning of happiness is constantly shaped and reshaped by small choices we make every day.”

“One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy,” 25-year-old George Eliot wrote in an 1844 letter to a friend. But rather than directed at a static end goal, this learning is a dynamic recalibration of our very definition of happiness as we move through different life-stages. “Human beings,” Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert observed a century and a half after Eliot as he contemplated our illusory understanding of happiness, “are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

The evolving conception of happiness over the human lifetime is what Stanford social psychologist Jennifer Aaker and her team study in order to help us better calibrate what we believe makes us happy to what actually makes us happy. In this animated short film for the Future of Storytelling Summit — which also gave us Margaret Atwood on how technology shapes storytelling — Aaker outlines how the primary definition of happiness shifts in five systematic stages over time: discoveryduring childhood and adolescence, pursuit in our mid-twenties, balance in our late twenties and early thirties, meaning in our late thirties and forties, and savoring from our fifties on. But these chapters, Aaker illustrates through her team’s studies, need not be linear or sequential — different life-experiences help us reorder and edit them...

(continues at Brainpickings)

BY MARIA POPOVA

Music

   So far in our group, we have covered a great deal of ideas about what it means to be happy and what we could do to (or if we should) strive for happiness. One thing though that has not appeared often enough is music. Music has been an integral part of my life, whether it be the appreciation or creation of it. For most people, it is easy to acknowledge that listening to music can bring joy. What may not be as easy to see is why it can bring about this experience, or the elation of performing music can bring.

   Today in class, we will tackle a few of these ideas, such as what music actually does to our brains, and why performing music can be so joyful. We will discuss the effects music has on us chemical, psychologically, and socially, and see how sitting down and playing music with your friends can be akin to having a conversation with peers.

   If you need help getting in the mood, below is a list of science's top 10 happy songs, and a video that explains how playing music and speaking are not completely independent activities (as well as some pretty phenomenal bass playing).

TEN HAPPIEST SONGS ACCORDING TO SCIENCE

--Don't Stop Me Now- Queen

--Dancing Queen- ABBA

--Good Vibrations- Beach Boys

--Uptown Girl- Billy Joel

--Eye of the Tiger- Survivor

--I'm a Believer- The Monkees

--Girls Just Wanna Have Fun- Cyndi Lauper

--Livin' on a Prayer- Bon Jovi

--I Will Survive- Gloria Gaynor

--walking on Sunshine- Katrina and The Waves