I would love to teach my Enlightenment to the Present class starting with this Berthold Brecht play about Galileo, written in Germany, 1938. Better yet, take my class to the theater if it’s ever in town.

Then again, consider that year and place. Maybe it would be a great way to end the semester, as I plan to do this year with Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, set in a 14th century Monastery with a cast of Benedictine and Franciscan monks, though written partially to address controversies in 20th century semiotics.

 

Too many papers to grade this morning to spend any time grading, so instead I’ll leave you with this. Philosopher Peter Bogghosian argues for the thesis that, to paraphrase: having faith is counter-productive to pursuing the truth. Or, having faith causes one to have more false beliefs and less true beliefs that pursuing the truth without faith.

His argument is clear and provocative, and he seems like a talented speaker too. Regardless of one’s own stance on faith, Bogghosian’s open-minded approach seems like it would give something to think about for everyone.

After having disabled comments for nearly a year, they are enabled again.

Not one day into my goal of posting every day, and I have already skipped a day.

Yesterday, I attempted to grade papers, again. There is something about this activity that usually feels utterly foreign to me. When I do it correctly, and when I am in the correct mind-set, it is long and tiresome mental work, but in the end rewarding for both students and myself. But getting in the correct mind set is difficult. Still, I made progress yesterday- better progress than I had made in the previous few days. Hopefully I will have something complete by the next round of classes.

This winter in Chicago can barely be called winter. Most of the Minnesota falls and springs I have experienced were colder and snowier than this. It is late February, and we have perhaps had seven days with any snow on the ground. There has truly been no more than two days with very cold weather. And by “very cold,” I mean very cold for Chicago. Has it reached below zero even once this year? I cannot recall.

I am once again starting a personal writing project, which I began this morning. I will not be sharing it on this blog, exempting a sample here and there. It will be a collection of personal essays, written for a general audience, though I have no idea if they will be of interest to anyone. I have selected a number of topics so far. This is only a rough draft, but the topics I am playing with include:

On knowledge, its pursuit, and those who “know.”

On the difference between the 17^th century and 21^st century letters.

On the ideal form of public dialogue.

On god, and modern believers’ embrace of it.

On god, and modern atheists’ rejection of It.

On god, and how the proper contemplation of it expands the soul and mind.

On god, and how one can have proper contemplation of it.

On essays, arguments, and their proper goals.

On Socrates.

On my goals of being a teacher, and how I have failed.

On being liberal and conservative.

On growing up in the suburbs, to live in the city.

On being a former Marine amongst an ocean of life-long progressives.

On joy and sorrow.

On alcohol, its joys and dangers.

It has been many months since my last post. I wonder why my impulse ceased, and hope to get back to posting regularly.

This blog had largely become a teaching blog; a place for me to reflect on philosophy and my classes, to work out solutions to various problems, and explores ideas in a public forum (though my audience is exceptionally small, and I like it like that). This blog actually became one of my most important tools in my first three or four years of teaching, as I would frequently stumble upon great flaws in my teaching, or need to work out how to teach a particular philosophical lesson to my classroom audience.

But something happened in the past year. A switch occurred over the course of a few months whereby I became much more comfortable teaching. I rarely finish a class now where I think the entire thing is failing and I don’t have a solution. I still frequently have a class where I feel there is significant room for improvement, and occasionally teach a class where I feel something went horribly wrong. But these problems are no longer new: I feel more like an experienced doctor who has seen a wide variety of ailments, and is now more capable of identifying the ailment and prescribing a solution. Where before, I might obsess for days about the conduct of a single class, I can now usually spend a relaxed twenty minutes reflecting on the bus and finding a new solution that works.

But this is troubling. Just because I don’t see problems, it does not mean that problems are not present. And if I don’t see them, I can’t solve them. Have I really reached a stage of teaching where I no longer make radical changes and improvements in my teaching, or have I merely become lazy?

On the other hand, maybe my lack of posting has more to do with being exceptionally busy this year. I am taking grad classes in philosophy all year and it is proving adept at occupying all available time. And I am also simply out of the habit of writing. I will make sure I put an entry up here every day, even if it is mundane and boring, in order to get back into the habit of thinking and writing something more worthwhile.

