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No seriously.

It's a constant joke, even within the field, that none of us know how to write. I'd love to teach courses for undergraduate and graduate students just about how to write well.

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I wish I teach a course about kids and philosophy.

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I wish I teach a course about kids and philosophy.

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Are kids philosophers? Do we all start up philosophers then lose it as we grow?

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So much to do, so much to see!

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History, Philosophy and Politics of Nonsense

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History, Philosophy and Politics of Nonsense

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I would love to teach a class that investigates the history and politics of nonsense. I would look at how some philosophers attributed it a disruptive and revelatory role, some saw it in relation to purity, and more recently it is described as the sense of life that should be retrieved. I would include how it plays out in current reactionary politics, as well as in left-wing cynicism and/or hopelessness. I wouldn't know how to tie together that mess!

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We have more padlets with conversations for you to join in on!

> https://padlet.com/lilliannephil/critphilresources
> https://padlet.com/gsipconference2022/dreamcourseteach
> https://padlet.com/gsipconference2022/acourseyouneed
> https://padlet.com/gsipconference2022/whyornotphilac
> https://padlet.com/gsipconference2022/relevantphil
> https://padlet.com/gsipconference2022/teachingtoughtimes
> https://padlet.com/gsipconference2022/teachingtoughphil

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A dream course I wish I could teach would be one I might call ‘The Last Descartes Course.’ It would begin with Descartes’s Meditations, with an emphasis on the first meditation, the evil demon, and the rejection of the body, dreams, and madness. Then the course would transition into discussing Freud on dreams (with an emphasis on Irma’s injection) and Michel Foucault on the history of madness, to show how the exclusion of dreams and madness from epistemological certainty gets re-incorporated into theory contra Descartes, as well as the unique place of the hystericization of women.
Turning to the ‘evil demon’ and the body, the course would then pivot to Federici’s Caliban and the Witch to discuss the witch trials relationship to mind-body dualism. This thread would be developed by reading Enrique Dussel’s Anti-Cartesian Meditations, and Ramon Grosfoguel’s “Four Genocides of the Long Sixteenth Century.” Here the course would show the way in which Descartes’s account of the ego and the body is inextricable from the larger historical context it exists within, particularly in relation to colonialism and the violence of primitive accumulation.

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An Introductory Philosophy Course Through @americanbaron's Tiktoks

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An Introductory Philosophy Course Through @americanbaron's Tiktoks

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Compelling conversations to be had, relatable content for all!

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I would love to teach a course about thoughts on the pandemic. 

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I would love to teach a course about thoughts on the pandemic. 

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Like a modern danse macabre, we see tired health personnel (doctors, nurses and auxiliaries) dancing around us, numbers of infected rising and falling, new vaccines, new security measures, anxiety, insecurity and death dancing among them all, holding out its hands to us. In the fourteenth century it was a skeleton that came to look for us, the baleful scythe and its rough bony hand, now comes to us a dying viral particle to take us with it, but not before, making us participate in a colossal feast in which, this time not only calls bishops, kings or merchants, but also acclaimed youtubers, adorable elderly, heroic mothers and some other innocent child.

The filth of disease and the silence of death break into our world of hygiene and noise. The hygiene of fashion, of waxed and tanned skins, of bodies equalized by aesthetic surgeries. The noise of tablets, of smartphones, of the thousand and one chores that can be called to do or tasks, the noise of night and day, of work and vacations. This hygiene is now covered by a mask that hides the face and its makeup, veiled by latex-covered skins and prophylactic hydroalcoholic gels. The indistinct bodies are camouflaged by protective barriers against the virus, which is nothing more than a form of death. The noises have been exchanged, they are not message tones or prefabricated music, they are the beep-beep of the respirators of the full ICUs, the breathing of the one who sleeps next to me and may, in a few weeks, after a sudden and unexpected contagion, no longer be there.  An immense tide of pain without number reaches our necks, but, mysteriously, we remain painless. The number of contagions has already dropped and the measures taken by governments are becoming lighter and more bearable. Some believe they can forget the irruption of mute chaos in our world and in our lives. However, there are chaos and pains, chapters in human history, that are impossible to forget. The Black Death that swept through Europe and Asia in the 14th century, the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki or 9/11 are events that have shaped our world and our way of thinking and relating to each other. They are chapters that cannot be forgotten, even if one wants to. A clear image of a society that tries to forget or to believe that what happened does not have a word of sense about what its tomorrow will be is like a man who has had his house robbed, beaten and burned down, and pretends to restart his journey without, not only shaking off the ashes he holds on his shoulder, but also repairing and healing his wounds to see how to embark on a new path.

We have all counted the numbers of the dead, the changing numbers of the infected, the asymptomatic and those admitted to the ICUs. The appearance of death has not generated an opening to the mystery, but has led to the human face being pushed into loneliness. Numbers, the desire for control and statistics: depersonalization. Loneliness before Covid-19 was covered with screens, with sporadic or merely professional relationships; now, after confinement, it appears naked and, although we are no longer confined or in quarantine, the memory of that nakedness does not leave our mental retina.

The essence of life, of which Thoureau spoke, has become the maintenance of optimal health, even if we do not know what for. We seek a healthy life in the first place, and in third or fourth place, a meaningful life. This fact introduces a profound contradiction into the core of our existence: what is the point of living a healthy life if it is meaningless? It has been demonstrated that a healthy but meaningless life produces depression and anxiety. The same pharmaceutical companies that manufacture vaccines are the ones that sell anxiolytics. I think of all those people who many days, like myself, arrive home after work, healthy and meaningless. Almost a century ago the question of suicide made a radical difference. Camus, Dostoevsky... The human question par excellence was to live with meaning or not, to commit suicide in the face of it or to resist the onslaught.  Today not even suicide makes sense, preferring the tide, the drift and the anesthesia that covers us with an existential amnesia. Not only do we not want to remember what has happened, but we also refuse to learn from it and draw all the good that disasters offer to the human species.

Happycracy dictates welfare, but a tiny viral particle disobeys the regime and revolts our way of life. Pain appears. A pain from which we flee but which is necessary. Pain makes life. The slogan "you are worth as much as you smile" is discovered as a trap of what has come to be called "positive thinking".  When the desire for happiness is a social imperative and not an inner longing, the frustration between what I would like to become and what I am produces a collapse. The peak of the crisis occurs when the internal contradiction between how I would like to feel and how I actually feel is perceived. A life built on the back of pain is a life that renounces the feet to walk on the hands. In the long run, the fatigue is such that one stops walking or becomes accustomed to walking on one's hands and... stops being human.

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I would LOVE to teach a course with zero texts, zero assignments, and preferably a quiet, outdoor, absolutely technology free environment. To just be able to engage in deep conversations with students about whatever it is they agree on for a topic each day, offering philosophical knowledge if needed, but just being curious together, challenging each other to think deeper/further/outside their comfort zone...it would be a dream.

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I would LOVE to teach a course with zero texts, zero assignments, and preferably a quiet, outdoor, absolutely technology free environment. To just be able to engage in deep conversations with students about whatever it is they agree on for a topic each day, offering philosophical knowledge if needed, but just being curious together, challenging each other to think deeper/further/outside their comfort zone...it would be a dream.