This episode is part five of five of the lecture series [HTA 17] on Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Of Divine Places” [1986], in The Inoperative Community [1991].

Primary Source

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Of Divine Places.” In The Inoperative Community, translated by Michael Holland, [2026] Second V., 110–50. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991 [1986].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• What is the significance of the wink?

• How does the wink replace the instant surface of art with the face of the gods?

• How does the smile of the gods occur?

• Where are the gods? Where is God?

• What does the death of God mean for Nancy?

• How are coming and departing related for divine places and for the gods?

• How does the god appear and disappear? Offer and withdraw?

• What are bare places?

• Why are the temples deserted?

• Why is God’s nature essentially lacking as a no god rather than as a lack?

• How have God, the gods, and my God all abandoned us?

• What are the importances of exposure and destitution in Nancy’s argument?

• How does no presence — of nothing as void — allow for a god’s return?

• Who is my God? [A singular address from a singular subject.]

• How does our shared destitution, exposure, and abandonment before the face of our wandering god — gods who have long abandoned us or will nevertheless soon leave anyway — connect us? How does this mirror our connection through being’s originary co-spacing and co-origination via mitsein in other Nancy texts?

• How does the God differ from a god?

This episode is part four of five of the lecture series [HTA 17] on Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Of Divine Places” [1986], in The Inoperative Community [1991].

Primary Source

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Of Divine Places.” In The Inoperative Community, translated by Michael Holland, [2026] Second V., 110–50. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991 [1986].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• What is the significance of the wink?

• How does the wink replace the instant surface of art with the face of the gods?

• How does the smile of the gods occur?

• Where are the gods? Where is God?

• What does the death of God mean for Nancy?

• How are coming and departing related for divine places and for the gods?

• How does the god appear and disappear? Offer and withdraw?

• What are bare places?

• Why are the temples deserted?

• Why is God’s nature essentially lacking as a no god rather than as a lack?

• How have God, the gods, and my God all abandoned us?

• What are the importances of exposure and destitution in Nancy’s argument?

• How does no presence — of nothing as void — allow for a god’s return?

• Who is my God? [A singular address from a singular subject.]

• How does our shared destitution, exposure, and abandonment before the face of our wandering god — gods who have long abandoned us or will nevertheless soon leave anyway — connect us? How does this mirror our connection through being’s originary co-spacing and co-origination via mitsein in other Nancy texts?

• How does the God differ from a god?

This episode is part three of five of the lecture series [HTA 17] on Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Of Divine Places” [1986], in The Inoperative Community [1991].

Primary Source

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Of Divine Places.” In The Inoperative Community, translated by Michael Holland, [2026] Second V., 110–50. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991 [1986].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• What is the significance of the wink?

• How does the wink replace the instant surface of art with the face of the gods?

• How does the smile of the gods occur?

• Where are the gods? Where is God?

• What does the death of God mean for Nancy?

• How are coming and departing related for divine places and for the gods?

• How does the god appear and disappear? Offer and withdraw?

• What are bare places?

• Why are the temples deserted?

• Why is God’s nature essentially lacking as a no god rather than as a lack?

• How have God, the gods, and my God all abandoned us?

• What are the importances of exposure and destitution in Nancy’s argument?

• How does no presence — of nothing as void — allow for a god’s return?

• Who is my God? [A singular address from a singular subject.]

• How does our shared destitution, exposure, and abandonment before the face of our wandering god — gods who have long abandoned us or will nevertheless soon leave anyway — connect us? How does this mirror our connection through being’s originary co-spacing and co-origination via mitsein in other Nancy texts?

• How does the God differ from a god?

This episode is part two of five of the lecture series [HTA 17] on Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Of Divine Places” [1986], in The Inoperative Community [1991].

Primary Source

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Of Divine Places.” In The Inoperative Community, translated by Michael Holland, [2026] Second V., 110–50. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991 [1986].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• What is the significance of the wink?

• How does the wink replace the instant surface of art with the face of the gods?

• How does the smile of the gods occur?

• Where are the gods? Where is God?

• What does the death of God mean for Nancy?

• How are coming and departing related for divine places and for the gods?

• How does the god appear and disappear? Offer and withdraw?