How I Read Philosophy

[This is a draft of a tutorial I’m working on to help my students feel more comfortable reading philosophy. Comments, critiques, and additional tips would be welcome!]

Reading philosophy is still difficult for me, despite having been at it for ten years. But it’s been doable since the beginning, and I believe it is doable for anyone who is capable of attending college. Throughout that time, I’ve learned an important lesson: reading philosophy is unlike reading most other materials.

When reading philosophy, there are two principals things that a reader needs to pay attention to: structure and claims. We are often habituated to read for claims: “what the author is saying.” But philosophy isn’t philosophy without structure. The hallmark of philosophy is not what is being said, but how. Most philosophy essays are in the process of literally building an argument. As the reader, that building must occur in my mind as it occurs in the text. The reader could jump to the main claims, or read a quick review on Wikipedia, and understand what the claim is, but that doesn’t mean the reader understands philosophy. As one is reading, one should always ask one’s self, “Do I clearly understand what was said before, and how this current section is building upon the old?”

This short paper is broken down into a few sections. First, there are what I consider some basic principles for reading philosophy. I cannot even imagine how someone can regularly read and benefit from philosophy without these principles. Second, I describe how I’ve put some of the principles into practice in my personal life. Third, I briefly discuss how one’s reading style sometimes must change depending on the author one is reading. It is as if one must take on entirely different psychologies for Plato’s casual dialogues, Spinoza’s geometrical postulates, Kant’s dry analysis, and Nietzsche’s thunderous aphorisms.

I. Basic Principles

1. Reserve time. Reading philosophy will take a lot of time. Do not fool yourself into thinking that you can understand 20 pages of Aristotle with one hour of reading. On my good days, I try to set aside three or four hours at a time for reading.
2. Concentrate on reading. Reading philosophy is almost a meditation. Complete concentration is critical. The reader is carefully building a thought-structure in her mind, and while it is being learned, it is delicate. Anything that averts the attention of the reader is like a puff of wind on a castle of cards.
3. Practice patience. Patience, especially in regard to reading, is a habit. And as a habit, every time you practice patience, your patience gets better. Don’t let anyone tell you that they sped-read through a philosophy book. Maybe they did: there are a few extraordinary minds out there, but in most cases they’re exaggerating or didn’t understand the text.
4. Review. One of the most valuable practices to engage in is the leisurely review. Whenever I’m taking a walk, riding the bus, waiting in line, etc., I try to recall a recent reading project. Can I construct the argument in my mind? Where are the holes? Frequently, when I’m reading in a coffee shop and need a reading break, I close my eyes, lean back, and simply play with the ideas. This seems to solidify the knowledge in my mind, and makes it easier to recall later on.
5. Discuss: Whenever possible, find an excuse to discuss what you’ve read. Be prepared for someone to criticize your interpretation of the text. Be humble enough to re-examine your interpretation, but confident enough to stand by your own reasoning. This is as close to a scientific experiment as the art of reading gets. Every time we read, we develop an interpretation of the text. This interpretation is essentially a hypothesis about what the text means. And as we all know, hypotheses must be tested in a laboratory of some kind. But the interpretations of others are also hypotheses, and may be wrong. If you’re in a discussion with someone with much more experience on the subject than yourself, for example, a senior student or a professor, it will be more tempting to abandon your interpretation for theirs. But if you do not understand why their interpretation is better, then adopting their interpretation doesn’t serve you at all. You are seeking understanding, not imitation. And after all, professors can be wrong too. Professors know this, because they spend much of their time arguing that other professors are wrong, and responding to arguments that they are wrong themselves. This is not a bad thing: they do it because it assists in their understanding and the growth of their knowledge.
6. Take notes. This takes extra work, and I don’t do it nearly as much as I should. But on some occasions, I will force myself to outline an argument while I’m reading it. The affect on my comprehension and memory is unbelievable.

II. My Own Practices: Everyone is different, and the best way to learn how to read is simply to practice. But my specific practices may be helpful to others in the short or long term.

