Exam 1 review

 Exam 1 will be drawn from the even-numbered questions (2,4,6...) in January and February. Wording will be adjusted to fit the exam format, which will include an answer bank. Best way to prepare: revisit the texts. Recorded review: 

https://mtsu.zoom.us/rec/share/RhvUht89aFHkSpfobgKh7iGtTEkL4jkdvJ9T5Ez87ILXJMDZDVnhvQr5ZA1z7iCS.Osx4mFc-u6uG5Hw9?startTime=1647452668000 (Passcode: ^X4F7?BB)

JB 1-2

1. What did the word "atheism" conjure up for Baggini in his schooldays? Did it conjure similar associations for you? Or does it still?
2. The atheist's disbelief in god is usually accompanied by what other rejection, and what affirmation? 
3. What reductive 'ism do atheists usually not embrace? Which 
4. Do you have any problem with the claim that love exists, even though it is not identical with some physical substance or "stuff"?
5. What kind of absence of evidence IS evidence of absence?
6. What natural human tendency leading to extraordinary but poorly evidenced claims did David Hume point out?
7. What do you think of the claim that all religions are paths to the same truth?
8. What do you think of Russell's statement about alternately deploying the labels atheist and agnostic depending on his audience?
9. Do you agree that atheism is not a faith position?
10. Is Pascal's Wager rigged?

Atheist ethics; Meaning & purpose (JB 3-4). Post your thoughts (etc.) in the comments space below.

1. What was Ivan Karamazov wrong about? Why do you think this attitude was popular in the 19th century with philosophers like Nietzsche, and is popular still with many theists?

2. What main point about goodness did Plato's Euthyphro make? Do you think most theists are comfortable with the idea that moral principles and rules may ultimately be arbitrary, from the standpoint of reason and human values?

3. The major monotheistic traditions all leave us with what view of morality? Were you raised to believe that God (like Santa Claus) is always watching and knows if you've been bad or good? Do you agree that those whose decision not to engage in criminal acts is motivated primarily by fear of punishment are not behaving morally?

4. What view of choice and responsibility comes easier for the theist?

5. What basic impulse did Adam Smith and David Hume consider prerequisite to moral reasoning?

6. Why should we be moral?

7. What consequentialist conundrum was raised by COVID?

8. What must we accept, if we take a pluralistic approach to moral reasoning?

9. By what measures can the most secular societies be said to be the most moral?

10. What form of purpose is most meaningful?

11. What do most people want, more than the achievement of goals (in the narrow sense)? But are these goals in a broader sense?

12. What do we really need to know, rather than the meaning or purpose of life?

13. Religion's "happiness dividend" seems to come from what?

14. Baggini finds it hard to believe that life could not be improved by what?

15. Who are some famous atheists named by Baggini?

16. What does Baggini find problematic about cheery or happy atheists?

17. What is Hanami?

Atheism in history; Against religion?; Conclusion (JB 5-6... or 7, if you're reading the 1st edition; FYI, 2d edition includes interesting new material on the New Atheists and other more recent debates.)

1. What ancient Indian school was materialist and probably atheist? Do you think a materialist worldview necessarily entails atheism?

2. Naturalism emerges from ____, making the latter most fundamental to the origins of atheism. 

3. "The first unequivocally professed atheist in the Western Tradition" was who? (But in light of #1, can you think of previous philosophers who were probably atheists?)

4. What % of Americans said in a 2019 survey that they would never vote for an atheist? What would it take to shrink that percentage?

5. What does Baggini say is one of the greatest predictors of how well a country is doing? Can you think of exceptions?

6. What is militant atheism?

7. We have to accept that there are no ____. (But do we?)

8. What sort of "climate" does moderate and mild religion support?

9. What is NOMA? Do you accept it?

William James (WJ), Pragmatism Lec I The Present Dilemma in Philosophy; Lec VI Pragmatism's Conception of Truth.  Post your thoughts, questions etc. on James's philosophy and its implications for both those who do and do not believe in a god. Don't forget to declare your midterm report presentation topic.