• What are bare places?

• Why are the temples deserted?

• Why is God’s nature essentially lacking as a no god rather than as a lack?

• How have God, the gods, and my God all abandoned us?

• What are the importances of exposure and destitution in Nancy’s argument?

• How does no presence — of nothing as void — allow for a god’s return?

• Who is my God? [A singular address from a singular subject.]

• How does our shared destitution, exposure, and abandonment before the face of our wandering god — gods who have long abandoned us or will nevertheless soon leave anyway — connect us? How does this mirror our connection through being’s originary co-spacing and co-origination via mitsein in other Nancy texts?

• How does the God differ from a god?

This episode is part one of five of the lecture series [HTA 17] on Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Of Divine Places” [1986], in The Inoperative Community [1991].

Primary Source

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Of Divine Places.” In The Inoperative Community, translated by Michael Holland, [2026] Second V., 110–50. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991 [1986].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• What is the significance of the wink?

• How does the wink replace the instant surface of art with the face of the gods?

• How does the smile of the gods occur?

• Where are the gods? Where is God?

• What does the death of God mean for Nancy?

• How are coming and departing related for divine places and for the gods?

• How does the god appear and disappear? Offer and withdraw?

• What are bare places?

• Why are the temples deserted?

• Why is God’s nature essentially lacking as a no god rather than as a lack?

• How have God, the gods, and my God all abandoned us?

• What are the importances of exposure and destitution in Nancy’s argument?

• How does no presence — of nothing as void — allow for a god’s return?

• Who is my God? [A singular address from a singular subject.]

• How does our shared destitution, exposure, and abandonment before the face of our wandering god — gods who have long abandoned us or will nevertheless soon leave anyway — connect us? How does this mirror our connection through being’s originary co-spacing and co-origination via mitsein in other Nancy texts?

• How does the God differ from a god?

This episode is part two of two of the lecture series [HTA 16] on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Divinity School Address, i.e., Acquaint Thyself First Hand with Deity,” delivered to the Harvard Divinity School in the summer of 1838.

Primary Source

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Divinity School Address, I.e., Acquaint Thyself First Hand with Deity,” 2019 [1838]. https://emersoncentral.com/ebook/Divinity-School-Address.pdf.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• What is the relationship between deity, spirit, truth, and direct experience?

• How does Emerson argue that we have misunderstood Christianity?

• “And now, my brothers, you will ask, What in these desponding days can be done by us?”

• Which two benefits does Emerson argue Christianity offers to us as a starting point?

• How does Christian/religious anarchism relate to the notions of individualism, personal access to God, self-reliance, and transcendentalism?

This episode is part one of two of the lecture series [HTA 16] on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Divinity School Address, i.e., Acquaint Thyself First Hand with Deity,” delivered to the Harvard Divinity School in the summer of 1838.

Primary Source

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Divinity School Address, I.e., Acquaint Thyself First Hand with Deity,” 2019 [1838]. https://emersoncentral.com/ebook/Divinity-School-Address.pdf.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• What is the relationship between deity, spirit, truth, and direct experience?

• How does Emerson argue that we have misunderstood Christianity?

• “And now, my brothers, you will ask, What in these desponding days can be done by us?”

• Which two benefits does Emerson argue Christianity offers to us as a starting point?

• How does Christian/religious anarchism relate to the notions of individualism, personal access to God, self-reliance, and transcendentalism?

This episode is part one of one of the lecture series [HTA 15] on Gilles Deleuze’s “Zones of Immanence,” from Two Regimes of Madness_ Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 and on Deleuze’s “Immanence_ A Life” [1995], in Pure Immanence_ Essays on A Life.

Primary Source

Deleuze, Gilles. “Immanence: A Life.” In Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, translated by Anne Boyman, 25–33. New York: Zone Books, 2005 [1995].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Zones of Immanence.” In Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, 266–69. Cambridge, MA / London, UK: Semiotext(e), distributed by The MIT Press, 2007 [1995].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

“Zones of Immanence” [ca. 1975-95] in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995

• Which historical tradition contrasts with immanence? In other words, what foil does Deleuze start the essay with to help compare against and define immanence?

