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Here is an interesting Times article by David Brooks on the how the internet and books shape academic performance.  The broader point is that the different cultures that currently travel with each medium shape us as learners.  As it stands now, he think the internet helps you be informed and hip while books help you become cultivated.

An excerpt:

“The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom.

A person enters this world as a novice, and slowly studies the works of great writers and scholars. Readers immerse themselves in deep, alternative worlds and hope to gain some lasting wisdom. Respect is paid to the writers who transmit that wisdom.

A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary America. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.

These different cultures foster different types of learning. The great essayist Joseph Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on, as Epstein writes, “in those lively waters outside the boring mainstream.”

But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.

Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students.”

This fall we will see many more offerings in Philosophy than we have had in recent years, due mainly to the return/addition of more teaching faculty.

Gordon Steinhoff will return from his 09-10 sabbatical, and will resume teaching his courses in logic, metaphysics, and East Asian Philosophy.

Harrison Kleiner has been hired as a Lecturer, and will be teaching Ethics and Social Ethics, as well as distance ed sections of Social Ethics and Business Ethics. He also will be teaching a section of USU 1320 (Civilization: Humanities). We’re not sure yet exactly what Kleiner will be teaching in the spring, but his assignment is sure to include the highly-anticipated Contemporary European Philosophy. Also note that Kleiner is moving office, from the basement of Main to Main 341A.

Gary McGonagill will also be joining our faculty as a Lecturer this fall from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. Dr. McGonagill’s Ph.D is in Classics from Harvard, and he will be teaching our Ancient Philosophy course, as well as some sections of Intro to Philosophy and yet another section of USU 1320. His work has focused on the intersections of ancient Greek philosophy with early Christianity. McGonagill will also offer a seminar course in the spring, on a topic of his own devising.

Huenemann has been appointed an Associate Dean in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, so he will only be teaching one course each term next year, but he will be generally available for advising, consultation, and sarcastic skepticism.

An article here reprises some of G.K. Chesterton’s thoughts on America.  Chesterton called America a “nation with the soul of a Church”.  It is, Chesterton remarked, the only nation “founded on a Creed” (“a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.”).

An excerpt from the article:

“Now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest thing in the world,” Chesterton continues.  America’s creed is universal in its implications, recognizing knowable truths applicable to all men at all times. And in that sense, the country’s essence, he concludes, is “religious because it is not racial” in the way that “England is English as France is French or Ireland is Irish; the great mass of men taking certain national traditions for granted.”

At the same time, America’s creed is limiting because the creed itself defines what it is to be an American; it is the truths we hold. As Chesterton puts it, even when American pluralism is compared to a melting pot, “that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The melting-pot must not melt.” That solid substance – that creed – he writes, is “traced on the lines of Jeffersonian democracy.”

Very interesting philosophically:

We are overshadowed by a nimbus of ideas. There is our physical reality and then there is our conception of ourselves, our conception of self — one that is as powerful as, perhaps even more powerful than, the physical reality we inhabit. A version of self that can survive even the greatest bodily tragedies. We are creatures of our beliefs. This is at the heart of Ramachandran’s ideas about anosognosia — that the preservation of our fantasy selves demands that we often must deny our physical reality. Self-deception is not enough. Something stronger is needed.

Full article here (part 4 of a 5-part series).

coming up in November. Details here.