Final Notes for PH1104

Dear Philosophers,

Congratulations on all of your hard work this semester. I invite you to take time to acknowledge your efforts and I salute your choice to pursue education and mental liberation. Below are some things I wanted to share with you.

1. First, Jen and I wanted to extend a warm invitation for you to visit us at our center, The Sanctuary at Shepardfields in East Haddam. We do host a weekly meditation group including a discussion group on the practice of forgiveness via A Course in Miracles, most Sundays from 3-5 PM. We are also having our first larger event, a Tiny Hermitage Open House on June 15th. If you’d like to be included on our email list, please email us at info@oursanctuary.org.   

2. On the topic of capitalism versus socialism, there was recently an epic debate between two famous public intellectuals: Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher and Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. Their discussion on the theme of capitalism, socialism and human happiness, is generating much discussion and offers a very deep analysis of these questions. 

In a recent book Zizek lays out what he takes to be our basic political choice: “Cynical conformism tells us that emancipatory ideals of more equality, democracy and solidarity are boing and even dangerous, leading to a grey, over regulated society, and that our true and only paradise is the existing ‘corrupted’ capitalist universe. Radical emancipatory engagement starts from the premise that it is the capitalist dynamics which are boring, offering more of the same in the guise of constant change, and that the struggle for emancipation is still the most daring of all ventures. Our goal is to argue for the second option.”
    (Slavoj Zizek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism)

3. Secondly, a topic that I was thinking of including in our class but did not get to: the topic of extraterrestrial visitation. This may not seem like a serious topic for philosophy, but I assure you it is. In fact, the advent of this new reality is creating the newest branch of philosophy, called “exo-philosophy.” I teach one of the very first academic classes in the US dedicated to this topic, which you can check out here. 

If you want to delve into some reliable documents, you can visit a recent blog post from another class I teach here. 

4. Finally, I made use of many fantastic books while teaching this semester. If you would like to pursue further any of the topics we looked at, I could recommend any of the following books.

I thoroughly enjoyed teach/learning with you this semester and wish you the best in your pursuits! 

Sincerely Yours, Justin

Books I used this semester while teaching the class that I found useful and inspiring

Anarchism and Direct Democracy

David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement

David Graeber, The Debt: The First 5000 Years

Mass Incarceration and Prison Abolition

Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and The Road to Repair

Emily Bazelon, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration

Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

George Jackson, Soledad Brothers: The Prison Letters of George Jackson

Abolition Now: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex

Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice

Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.

David Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice

Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

White Supremacy and Structural Racism

Angel Davis, Freedom Is A Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

Patrice Khan-Cullors & Asha Bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

Robin Diangelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro

Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Fredrick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglas

Ta Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power

The Deep State

David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

Jefferson Morley, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton

Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK

Haitian Revolution

C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

Jacob Carruthers, The Irritated Genie: An Essay on the Haitian Revolution