• What are the two movements of immanence? How do they relate to the classic problem of the One and the Many? How might the One and the Many relate to the simultaneity we saw in Sartre between first-person freedom/magic and third-person determinism/mechanism? How might this simultaneity result in identity and difference? Do they determine their meanings in relation to one another?

• How do horizontality and verticality relate to immanence and transcendence?

• What two ideas form the basis of an expressionist philosophy, according to Deleuze?

• How does translation demonstrate the simultaneity between the One and the Many, between God and the multiplicity of the World?

• How does Deleuze’s re-conception of translation (through Gandillac) offer a notion of the world as linguistic, forming the basis of hermeneutical materialism (that sense communicates to us through originary, shared material communion)?

“Immanence: A Life” [1995], in Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life

• What is A Life?

• What is the significance of the example from Charles Dickens? Why does everyone lose their sense of self to save the degenerate rogue’s life?

• Whose perspective is A Life? If we are entangled in strange ways, how does this interact with solipsism? If solipsism is still possible, how would it be multiple?

• How does Deleuze’s view contrast with the “experience-in-the-brain” model?

• What active verbs describe how the concepts/notions articulate and express behavior patterns out in the world? Avoid linking verbs when writing on ontology.

• What is the difference between “a” life and “the” life? This determination into suchness, particularness, thatness, mineness, and as-it-is-ness is called haecceity. Still, how does Deleuze transform the medieval haecceity (with its assumption of transcendence) into the dimension of immanence and actualization? How does this relate to singularities, indices, and abschattungen, i.e., adumbration, in phenomenology?

• How does “a” life connect from the first instance the unity of beings due to giving primacy to the indefinite article “a”? This indefiniteness is an index rather than a transcendental form “out there,” separate and away from the world.

• How do immanence and transcendence relate to monism and dualism? How do these relate to the nature of consciousness? How do they describe the production of conscious experience and its necessary preconditions?

• How might A Life and its accompanying model of consciousness relate to “an answer to the meaning of life” and why we exist in the first place?

• Does Deleuze replace transcendence with immanence or show how they interrelate? Is one of these two fundamental metaphysical structures subordinate or superior to the other structure? Are they inseparable?

This episode is part six of six of the lecture series [HTA 14] on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939].

Primary Source

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Translated by Philip Mairet with foreword by Sebastian Gardner. New York: Routledge Great Minds, 2014.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

Introduction

• Why is phenomenology better suited than psychology to offer a complete account of human-reality, the world as synthetic totality, and self-conscious subjectivity (i.e., consciousness)?

I. The Classical Theories

• What is the finality of emotion?

• Why are James’s peripheric theory and Janet’s intellectualist theory of emotion similarly inadequate solutions to the mind-body problem, for the same reason?

• What is Sartre’s alternative, which is an adaptation of Janet’s theory?

II. The Psychoanalytic Theory

• Why is the psychoanalytic theory of emotion as an unconscious resolution of drives, urges, impulses, or tensions still inadequate?

III. Outline of a Phenomenological Theory; Conclusion

• How does emotion as a transformation of the world imply and provide evidence for the reality of the magical world, i.e., for the world as fundamentally magical?

This episode is part five of six of the lecture series [HTA 14] on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939].

Primary Source

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Translated by Philip Mairet with foreword by Sebastian Gardner. New York: Routledge Great Minds, 2014.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

Introduction

• Why is phenomenology better suited than psychology to offer a complete account of human-reality, the world as synthetic totality, and self-conscious subjectivity (i.e., consciousness)?

I. The Classical Theories

• What is the finality of emotion?

• Why are James’s peripheric theory and Janet’s intellectualist theory of emotion similarly inadequate solutions to the mind-body problem, for the same reason?

• What is Sartre’s alternative, which is an adaptation of Janet’s theory?

II. The Psychoanalytic Theory

• Why is the psychoanalytic theory of emotion as an unconscious resolution of drives, urges, impulses, or tensions still inadequate?

III. Outline of a Phenomenological Theory; Conclusion

• How does emotion as a transformation of the world imply and provide evidence for the reality of the magical world, i.e., for the world as fundamentally magical?

This episode is part four of six of the lecture series [HTA 14] on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939].

