Study Guide

A Philosophy of Walking, 1-3

1. What has introduced an invasive "sporting spirit" to the child's play of walking?

2. What does Gros say we escape from, by walking?

3. Nietzsche said you should disbelieve any idea that _____.

4. Where and how did Nietzsche write The Wanderer and His Shadow? *

5. How did Nietzsche's walks differ from Kant's?

6. What advantage does the peripatetic author have over his desk-bound counterpart?

7. Nietzsche preferred climbing because it affords a _____ outlook.

8. What Nietzschean idea does Gros explicitly connect to the experience of walking, particularly long repeated excursions on familiar paths?

9. For Nietzsche the discovery of Turin brought a renewal of _____.

PW 4-7

1. Outside is generally regarded as a _____ between insides.

2. When are outside/inside inverted?

3. What was Mateo's walking lesson?

4. What's the illusion of speed?

5. How did Rimbaud describe himself, in his "poetry of well-being"?

6. Rimbaud said "I'm a _____, nothing more."

7. What's the source of "deep joy" Gros attributes to Rimbaud's way of walking?

8. Why did Nietzsche, Thoreau, and Rousseau (among others) prefer to walk alone?

9. How do you "become two" after walking a long time?

PW ch8-10

1. How does Gros describe morning walks?

2. What does "chatter" do to our consciousness? (If you know Heidegger, how would you compare it to what he calls "idle talk"?)

3. What do you lose, when you are "doing nothing but walk"?

4. What made Rousseau sick?

5. Rousseau, the new _____, was "the doggish man of the Enlightenment" after deciding to break with ("stop frequenting")  _____.

6. What is homo viator?

7. Rousseau's "natural man instinctively ____ but never ____ himself."

8. What w as Rousseau's state of mind during his last walks, as recounted in Reveries of the Solitary Walker?

9. What becomes unimportant when you walk? What kind of interior awareness stops? What may we rediscover?

PW 11-12, 15-16, 18-19

1. The first philosophic treatise on walking was called _____.

2. What's the principle of Thoreau's new economics?

3.  To walk is to experience _____.

4. Love of morning is a measure of _____.

5. What was Thoreau's reaction to "the other world"?

6. What's in the heart of a healthy man in winter, according to Thoreau, and how according to Gros does this affect walking?

7. Who said Socrates wasn't a great walker? Why not?

8. What does peripatein mean?

9. What sedentary "classic opposition" did Cynics reject? What are Truth and Nature, for the Cynic?

10. How did the Cynic achieve cosmopolitanism?

11. Why is happiness fragile?

12. What concerns did Kant share with Nietzsche?

13. When may a stroll become an "aesthetic moment"?

PW 22-25

1. Walking is, paradoxically, a renunciation or resignation to being earthbound that gives us _____.

2. When he ditched his rucksack at the foot of a mountain Gros felt a sensation of  _____.

3. How does walking help you "hold yourself to account"?

4. Monks suggested walking as a remedy for _____.

5. Who was first to conceive of the walking as a "poetic act"?

6. What practice in Tibetan spirituality is key to walking without fatigue?

The Sentiment of Rationality, The Dilemma of Determinism

1. By what "marks" does James propose to recognize rationality?

2. What is James's definition of rationality? (What "feeling" is associated with it?)

3. Under what conditions does James endorse the "subjective method" of believing what you desire to believe?

4. Does James intend to prove the reality of free will?

5. What are the two poles of the "dilemma of determinism"? (Into what dilemma do we fall if we deny possiblity?)

6. Free will is compatible with divine providence, provided the universe include what?

"On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" 
1. What makes life "significant," (= happy?) for James? 2. What do we miss, if we "miss the joy" of living? 3. What were the external catalysts of inward significance for Wordsworth and Whitman? 4. What causes the "highly educated classes" to lose a capacity for joy? 5. At what "level" does  James say life assume an especially intense interest?
6. What are the "positive" and "negative" results of James's reflections in this essay?

Conquest of Happiness* 1-3

1. What mistakes does Russell blame for ordinary unhappiness?

2. What is the "first step towards happiness"?

3. How does Russell say he escaped the Ecclesiastic mood?

4. Why does Russell value love?

5. Why do "successful people" stay on an unhappy treadmill, rather than quit the rat-race?

6. What does Russell say we have cultivated, at the expense of senses and intellect?

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16-17

7. How may we prevent personal failure from turning into utter defeat?

8. What's an indispensable condition of secure and lasting happiness?

9. To be happy you must have free_____ and wide _____.

10. Why is a happy person untroubled by the thought of death?