1. The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter, says James, it is our what? In those terms, and to the extent that you can find some pertinent words to characterize it, what's your philosophy?

2. The history of philosophy is that of a clash of what? Do you agree that philosophers' reasons do not initially indicate and identify their respective philosophies? What would you say is the originating source of yours?

3. What quarrel do the the pragmatists have with the definition of truth as agreement? Do you consider the classic correspondence theory of truth helpful or constructive in the practical matter of discovering truths?

4. What is pragmatism's usual question? Are you in the habit of posing this question, with regard to your own as well as others' philosophical assertions?

5. "Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with" what? Does this statement reassure you that pragmatism is NOT an arbitrary philosophical relativism?

6. "To 'agree' in the widest sense with a reality" means what?

7. "We live forwards, _____ has said, but we understand backwards." If that's right, what would you consider the pragmatic lesson we should learn about the nature and function of truth in human affairs?

8. What's the difference between tough- and tender-minded philosophies?

9. What philosopher's religious theodicy does WJ say instantiates "superficiality incarnate"? Agree?

10. What does WJ like about Herbert Spencer's philosophy, and in what important way does pragmatism differ from it?

WJ,  Pragmatism Lec VII Pragmatism and Humanism; Lec VIII Pragmatism and Religion. Post your thoughts, questions etc. on James's philosophy and its implications for both those who do and do not believe in a god. Don't forget to declare your midterm report presentation topic.

1. What attitude towards science, art, morals, and religion does WJ call an idol of rationalism? Do you share it?

2. Whose version of Humanism holds truths to be human products "to an unascertainable extent," and the world to be "plastic" to that extent? How is this a "butt-end-foremost" pronouncement? Do you accept it?

3. Tough-mindedness positively rejects what, and pragmatism cannot on principle reject what? Do you think this implies that pragmatists should resist the "tough-minded" label?

4. What's the "use" of the Absolute? Do you find it a useful and meaningful concept in philosophy?

5. "To You" by _____ is addressed to whom? What are two ways of taking it? Do you take it in one of those ways? What does your way say about your philosophical temper?

6. What does WJ consider "the great religious difference" between rationalists and empiricists, with respect to the world's possibilities and destiny?

7. What "type of theism" does WJ say avoids both "crude naturalism" and "transcendental absolutism"?

8. What are the three parts of reality we must take account of, in order to encounter truths? Do you think that's all there is to it? Is that enough, philosophically speaking?

9. What is the "essential contrast" between rationalism and pragmatism? Is it fundamentally an epistemological difference? What temperamental difference does it indicate, with what nod to Diogenes?

10. WJ's pragmatism is offered as a ____ between tough- and tender-minded philosophies.

The varieties of experience. WJ, Varieties of Religious Experience Preface, Lectures I-II (and whatever else you'd care to read) ; Carl Sagan, Varieties of Scientific Experience, editor's intro & whatever else you'd care to read. (You'll want to get hold of the book when you can, it features stunning astronomical photos missing from the excerpt below.) Also recommended: Pale Blue Dot, PBD text, PBD video, Who Speaks For Earth video, Cosmos, Cosmic Connection...and Carl's & Ann's daughter Sasha's For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World* 

1. What was to have been the second part of these lectures, ultimately postponed (but "suggested" in the postscript)?

2. What precedent does WJ hope his lectures will set?

3. What result does WJ say is "alien to my intention"?

4. What "method of discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy" does WJ say we're all familiar with, which he calls medical ___? 

5. Does WJ think religious emotions are more "organically conditioned"  than scientific theories? Why does he think we find some states of mind superior to others?

6. What's WJ's definition of religion? And what do you think of it?

7. "At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is ___."

8. "We are in the end absolutely dependent on ___."

9. What did Carl Sagan find tragic about the Genesis creation story, and why did he find Darwinian science more spiritually satisfying? Do you?

10. Carl agreed with Bertrand Russell that what we need is ___. (Russell was targeting WJ with this barb, but do you Carl and WJ ultimately disagreed about this?)

