Worlds Of Speculative Fiction Lecture Series Renewed

Over the course of 2016, I've been providing a monthly lecture and discussion series, hosted by the Brookfield Public Library, focused on - and called - Worlds of Speculative Fiction: Philosophical Themes.  I proposed the idea originally as a way for me to get to engage in a bit of "guilty pleasure" reading, going back to classic science fiction and fantasy works I had enjoyed in my childhood, teens, or college years, and seeing what might be said from a philosophical perspective about the narrative worlds these authors had created.

We're now getting ready for the last installment of the series, focused on George R.R. Martin's voluminous and yet-unfinished Song of Ice and Fire, which will take place Thursday, December 8, 7:00 PM, and wrap up the series for the year.  I'm happy to report, however, that we've been renewed for another year of the series - 12 more monthly lecture and discussion sessions!

Here's the list of the 12 authors and literary universes slated for 2017:

• January – Phillip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld 
• February – Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet
• March – Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Galaxy
• April – Anne McCaffrey, World of Pern
• May – Orson Scott Card’s Enderverse
• June – Ian Banks’ Culture Series
• July – Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy.
• August – H.P Lovecraft’s Universe of the Elder Gods
• September – William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy
• October – C. L. Moore’s Fantastic Worlds
• November – L. Sprague de Camp’s Worlds of the Compleat Enchanter
• December - Jorge Luis Borges’ Philosophical Universes

If you've missed any of the previous eleven sessions, and you'd like to watch the videorecordings, you're in luck - here's where you can find all the videos (I'm uploading the eleventh video as I write this).

So far, we've covered J.R.R. Tolkein, Mervyn Peake, C.S. Lewis, A.E. Van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Leguin, Roger Zelazny, Michael Moorcock, and Philip K. Dick.  I'm hoping to do a bit of writing on each of these here in Orexis Dianoētikē in the coming year as well!

New Lecture Series - Worlds of Speculative Fiction

After our move from the Hudson Valley of New York back to Milwaukee, we started looking for another library to partner with in order to offer a monthly series.  The Brookfield Public Library stepped up, and we began organizing the new series: Worlds of Speculative Fiction - Philosophical Themes.

The general idea behind the series is for me to reread classic science fiction and fantasy authors I've enjoyed in the past, and then to discuss with an audience of library patrons and the general public some of the philosophical themes either explicitly referenced or implicitly involved with the worlds generated within their works.

We've had two sessions so far - and here are the video-recordings from those talks:

• Lecture 1: Introduction to the Series (January) 
• Lecture 2: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Saga of Middle Earth (February)

In the months to come, we'll be looking at the works of ten more seminal figures in science fiction and fantasy - A.E. Van Vogt, C.S. Lewis, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Leguin, Michael Moorcock, Phillip K. Dick, Mervyn Peake, and George R.R. Martin.

Understanding Anger - Lecture 9: Thomas Aquinas On Anger

Our series of monthly lectures for this year -- hosted by the historic Kingston Library -- has come to a close, with a well-attended and very enjoyable last session.  The topic for this talk, Thomas Aquinas' perspective upon anger, tied together thematic threads from many of the previous sessions, particularly because Thomas himself was a great systematizer and synthesizer of previous points of view.

In the previous session, we examined several early Christian thinkers who discussed anger (you can watch the video of that earlier session here), taking us up to the 5th century AD, the cusp between antiquity and the middle ages.  In this final session, we focused on a thinker solidly in the midst of the medieval period, the 13th century, often called the "high middle ages."  You can watch the video of that very lively discussion here.

10 Philosophical Texts I'd Bring to a Desert Island

A bit over a year ago, a longstanding friend and colleague -- someone I actually went to college with -- asked me a question so intriguing that I ended up sitting down and recording a 20-minute YouTube video answering it in detail.

He wrote me:  If you could bring ten philosophical works to be stranded with on the proverbial desert island, which ten would they be, and why? 

Understanding Anger - Lecture 3: Plato on Anger

The series "Understanding Anger" continued with the third installment -- a lecture focused now not on literary or religious texts, as the previous two were, but on a philosophical perspective upon the emotion of anger.  At least in Western Philosophy, Plato is one of the first philosophers to devote sustained -- though not exactly systematic -- attention to anger in his works.