First, I need a comfortable spot. My two favorite places are my bed, or a hard chair in a coffee shop. The bed is excellent because I can lie prone, comfortable, and completely forget about my body. But occasionally, the softness of the bed makes me lazy, and especially after I’ve read for a few hours. My reading becomes slow and inattentive. At times like this, I will take about a 30 minute walk to a coffee shop (picking something that’s suitably far away to ensure that I get my blood flowing)

Second, I set the timer on my stopwatch. I set it for one hour, at which time it beeps. I started doing this because I’ve noticed one of my biggest distractions is checking the time. This way, I know that I’m not losing track of time. Psychologically, it seems easier to let my mind absorb the reading and leave the world behind for a little while.

Third, sometimes, I use a notecard to guide my reading, scrolling the card down the page so it is easy to tell what line I’m supposed to be on. The physical movement of moving the card also (1) helps me keep a healthy pace, and (2) somehow alerts me to when I haven’t been paying attention. Which brings me to four:

Fourth, do not be afraid to return to an earlier passage again and again and again. If someone ever watched me reading, they might sometimes get the feeling that I am reading a book backwards, such is my habit to return to earlier pages. If I’m reading, and I realize I haven’t understood the previous page, or I realize that my mind has still been reflecting on something I read four paragraphs ago, I return to the last place where I was on solid footing.

III. Different Styles for Different Authors

I have noticed that different authors require different styles of reading. Often, if I apply the wrong style, I will get very little from the text. It is as if each philosophy essay is a padlock of some sort, and the lock-picker needs to use the right tool to get to the treasure inside.

Immanuel Kant is interesting to read. I find that when reading Kant, if I move too slowly, I never understand what is being said or the structure. It’s counter-intuitive, but this most immensely complex and logical philosopher requires an initial aggressive forced march through the text. Once I get a feel for the argument, I can go back and spend more time analyzing the structure.

Nietzsche is another interesting case. He says of himself that he needs to be read slowly. But frankly, that rarely gets me anywhere, especially when I was first starting my Nietzsche readings. Reading Nietzsche is like assembling a puzzle, and first, you need to ignore the pieces that don’t make sense, and hunt for the pieces that do make sense. When you hit upon a piece that seems to make sense, study it, think about it, then set it aside. You won’t know how it fits into the whole, and because of this, you won’t be able to get a complete understanding of the piece itself. But it’s a start. As you go further into Nietzsche, you’ll find more pieces that make some sense. You’ll put those different pieces together, and you’ll start to understand the structure of the whole. Then, the pieces that initially made no sense, will make more sense. Eventually you’ll be in a place where almost everything he writes makes some sense, because it clearly fits into a larger picture clearly.

This is far from a universal rule, but generally, more modern authors pay better attention to clarity and organization. Since Socrates, the logos of the philosophers had been set opposed to rhetoric of the sophists, and this was probably a mistake. The rule becomes especially true with authors like William James and Sigmund Freud at the turn of the 19^th/20^th century. Their writing is crisp, and it is easy to find the distinct claims in each paragraph and the relevant support. Plato is a brilliant author, but the dialogue format means that claims are often buried or rejected as the dialogue progresses. Many of the 17^th century authors, such as Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza, strived for organization, and you can see their very blatant but useful structures of organization guiding their work. David Hume in the 18^th century recognized the importance of rhetoric in philosophy Hegel, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to care about his reader at all. But like I said, this is far from a universal rule. Many contemporary philosophers are worse than just about everything that came before, and the best passages of Plato and Aristotle outshine almost everything that’s written today.

My three mile run this morning hurt more than the twelve mile runs I was making regularly in June. That’s what I get for sitting on my butt for a month.

I suppose it is long past due for another post. I have fallen out of the habit of writing over the past two months, which is a shame, but that sort of thing happens from time to time.

Comments are again enabled. They were disabled because of issues that I shouldn’t discuss here. But that’s a different story.