11. Carl wanted us to see ourselves "not as the failed clay of a disappointed Creator but as ___."

12. What did Carl admire about WJ's definition of religion? Do you think science, religion, philosophy are in some important sense an attempt to come home? Or to have the experience of feeling at home, in our experience and our lives?

RR foreword, preface, 1

1. The ultimate goal and aim of pragmatism is what, according to Rorty?

2. How is Rorty at one with Kant?

3. Rorty says for James and Dewey the only goal was what? 

4. What does Rorty want to teach us, according to Robert Brandom? And who do you think he means by "us"? Do you think WJ wanted to teach us the same thing?

5. What are norms, for Rorty, and how do they relate to reality (and Reality)? Do you understand and accept Rorty's upper/lower case distinction?

6. What of the original Enlightenment did Rorty applaud? Do you?

7. What in Plato and Christianity does Rorty call morally ambiguous?

8. What does Rorty say Dewey and Nietzsche simultaneously turned their backs on, and why? But what difference sharply distinguishes them?

9. What does Rorty say his version of pragmatism mediates and replaces?

10. Dewey, like James, hoped each new generation would try to do what? Is that a worthy and reasonable hope? What did Peirce, James, and Dewey "combine"? What was James more interested in than either of the other two?

11. James approvingly cited Papini's description of what, in making what point? 

12. What did Dewey say was the proper task of future philosophy?

13. What do his biographers agree was central to the formation of Dewey's mature thought? To what need related to his father does Rorty think we owe the pragmatist theory of truth? What is that theory's underlying motive?

14. Dewey's stories are always stories of what kind of progress?

15. James rejects what Clifford-like view?

Polytheism, Universality and Truth.  RR 2-4

1. Berthelot found an affinity between James and who? And traced the bifurcated roots of pragmatism to who?

2. Abrams says poetry can be a substitute for what? What definition "covers" Nietzsche and James?

3. Echoing Mill, James said what about demands and desires? Agree?

4. Nietzsche mistakenly thought what, about happiness? Do you agree that he was mistaken? How do James and Dewey differ from Nietzsche with regard to religious belief generally?

5. What text of James or Dewey does Rorty think "coheres best" with their shared view? What do you think of WJ's statement about "the end of religion"? (36)

6. In a democratic society everybody gets to worship what? What was "Dewey's god"?

7. In what way does Rorty see Clifford as religious?

8. RR thinks the universal desire for truth (or unconditionality) is better described as what? Why is the yearning for unconditionality unhealthy?

9. What makes us special, for Dewey? Why might that sound suspicious to Habermas and Apel?

10. What project "is democratic politics?

11. What do "we American college teachers do" when encountering religious fundamentalists?

Pan-Relationalism, Depth. RR 5-6 [I realize now, btw, that I was ahead of myself this afternoon when I said we were officially reading these lectures today.]

1. Rorty says "we bourgeois liberal have Dewey" and no longer need who to fend off anti-Enlightenment irrationalism? Agree? How would you characterize the difference between their respective conceptions of enlightened philosophizing?

2. How should we not answer "what purpose is this description supposed to serve"?

3. Why are numbers a good model of the universe?

4. What do pragmatists think is the aim of inquiry? Do you think their aim is true? (Elvis Costello pun only partly intended.)

5. What's pointless about things-in-themselves?

6. What did Darwin make hard for essentialists and Kantians?

7. Why must pan-relationalists (& pragmatists) not accept the making/finding distinction their critics would like to impose on them?