To be sure, there were a few pre-Socratic philosophers who made isolated, though interesting remarks about anger, but those don't provide enough to say that we have any real articulated perspective upon anger and the many other phenomena with which it is -- or can be -- connected.  In Plato's works, we find considerably more intellectual resources available -- as I discussed in my talk (the video of which you can see here).

A New Series of Talks: "Reconsidering. . . "

I've been involved in so much philosophy-related activity of various sorts lately, that I've not had the time to write here about quite a bit of it, which might lend a mistaken impression of precisely the opposite -- that nothing has been going on! 

Last night, at the Kingston Library, we held the second of a new series of monthly community discussions -- the "Reconsidering . . ." series, this one called "Reconsidering Charlie Hebdo:  Free Speech, Violence and Offense in Context".  So, that means that it has been a month since the first session. "Reconsidering Ferguson:  Racial Politics in Context."

Understanding Anger - A New Lecture Series

Last year we (that is, ReasonIO) partnered with our local library -- the historic Kingston Library (a lot in this town is historic, given its age and earlier importance, but the library really does deserve that epithet!) -- to offer a lecture series, about Philosophy but suited for the general public, spanning the entire twelve months of 2014.  It focused on eleven Existentialist writers, and was called, aptly enough, Glimpses into Existence (here's the playlist of sessions).

It turned out to be quite a draw -- a growing group of regulars from local communities would show up, hear what I had to say, and then get into some quite interesting discussions (and at times digressions).  I got to spiel out some ideas I'd been mulling over about classic Existentialist thinkers, texts, and ideas with a well-educated, interested, and responsive audience.  The Library got some decent events for adult programming.  A win-win all around.  So they asked me back to do another series -- and I'd already been thinking about what I might do.

Kicking off my Book Tour in National Library Week

Nearly a week and a half of busily packed days have passed since I officially started the tour for my book Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France  at our own Charles Chesnutt Library at Fayetteville State University.  I didn't realize until I started putting my presentation together precisely how appropriate an occasion and location that was.  The story that I'm going to tell, reflect upon, draw some implications from, and conclude with an argument about resources and policies - - the story of my research and the book that eventually emerged from is also the story of a library, the University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Library, a library of a certain type that unfortunately seems to be at risk for gradually dwindling away, faced with the twin pressures of a digital age and the costs of maintaining library stacks.

I'm not going to talk much about my book in this entry, other than to say that I'll be adding a video (to My New Book) discussing how it is intended to make contributions to scholarship in several respects somewhat different than and complementary the volumes of secondary literature -- or even original groundbreaking work in Philosophy, Religion, History, Political Theory, or Rhetoric -- the disciplinary circles in which I move and appreciate the works of my peers.  What I will note first about Reason Fulfilled By Revelation is that were it not for the existence nearby of a certain kind of library, a certain form of repository of human knowledge, of intellectual striving and dialogue, the research that I carried out would have been. . . . well, not entirely inconceivable, but practically speaking rendered impossible

Infusing Critical Thinking through the Curriculum: FSU's QEP

One of the requirements for reaccreditation of an educational institution -- at least at the college and university level -- if you are under SACS (the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools), since 2004, has been producing a Quality Enhancement Plan. This is supposed to be a institution-wide, comprehensively worked out, step by step, multidimensional means of improving education at as college or university. It is interesting that the original idea behind requiring institutions to develop a QEP was to remedy a seemingly widespread view that SACS was more reactive than proactive, more about assessing past performance than about fostering future improvement.

Even those who are interested in, who "buy in" to, (some forms of) assessment -- like myself -- do admittedly often look at the sorts of requirements SACS imposes upon its constituents, at the reams of data it falls upon us to generate, to organize, to report upon, as onerous make-work. Having been drawn in to the ongoing process of generating our Quality Enhancement Plan at Fayetteville State University -- first as a subject matter expert in both Critical Thinking and CLA Performance Tasks, a purely advisory role, and then afterwards as a member of the QEP Writing Committee -- I was afforded an illuminating vantage point from which to observe at least some of the workings of SACS and the QEP activity.