This morning, I started yet another book, which brings my total of current readings projects up to some uncountable number. This was is simply titled Aristotle, by Christopher Shields, a “Tutor” of Ancient Philosophy at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. I am not exactly sure what the title of “Tutor” means, but a quick look at wikipedia states that it is comparable to American “Teaching Assistants,” ie, post-graduate students who assist a lecturing professor and frequently run lab-type study groups. But he’s a scholar, and it’s been refreshing to read a well-written and informative account of Aristotle’s life and philosophy. Aristotle, of course, wrote on nearly every subject under, over, and including the sun, and it is doubtful that any single individual in the history of Earth has had a comparable influence on intellectual pursuits. I have only read a small fraction of his works, namely Ethics, Poetics, and parts of Rhetoric, Categories, Metaphysics, Politics, and De Anima. Nevertheless, I have spent 10 years studying philosophy and 4 teaching it, and that has inevitably given me a basic understanding of his most important concepts, such as his four causes and the substance/attribute/accident divide. Philosophers throughout Western civilization have used and/or critiqued these concepts, and they are as familiar to most philosophers as Aristotle’s logic. Anyway, I’m excited about the book because it will help me quickly and efficiently fill in a lot of my gaps and refine the knowledge I already have. Hopefully someday I’ll have the time to read more of Aristotle’s gigantic corpus.

Continue reading “Current Readings” →

As I laid down to bed last night, exhausted and yearning to unconsciousness, my mind was occupied with the anxious thoughts of the last few hours: anxious that I had had an unproductive and distracted day and that I had to delay a trip by a day because of my sloth, among other things. They were pessimistic, self-deprecating thoughts, useless for making life better, and even contributing to more of the same the next day.

Fortunately, in my exhaustion, I sunk into sleep quickly and had a long, peaceful sleep.

When I awoke the next day, my mind was clear and empty. I felt pleased, lying in my soft bed with the sun creeping in, the heaviness of sleep quickly slipping away. But I don’t think I had an identity at this point: the memories of the previous night were not yet in my mind: I was not recognizing the failure of the previous day, or the bus that I was currently missing. There may not even have been a recognition that I was in Chicago, or even that I was Kamran. My conscious experience was almost empty of content.

However, a moment later, the same thoughts that accompanied me to sleep rushed back into my consciousness. And with the content, the pessimism followed. I noticed it was as though I was “becoming” a certain person, with a certain psychology, at the moment those thoughts came into my mind. Prior to that moment, I could have been anybody, or it could have been any day in my life, both the good days and the bad. That pre-content moment was identical to any other pre-content moment I’ve had on nearly every morning of my life.

The implication is that my mood is set, my identity is set, based on what thoughts came before: perhaps even those same thoughts that I had when I was going to bed the previous night. After a bad day, we often like to say that tomorrow is the beginning of a new day, but can that really be true? There is too much of the previous day’s thoughts that still occupy the new day’s thoughts, and if an individual’s identity and psychology is identical to the content of those thoughts, then there is no such thing as the “first day of the rest of your life.”

The semester wrapped up about a week ago. With all the end-of-semester shenanigans, it seems I neglected this blog. I have also had nothing worthwhile to write. I write this with the hopes that it breaks the habit of not posting.

I will not make this long, but I wanted to quickly post about two books that I’ve started in the past few days. First is Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes. My dad gave this to me for Christmas, but at 550 pages, it wasn’t something I wanted to start in the middle of the semester. It’s a novel about a platoon of Marines in the Vietnam War. Unlike many war books I’ve read, this one carries some serious literary value. The characters are much more complex and evolving than I’m used to, and the issues it deals with are not just war issues. Racism, ambition, deceit, and politics have all been major themes. Perhaps I’ll have more to say about it later.

The other book is Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. Fish is a very controversial intellectual, but one that I admire. He gets me to think, and that’s all I really want. For a long time, I’ve wanted a re-education in writing well, and I ran across an article about Fish in “The Chronicle of Higher Education.” It referenced this book, it sounded perfect, and picked it up immediately. I anticipate I’ll get these wrapped up in the next couple days (maybe longer for Matterhorn).

I’m also working on another project, dealing with writing for my students. I’ve had some revelations from last semester that have inspired me to take a different approach to writing instruction: not a radically different approach, but a different way to teach what I’ve already been teaching.