8. Socrates/Plato said knowledge of something deep would let us escape from what?

9. In what sense, for a pragmatist, are philosophy's traditional problems verbal?

Ethics, obligations, justice. RR 7-8. PRESENTATION: Gary, "My Two Weeks With the Atheists of Prague"

1. What practical question do pragmatists prefer to what traditional question?

2. What may be "the best single mark of our progress toward a full-fledged human rights culture"? 

3. RR asks if we could replace "justice" with what?

4. The problematic dichotomy of reason vs. feeling would begin to fade away, says RR, if we thought of reason as what?

Empiricism. RR 9-10, epilogue. PRESENTATION: Javan, Pragmatism as humanism

1. What statement of Wittgenstein's does RR think applies to terms like "sentience" and "consciousness"?

2. What does RR say Brandom "flirts with"?

3. What cultural achievements do Anglophone and non-Anglophone philosophers first think of?

4. When RR says he sees nothing worth saving in empiricism, he means he doesn't want to save what as a non-human authority due our respect?

5. In the Epilogue RR is quoted as saying what about his faithfulness to the thoughts of James and Dewey?

Questions MAR 17

 

1. Secularists can agree with Hamlet, that death is nothing to fear, if they dismiss what possibility?

2. What lies behind the sense of horror at the prospect of non-existence?

3. Meaningful lives do and do not require what?

4. Kitcher wants to resist what temptation?

5. What are the chief sources of pessimism?

6. By what does Kitcher want scriptures to be superseded?

BONUS:

• Name a thinker who reacted against the outside imposition of meaning, emphasizing autonomy instead.
• Kitcher thinks we should be committed to what, instead of salvation?
• What does Kitcher say about a grandfather's joy?
• What's wrong with the Christian and Muslim afterlife?

DQ:

• "What use is Darwin at a funeral?" 96 In fact, isn't there some consolation in the evolutionary hypothesis that individual mortality is inseparable from species evolution? Is there some further sense in which such "gibes... misunderstand the human situation"? 105
• "Do you feel differently about your absence from different parts of the future?" 97 Are you also increasingly "indifferent" to the future? 98
• COMMENT: "Mattering to others is what counts in conferring meaning."
• What's your answer to the "religious challenger" who says bereaved secularists misunderstand the character of the afterlife? 103
• Does an afterlife without striving nullify our acts and identities? 104
• Did you have an "epiphany around (age) 16"? 107
• COMMENT: "Lives matter when they touch others." 108 Presumably the touch should be positive and altruistic, not destructive and selfish. But how do you argue this with a confirmed Randian, for example, who says we should all live only for ourselves? Is there any point in having that argument with an egoist?
• Does impermanence cancel meaning? 110 Is "lingering" in the memories of those who knew us enough to confer meaning? 111
• What other "sources of the deepest satisfactions" would you suggest? 119
• Do you agree that secular humanism faces practical but not intellectual problems in accounting for meaning? 122
• Why would Charles Taylor or anyone insist that joy is not fully available to secularists? Is this simply prejudice? 127-8
• Seeing God in all things is transformative, said George Herbert, but isn't it also potentially transformative to see no God? 129
• Are epiphanies valuable, whatever their causes? 131
• COMMENT: "Each life that goes badly... should be a stimulus to renewed human effort" and not to belief in "ultimate compensation" in heaven. 136
• COMMENT: The properly strenuous life is humanist, not religious. 139
• What's your takeaway from Kitcher's discussion of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky?

==

God Is a Question, Not an Answer

By WILLIAM IRWIN

Near end of Albert Camus’s existentialist novel “The Stranger,” Meursault, the protagonist, is visited by a priest who offers him comfort in the face of his impending execution. Meursault, who has not cared about anything up to this point, wants none of it. He is an atheist in a foxhole. He certainly has not been a strident atheist, but he claims to have no time for the priest and his talk of God. For him, God is not the answer.

Some 70 years later, Kamel Daoud, in his 2013 novel “The Meursault Investigation,” picks up the thread of Camus’s story. In one scene late in that novel, an imam hounds Harun, the brother of the unnamed Arab who was killed in “The Stranger.” In response, Harun gives a litany of his own impieties, culminating in the declaration that “God is a question, not an answer.” Harun’s declaration resonates with me as a teacher and student of philosophy. The question is permanent; answers are temporary. I live in the question.