For me, as a philosopher, this involvement has been very interesting on a number of different levels.Our plan itself thematically focuses on critical thinking and practical reasoning, two areas in which philosophers are not the only experts and disciplinary practitioners, but definitely fields in which we make central contributions. Going beyond the content of the plan, the very process of our QEP's development, our attempts to interpret and meet requirements imposed by SACS by drawing upon our available faculty strengths, leveraging our current involvements, and setting up tracks for future ongoing faculty development -- that very process has been a sort of set of test cases or experiments in practical reasoning -- and reasoning in difficult circumstances, less resources available than we would have liked, consensuses yet to be formed, buy-ins to be achieved -- basically, the sort of real-life circumstances in which most practical reasoning really does take place -- far from the clean contours of classroom examples, or the highly abstract thought-experiments and textbook cases with which most philosophers tend to be more comfortable.

Best Practices Not Always Best: Real Goods, Ideal Bests, and 3 Potential Problems

Harvard Business Review, whose enticing, bite-sized articles I get referred to through my Twitter feed, published a post yesterday which my recent experience compelled me to read:  Why Best Practices Are Hard To Practice.  Lately, I have been struck by how often we invoke that jargon  of "best practices" in higher education, particularly at conferences, during workshops, and in education theory literature.

We also throw about other similarly popular buzz-words:  Take "high-impact practices." As part of an FSU team detailed to study and gather information on these last Spring, I traveled to the Association of American Colleges and Universities conference on Faculty Roles in High-Impact Practices (HIPs)  It was eye-opening, to say the least, for a philosopher who, focused on scholarship and teaching within my discipline admittedly devoted little attention  to scholarship of teaching and learning until immersing myself in it at FSU.

As it turned out, many of the educational strategies we were already doing some work with fell into that category of HIPs.  We involve our first year students in Learning Communities.  We have brought in guest speakers to provide workshops on Inquiry-Guided Learning and the closely related Problem-Based Learning. We have invested heavily in CLA in the Classroom.  Through Title III, we've established excellent programs in Writing Across the Curriculum, Reading Across the Curriculum, and the Chesnutt Library Fellowships which focus on Information Literacy. Once Service Learning became a priority, our Center For Community Justice took on three new words and a new role, becoming the CCJSL.  We have a Chancellor's Reading Club, which has all of the incoming Freshmen read and discuss a common book.  A program was even established linking faculty mentors with budding student scholars, the objects of which were to produce a work of undergraduate-level scholarship and to introduce the student to how real scholarship is done in the field.  With the exception of RAC, I've been involved in every one of these, with notably mixed successes and failures, whose narratives I'll defer to later posts.

Injecting Information Literacy into Critical Thinking classes

Every semester at Fayetteville State University, I teach at least three Critical Thinking classes.  If I offer an upper-level class (and here, Intro counts as "upper level"), and it actually gets enrollment (nowadays, ten students minimum), then I teach that as well.  If it doesn't make enrollment, then its four CTs that semester.  This semester I have a course release, so three CTs. Next semester, I decided not to even try offering an upper level.  So, four CTs. For a philosopher, used to research and publishing, this teaching regime is potentially mind-numbing.  Remember the movie Groundhog Day, and the period of frustration, then boredom and despair Bill Murray's character Phil went through?  Imagine that, but now with a textbook and underprepared, mainly uninterested Freshmen students (and upperclassmen who flunked the first, second, third time around).

Groundhog Day provides a useful analogy here.  The danger is that of becoming jaded, disengaged, cynical, and thereby both workmanlike and almost useless to one's students.  The repetition of the trivial, disconnected from tangible consequences, seemingly not making any lasting difference has affective and practical consequences.  Or in less jargony terms, the repetition produces emotions, moods, and actions. Give it time (and in the Groundhog Day universe, that's all you've got), and these congeal into habits and palpable attitudes.

Now to putter with another metaphor, when the educational Establishment hands you a bag of lemons and tells you "the bad news is all we've got are lemons; the good news is we've got plenty of 'em," buddy, you better start liking lemonade and researching recipes for different varieties.