Atheism & Philosophy
PHIL 3310. Exploring the philosophical, ethical, spiritual, existential, social, and personal implications of a godless universe, and supporting their study at Middle Tennessee State University & beyond.
Tuesday, January 7, 2025
one with the infinite
https://www.threads.net/@humanists_uk/post/DEhXYPysszc?xmt=AQGzPjJeWS24-29zz_kNxZrfiIqZAcmMwPK6w7gnwBLgsQ
Monday, December 30, 2024
Faith, hope, gratitude, decency: James Earl Carter, 1924-2024
Has there been a more admirable, estimable, and under-valued public figure in our time than Jimmy Carter? Every semester, I talk about him in class as the anti-Machiavelli (and obviously the anti-Trump).
"A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can to extend a helping hand to others. It is a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity."If this decency and quiet strength came from his enduring faith, a Jamesian pragmatic pluralist must applaud its value for living. Fruits, not roots. “I found I was absolutely, completely at ease about death. I’m going to live again… Faith in something is an inducement not to dormancy but to action.”
We are, as Dawkins said, lucky to get to die. We got to live. The great challenge is to live well. Jimmy did.
Friday, December 27, 2024
Defending experience against 'philosophy'
Feeling It Out
Alice Gregory’s article on the philosopher L. A. Paul and her circle of oddly amusing philosophers was itself amusing and instructive (“Note to Selves,” December 9th). A great deal of what passes for the pursuit of wisdom in academia these days is, indeed, esoteric, technical, and, finally, irrelevant. But it should be noted that Professor Paul is hardly a pioneer in asserting, however “hesitantly,” that “experience has a kind of value” and that philosophy ought to be less “detached from ordinary life.” William James and the pragmatists said it long ago. In 1900, James, immersed in preparing lectures that would become “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” described the “problem” he set himself as “to defend (against all the prejudices of my ‘class’) ‘experience’ against ‘philosophy’ as being the real backbone of the world’s religious life.”
Phil Oliver
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
Middle Tennessee State University
Nashville, Tenn.https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/30/letters-from-the-december-30-2024-issue
Monday, December 23, 2024
Friday, December 13, 2024
Humanist common sense (in the UK)
— What I Believe: Humanist ideas and philosophies to live by by Andrew Copson