Any honest atheist must admit that he has his doubts, that occasionally he thinks he might be wrong, that there could be a God after all — if not the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, then a God of some kind. Nathaniel Hawthorne said of Herman Melville, “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.” Dwelling in a state of doubt, uncertainty and openness about the existence of God marks an honest approach to the question... (continues)
==
A reply: "Many “honest” atheists, including me, don’t care to consider the question of God at all. Aside from the simple truth that the question does not interest me, the existence of a god or gods would not change the way I live my life, and therefore holds no value to me. I also find it a waste of time and attention to wonder about the unknowable when there are so many interesting and urgent questions with real answers waiting to be revealed..." More responses...
==
Clearly Calvin hasn't read Scheffler, Kitcher, Dewey, or Russell...

 Defeating fascism’s ‘loneliness and alienation’ has a simple solution: author

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/how-to-defeat-fascism-solution/

By  John Stoehr                                                      March 14, 2022

Interview with author Nathan Crick who has written a new book focused on John Dewey entitled:  “Dewey and the New Age of Fascism”

The former president held another of his tiresome rallies last night. I say “tiresome” because it was more of the same spleen and bile.

But he did say something useful to my purposes, which is talking about John Dewey in a world gripped by tyranny. Below is a long interview with Nathan Crick. He wrote Dewey and the New Age of Fascism.

Amid Donald Trump’s laundry list of grievances, including reiterations of the Big Lie, he said: “Getting critical race theory out of our schools is not just a matter of values, it’s also a matter of national survival.”

“We have no choice,” he said:

The fate of any nation depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down – and they must do this – lay down their very lives to defend their country. If we allow the Marxists and communists and socialists to teach our children to hate America, there will be no one left to defend our flag or to protect our great country or its freedom.

That’s boilerplate fascism.

Just ask Jason Stanley. In 2018, he told Vox:

The story is typically that a once-great society has been destroyed by liberalism or feminism or cultural Marxism or whatever, and you make the dominant group feel angry and resentful about the loss of their status and power. Almost every manifestation of fascism mirrors this general narrative.

Per usual, the crowd was so rapt with attention, so immersed in the grume and gall, you wonder if it’s possible to reason with fascists.

Yes and no.

“You can’t argue a person out of a cult by walking into it,” Nathan told me. “There is hope only when they step outside of that experience.”

One does not ‘reason’ with fascists. It is more that you get outside the fascist vocabulary and talk about something different. The hope is by connecting with ordinary experience, perhaps they find life is more valuable than Donald Trump’s talking points.

What would that “outside life” look like? For Dewey, it meant more than protecting and advancing democracy. It meant protecting and advancing the capacity all humans have to be more fully human.

But first, get them out and back into ordinary experience.

As Nathan said:

Propaganda is totalitarian when it encircles a person. It creates an entire identity for them that tolerates no gods before it. It is a lifestyle and gives you an identity that you can share with other like-minded people.

(Continues with interview at link above)

Questions MAR 15

 1. Name one of Kitcher's assumptions he says "refined religion" abandons.

2. What is it about mortality and meaning that refined religion poses as a challenge to the secularist?

3. Name a famous defender of refined religion from the past century.

4. Full-blooded truth presupposes what?

5. What is a "true myth"?

6. What kind of future do secularists like Kitcher envisage?

DQ

• Do secularists have as great a quarrel with refined religion as with fundamentalism? (Sam Harris, for example, has argued that it is an "enabler" of fundamentalism and must be equally confronted.)
• What do you think of Emerson's abstract and figurative approach to the transcendent? Does it srrengthen his claims in defense of self-reliance and individualism? 66
• What's wrong with identifying the transcendent with value itself? 67 Or the experience of value? Can transcendence be naturalized without "loss of dimensions of experience"?
• Do you agree that the claims of the "subsidiary characters" in the Abraham story are disregarded? 70
• COMMENT: "Faith adds a depth of seriousness" to life.
• Is refined religious sophistication "a cover for sophistry"? 72
• Do we really live in different worlds and escape to other realities? 73 Isn't our one shared human world big enough to contain innumerable sub-worlds, reflecting our various purposes and psyches?
• Have you encountered truths in fiction? How do you think about and relate to them? Are they "endorsed" by their writers and readers, imagined, discovered, ...? Are they literally or figuratively true? For example: "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player. That struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And then is heard no more: it is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." True?
• Is religion a language-game? How about irreligion? How do you decide whether a language-game is "worth playing"? 84
• What does it mean to "abandon the assimilation of ethical truth to factual truth"? 85
• Can atheists achieve the same purposes attributed to religion? 87-8
• Is science free of superstition?
• Is "purifying progress" an oversimplification? 92
• COMMENT: "Refined religion is a way station, not a final destination." 94

