USUPhilosophy

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!

… is available. I’ve put extra copies in the envelope on my office door, Main 208. Looks like a very good collection of essays by undergraduates in philosophy.

Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.

Read the rest of the interview with Woody Allen here.

A few students have asked me about the possibility of forming some sort of informal reading group over the summer, thus avoiding the very real dangers of intellectual withdrawal. So let this be a space for self-organization: if you are interested, add a comment, maybe with a proposal of what to read, or when/where to meet. I can’t promise how involved I’ll be, as I have a book to write, but I hope to poke my head in here and there, at the very least.