Lecture 42 Friday May 6, 2005

Conclusions and Apologetics: “If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower”

______________________________________________________

Announcements:

(1)           Review sessions: Monday 5/9, 10am, in Fernow 304

(2)           Five handouts today

 

Overture and Prelude to the Final Act:

Elvis Costello’s “(What’s so funny ‘bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?”

 

I. IMHO, The Greatest Environmental Rock and Roll Album of All Time: the Talking Heads’s Naked

For your listening and viewing pleasure: ”Totally Nude”

 

II. What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been: What does it all mean?

The nature of leisure and play

Handout: “In praise of otium” by Richard O’Mara

Walter Kerr, The Decline of Pleasure

Charles Darwin’s Recollections

Utilitarianism and education

School as schole, “leisure”

 

III. Teaching the humanities to science students

The nature of the humanities and the nature of a liberal education

Handout: from “Teaching Philosophy and History & Philosophy of Science (HPS) to Science Students”

Handout: Excerpt from Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, chapters 1 and 2

Mr. Gradgrind and the definition of a horse

 

The love of art and other useless things: “magnificent obsessions”

(Study tip for the final: Reflect upon Sagoff's discussion of citizen values versus individual preferences)

 

IV. “In Praise of Eccentric Professors”

‘nuff said.

(But see handout: Thomas H. Benton, “In Praise of Eccentric Professors,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 5, 2004, pp. C2-C3.)

 

V. Dénouement: The Ambiguity and Irony of Nature and Culture

Wayne C. Booth. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

 

For your listening and viewing pleasure: from the greatest environmental rock and roll album of all time: The Talking Heads’s “(Nothing But) Flowers”