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So you just graduated from college with a philosophy degree.  Now what?  You’ve been living in an educational bubble that has allowed you to live the life of the mind, but now practical concerns are pulling you away from the cherished task of contemplation.

The relationship between the contemplative life and the practical life has always been vexed.  Aristotle describes the difficulty in Book X of his Nicomachean Ethics:

“But [a contemplative] life would be too high for man; for it is not in so far as he is man that he will live so, but in so far as something divine is present in him; and by so much as this is superior to our composite nature is its activity superior to that which is the exercise of the other kind of virtue. If reason is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything.”

The difficult that Aristotle finds is that our most natural desire (men by nature desire to understand) is strangely something of an unnatural desire, for fulfilling this desire seems to require that we be something that we are not – divine.  In other words, to satisfy this natural desire we must needs go beyond our composite nature.  This introduces a problem – how do I live a life that is both practical and contemplative?  At the end of the day, I think Aristotle aims at some kind of a balance here, but it is not at all clear how to work that out.  He goes on to contrast the “perfect happiness” of contemplation with the kind of practical happiness that “befits out human estate”, and seems to try to strike a balance but I don’t think ever quite manages to clearly negotiate the tension.  Instead, Aristotle leaves us at the end of his great work on the practical life with a great argument for why contemplation is the best possible (or is it impossible?) life for man.

It is tempting to believe that one can live the “life of the mind” only in the academe.  And so many liberal arts students graduate from college and think graduate school.  You can’t imagine setting aside the life of the mind for the all-too-practical life of a business person or some such thing.  But yet the prospects for a career after graduate school are exceptionally grim.  So what should you do?

Well, this article suggests that it is just wrong-headed to think that a life of the mind cannot exist outside the academe.  Is there a proper balance available out there?  For those of you out there working in the “real world”, share your experiences.  This is an issue that will face nearly all of our graduates.

The Zeno Effect is a new (to me) quantum physics effect that re-enchants the ancient Zeno Paradox.  Zeno, the greek mathematician, suggested that an arrow in flight could only be seen at a single position at each moment in time.  The lack of observable motion in the instant meant that it was not moving at all.

The fabulously brilliant computer nerd (before electronic computers), Alan Turning, demonstrated that a quantum system could be observed with sufficient frequency to freeze the evolving quantum system into a stationary state (even though it is an evolving system).  The Quantum Zeno Effect has been proposed as the method by which an advance brain can freeze-frame its state for analysis of the present moment.  Here is a section from the Wikipedia article on the Quantum Zeno Effect:

Significance to cognitive science

The quantum Zeno effect (with its own controversies related to measurement) is becoming a central concept in the exploration of controversial and unproven theories of quantum mind consciousness within the discipline of congitive science.  In his book, “Mindful Universe” (2007), Henry Stapp claims that the quantum Zeno effect is the main method by which the mind holds a superposition of the state of the brain in the attention. He advances that this phenomenon is the principal method by which the conscious will effects change, a possible solution to the mind-body dichotomy. Stapp and co-workers do not claim finality of their theory, but only:

The new framework, unlike its classic-physics-based predecessor, is erected directly upon, and is compatible with, the prevailing principles of physics.

Needless to say, such conjectures have their opponents, serving perhaps to create more furor, rather than less, for example, see Bourget. A summary of the situation is provided by Davies:

There have been many claims that quantum mechanics plays a key role in the origin and/or operation of biological organisms, beyond merely providing the basis for the shapes and sizes of biological molecules and their chemical affinities.…The case for quantum biology remains one of “not proven.” There are many suggestive experiments and lines of argument indicating that some biological functions operate close to, or within, the quantum regime, but as yet no clear-cut example has been presented of non-trivial quantum effects at work in a key biological process.

While this last objection may no longer be valid, the significance of the Zeno effect in determining the rate of quantum decoherence in biological systems remains unknown.

Here is the full article:    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno_effect

Think about it for a moment.

My grades are in, so I have officially changed hats from teacher to stay-at-home Dad.  (I might add that being a parent of young kids has only deepened my view about the teleological striving in human nature).  This post and video are totally unrelated to philosophy, but I think the new Toyota “swagger wagon” ads are funny takes on those of us who find ourselves tooling around town in minivans (a few of the other ads are linked at the end of the video):

So look for me ‘rolling hard through the streets and the cul-de-sacs’ in my Toyota minivan this summer with my two (soon to be three) future Philosopher Queens in tow, and know that I’ll still be rocking Thomas Aquinas along with Thomas the Train.

Here’s a passage from the memoirs of Robert Paul Wolff:

For the first time in my life, I had assigned a casebook, which is to say a collection of snippets from the great philosophers, instead of assigning entire works, such as Plato Dialogues. I soldiered on, “covering” the material, until I got to a selection by Hume containing his classic critique of causal inference. This was relatively late in the semester, and I was bored out of my mind. I can say with absolute confidence that I was not doing a good job of teaching. At the end of the next class after we had done Hume, a young man came up to talk to me. He said he had been troubled by Hume. I was astonished. I had done everything in my power to drain the last vestige of power from Hume’s words. I asked him how he had handled this distress. “I spoke to my priest,” he said, “but he could not help me, so he told me to call the office of the Archdiocese.” “What did they say?” I asked, expecting to be given some version of the party line. “A Monsignor answered. When I told him what Hume said, He answered, ‘Well, some people say that, but we don’t,’ and he hung up the phone.”

I was genuinely humbled. Despite my best efforts to guarantee that no student would walk away from my class with an original thought, David Hume had reached his hand across two centuries, grabbed that student by the scruff of the neck, and had given him a shaking that bid fair to shake him loose from a lifetime of unthinking obedience to received truth. It was the greatest testimony I have ever personally witnessed to the power of a liberal education .

One endeavor you may wish to take up is an organized assault upon the great books. Over on this website is a 10-year plan for working through many great works. You can probably polish off the first three years or so this summer, if you work at it.

An added plea: if you decide to do this, and you are on or near campus, please keep requesting the relevant volumes from the “Great Books of the Western World” series edited by Mortimer Adler. All of these volumes are currently being held in the automated-retrieval system at the USU library (the “BARN”), and the best way to get these volumes shelved in the public stacks is to keep requesting them. It’s easy: just look up the work from the online catalog, and click the “request” button, and the book will be waiting for you at the circulation desk. The great books really don’t belong in a barn!