Philosophical notes…
Milton Draws a Crowd
“Take Berkeley’s English department, hardly a bastion of intellectual conservatism. Our bedrock classes for the major are the three surveys that take students from Beowulf to Milton, the Puritans to the Victorians, the moderns to the present. Our most popular electives are courses like ‘The Bible as Literature,’ ‘Contemporary Literature’ and ‘The American Novel.’ ‘Milton’ manages to draw a crowd.”
"The Humanities in Crisis? Not at Most Schools"- http://nyti.ms/1bcP3kj
On Revising
“‘Much as I loathe the typewriter,’ W.H. Auden wrote, ‘I must admit that it is a help in self-criticism. Typescript is so impersonal and hideous to look at that, if I type out a poem, I immediately see defects which I missed when I looked through it in manuscript.’”
Craig Fehrman, "Revising Your Writing Again? Blame the Modernists" - http://b.globe.com/14I3NTd
Artisanal Education
“If it is indeed time to ‘get big or get out’ — or, better put, “get online or get an identity”—then I’m for the artisanal, the local, the educational equivalent of farmer’s markets. The irony is that while most professors embrace the ideal embodied in farmer’s markets, they have supported the evisceration of local institutional educational identity. It’s time to insist not only on locally grown food, but on local knowledge. I’d rather make and share my own beer than encourage my students to guzzle Budweiser.”
Patrick J Deneen "We're All to Blame for MOOCs," The Chronicle - http://bit.ly/12tceG3
Lonely Thinking in Film
“In one flashback with her teacher and former lover Martin Heidegger, Heidegger tells Arendt, “thinking is a lonely business.” Outside of a few intimates, Arendt is alone throughout the film, accompanied by nothing and no one but her thoughts and her ever-present cigarette. There is a danger that Arendt’s cigarette could become an empty cipher, an obvious symbol. Instead, it lingers there, pulsing with Arendt’s breath, as she remains silent, listening. It is her silent intensity, throughout the film, that strikes the viewer, propels us to think with Arendt about what she is observing and its implications. The audience is thus transformed, moving from observing Arendt to thinking with her. And when Arendt at the end becomes a speaker, her deliberations done, the film climaxes in her speech to students at a small liberal arts college. The seven-minute long monologue, a sort of closing argument in this film’s long accumulation of evidence, is gripping. Arendt concludes: ‘This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which had never been seen before. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.’ The full speech is likely the greatest articulation of the importance of thinking that will ever be presented in a film.”
Roger Berkowitz "Lonely Thinking: Hannah Arendt on Film," Paris Review - http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/?p=53407
Why Do I Teach?
“College education is a proliferation of such possibilities: the beauty of mathematical discovery, the thrill of scientific understanding, the fascination of historical narrative, the mystery of theological speculation. We should judge teaching not by the amount of knowledge it passes on, but by the enduring excitement it generates. Knowledge, when it comes, is a later arrival, flaring up, when the time is right, from the sparks good teachers have implanted in their students’ souls.”
Gary Gutting, "Why Do I Teach?" The Stone - http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=144567
Newcastle Herald Op-Ed
“Recent census data in the United Kingdom and Australia indicates that rates of religious observance remain low. However, from marriage equality and reproductive rights to political radicalism and terrorism, religion remains ever visible in political life. So too, a quick pass through the cinema presents us with a popcorn of paranormal activity. The ghosts of religion haunt our secular societies, and this has prompted new research at the University of Newcastle.”
"Opinion: State of Religion in Politics" - http://bit.ly/17W0NaB
Modal Religion
“In Australia, religious rhetoric in the political sphere seems designed almost specifically not to speak first, or most directly, to the religiously committed, who are likely to be already quite politically engaged and to have fixed their vote fairly firmly to one side of politics or the other.
Instead, its appeal seems aimed mostly at what Mol called the “modal” Australians who identify vaguely with tradition, do not go as far as to declare themselves atheist (like Gillard) or agnostic (like Hawke) but for whom religious categories speak of a nostalgic sense of safety and security.”
Marion Maddox, "God under Gillard: Religion and Politics in Australia," ABC Religion & Ethics - http://bit.ly/10aVOik
MOOC Justice?
One of the clearest explications of what's at stake in online education today has been made public as an open letter from the San Jose State University's Philosophy Department to Michael Sandel regarding the use of the EdX MOOC on Justice.
“What kind of message are we sending our students if we tell them that they should best learn what justice is by listening to the reflections of the largely white student population from a privileged institution like Harvard?”
"The Document: An Open Letter from San Jose State U.'s Philosophy Department," The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://bit.ly/10aXPqW