Primary Source

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Translated by Philip Mairet with foreword by Sebastian Gardner. New York: Routledge Great Minds, 2014.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

Introduction

• Why is phenomenology better suited than psychology to offer a complete account of human-reality, the world as synthetic totality, and self-conscious subjectivity (i.e., consciousness)?

I. The Classical Theories

• What is the finality of emotion?

• Why are James’s peripheric theory and Janet’s intellectualist theory of emotion similarly inadequate solutions to the mind-body problem, for the same reason?

• What is Sartre’s alternative, which is an adaptation of Janet’s theory?

II. The Psychoanalytic Theory

• Why is the psychoanalytic theory of emotion as an unconscious resolution of drives, urges, impulses, or tensions still inadequate?

III. Outline of a Phenomenological Theory; Conclusion

• How does emotion as a transformation of the world imply and provide evidence for the reality of the magical world, i.e., for the world as fundamentally magical?

This episode is part three of six of the lecture series [HTA 14] on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939].

Primary Source

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Translated by Philip Mairet with foreword by Sebastian Gardner. New York: Routledge Great Minds, 2014.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

Introduction

• Why is phenomenology better suited than psychology to offer a complete account of human-reality, the world as synthetic totality, and self-conscious subjectivity (i.e., consciousness)?

I. The Classical Theories

• What is the finality of emotion?

• Why are James’s peripheric theory and Janet’s intellectualist theory of emotion similarly inadequate solutions to the mind-body problem, for the same reason?

• What is Sartre’s alternative, which is an adaptation of Janet’s theory?

II. The Psychoanalytic Theory

• Why is the psychoanalytic theory of emotion as an unconscious resolution of drives, urges, impulses, or tensions still inadequate?

III. Outline of a Phenomenological Theory; Conclusion

• How does emotion as a transformation of the world imply and provide evidence for the reality of the magical world, i.e., for the world as fundamentally magical?

This episode is part two of six of the lecture series [HTA 14] on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939].

Primary Source

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Translated by Philip Mairet with foreword by Sebastian Gardner. New York: Routledge Great Minds, 2014.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

Introduction

• Why is phenomenology better suited than psychology to offer a complete account of human-reality, the world as synthetic totality, and self-conscious subjectivity (i.e., consciousness)?

I. The Classical Theories

• What is the finality of emotion?

• Why are James’s peripheric theory and Janet’s intellectualist theory of emotion similarly inadequate solutions to the mind-body problem, for the same reason?

• What is Sartre’s alternative, which is an adaptation of Janet’s theory?

II. The Psychoanalytic Theory

• Why is the psychoanalytic theory of emotion as an unconscious resolution of drives, urges, impulses, or tensions still inadequate?

III. Outline of a Phenomenological Theory; Conclusion

• How does emotion as a transformation of the world imply and provide evidence for the reality of the magical world, i.e., for the world as fundamentally magical?

This episode is part one of six of the lecture series [HTA 14] on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939].

Primary Source

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Translated by Philip Mairet with foreword by Sebastian Gardner. New York: Routledge Great Minds, 2014.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

Introduction

• Why is phenomenology better suited than psychology to offer a complete account of human-reality, the world as synthetic totality, and self-conscious subjectivity (i.e., consciousness)?

I. The Classical Theories

• What is the finality of emotion?

• Why are James’s peripheric theory and Janet’s intellectualist theory of emotion similarly inadequate solutions to the mind-body problem, for the same reason?

• What is Sartre’s alternative, which is an adaptation of Janet’s theory?

II. The Psychoanalytic Theory

• Why is the psychoanalytic theory of emotion as an unconscious resolution of drives, urges, impulses, or tensions still inadequate?

III. Outline of a Phenomenological Theory; Conclusion

• How does emotion as a transformation of the world imply and provide evidence for the reality of the magical world, i.e., for the world as fundamentally magical?

This episode is part four of four of the lecture series [HTA 13] on John Dewey’s Art as Experience [1934], Chapters 1-3, of which the entire text’s fourteen chapters were delivered in some format as a ten-lecture series in 1931 at Harvard for the honorary William James lecture series, with the assigned topic being the philosophy of art.