The third Terry Lecture anticipates chapter 4.

Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction... appendix (edge.org)

1. The Cosmological Argument
2. The Ontological Argument
3. The Argument from Design A. The Classical Teleological Argument B. The Argument from Irreducible Complexity C. The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations D. The Argument from the Original Replicator
4. The Argument from the Big Bang
5. The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants
6. The Argument from the Beauty of Physical Laws
7. The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences
8. The Argument from Personal Coincidences
9. The Argument from Answered Prayers
10. The Argument from a Wonderful Life
11. The Argument from Miracles
12. The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness
13. The Argument from the Improbable Self
14. The Argument from Survival After Death
15. The Argument from the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation
16. The Argument from Moral Truth
17. The Argument from Altruism
18. The Argument from Free Will
19. The Argument from Personal Purpose
20. The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance
21. The Argument from the Consensus of Humanity
22. The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics
23. The Argument from Holy Books Gold
24. The Argument from Perfect Justice
25. The Argument from Suffering
26. The Argument from the Survival of the Jews
27. The Argument from the Upward Curve of History
28. The Argument from Prodigious Genius
29. The Argument from Human Knowledge of Infinity
30. The Argument from Mathematical Reality
31. The Argument from Decision Theory (Pascal’s Wager)
32. The Argument from Pragmatism (William James’s Leap of Faith)
33. The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason
34. The Argument from Sublimity
35. The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe (Spinoza’s God)
36. The Argument from the Abundance of Arguments

Arguments analyzed here

 

 Study: Atheists who are women, Republicans, or Southerners more likely to hide beliefs

In groups that statistically have the fewest number of atheists, the atheists among them are less vocal.

https://religionnews.com/2022/03/10/study-atheists-who-are-women-republican-or-southerners-are-more-likely-to-hide-their-beliefs/

 

March 10, 2022

By Alejandra Molina

 

(RNS) — Atheists in the U.S. are more likely to hide their beliefs if they are women, Republicans, if they live in the South or if they’ve previously been religious, according to new research by Rice and West Virginia universities.

“If someone is already in a marginalized group — like women — or are members of a group that is heavily religious — such as Republicans or Southern Americans — it stands to reason they are less likely to take on the additional stigma of being an ‘out’ atheist,” said Jacqui Frost, a postdoctoral research fellow in sociology and the Religion and Public Life Program at Rice University.

With this new study, “Patterns of Perceived Hostility and Identity Concealment among Self-Identified Atheists,” Frost said researchers wanted to explore whether people who affirm atheist labels are more comfortable than other nonreligious people about sharing their atheism with others.

Top of Form

The research showed that atheists are the most likely nonreligious group to perceive stigma, yet among people who identify as atheist, agnostic or simply nonreligious, atheists are the most open about their beliefs, which Frost found surprising.

 “The people that are being most discriminated against are also the people that are least likely to hide their identities,” Frost, one of the report’s authors, told Religion News Service.

(Continues at link above)

Secular Students webinar Thursday

You could win a $100 gift card at the SSA national student meeting. 

Join us this Thursday, Mar 10, 5-8 pm central time.  Info about scholarships and Ask An Atheist Day. Speaker on SCOTUS, abortion, religious right. Everyone invited.  RSVP at https://secularstudents.org/webinars/