Primary Source

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

Ch. 3, Having an Experience

• What are the common patterns of every experience?

  • Doing and undergoing, not in alternation, but in simultaneous relationship, happening always at the same time and in the same action under different perspectives. Equal but opposite reactions, i.e., Newton’s Third Law of Motion. The lifting of a stone with my arm and with my hand is both an intentional doing as well as a responsive undergoing whereby I also feel the weight of the stone on my musculature, the data from which informs the forthcoming action, as a responsive mutual fine-tuning. In this way, artworks determine themselves by communicating to the artist the missing feedback of their achievement, the expectation of their arising re-creation.

• What gives meaning?

  • Meaning is perceived through the unified perception of cause and effect, especially as relations between mean and consequence or between method and outcome via creative, practical intention — i.e., being able to perceive the effect with the cause, simultaneously, as part of the same process, as one flowing, continuing act. Undergoing determines further doing insofar as the feedback informs the success of my actions and intentions through a given means. The excess of doing (e.g., a flurry of activity; mechanical; overstimulated) and the excess of undergoing (i.e., of receptivity; e.g., a flitting, a sipping) hinder one’s being given meaning or coming to perceive it for themselves. Further, Dewey’s instrumentalist view of knowledge and meaning are akin to Aristotelian and utilitarian means-ends reasoning.

• What kind of intelligence does the artist require?

  • Bonus question: Does listening to jazz piano make you more intelligent?

    • Listening to complexities in different sense-languages does increase mental activity and promote increasingly nuanced and complex thought-forms. Listening contours and shapes our perceptual and cognitive mental pathways.

  • Dynamic intelligence because they have to be able to engage with the world and interpret the qualitative, sensory aspects with sensitivity and causal reasoning (means-ends reasoning; doing and undergoing in relation, in alternation, and simultaneously). Awareness of the relations between what was just done and what is about to be done; of the relations between work and impact on the audience, which requires active listening; of the relations between process and product. See below.

  • Perception of the Relationships of Qualities (but what kinds of relationships?)

    • Process to Product (in process; envisioning the product, especially how the vision of the product changes in response to a present perception of whether the work is affecting the desired feeling)

    • Parts to Whole (in the product, how each part contributes to the whole, i.e., to the anticipated consequent end-result experience of the work of art)

    • Parts to Parts (how the qualities work together, whether auditory, visual, or tactile)

    • Artwork to Audience-Perceiver (how it will impact; between the independent product of the work of art and the experience of the viewer and/or artist)

    • Moment to Moment (technique; how methods achieve certain results; from one undergoing [of the brush on the hand and on the canvas] to the next doing)

    • Moment to Envisioned Whole (how a technique achieves the end)

    • Adaptation of the Whole Envisaged (in response to the present; see above, under Process to Product)

    • Technical Experimentation (to find new techniques to achieve a vision)

    • Historical Differentiations (how different histories in an audience will perceive a work)

    • Cause and Effect (Method toward an Intentional Purpose)

    • Doing and Undergoing (common elements of all experiences)

• How are the production and the perception of artworks interwoven?

  • Artistic (e.g., doing; production) vs. Esthetic (e.g., undergoing; perception)

  • Artistic Production (Undergoing Artist; Active-Receptivity):

    • The artist refines the production process in response to a present esthetic experience, and esthetic experience [of the work of art] is imbued in the work of art only insofar as the artist had an esthetic experience while making it.

    • The artist consciously, esthetically perceives the work of art in its production, to allow the perception of qualities to determine their own outcomes by informing the artist of whether such qualities reinforce esthetic experience through the work of art. Insofar as the artist has an esthetic experience in the process of production, they imbue the esthetic experience into the work (through a present perception of the work’s power), thereby allowing the work to produce esthetic experience in other viewers.

    • Artistic production by an artist is a doing, but it is also an undergoing insofar as the artist must refine their work in production through an active, ongoing process of esthetic perception. Insofar as they have an esthetic experience while making it, the work of art is more likely to produce such an esthetic experience in the viewer.

    • The measure of the value of what is prepared is found in consumption (cook and customer). The artist constantly takes up and furthers esthetic perception in the process of production, allowing to ensure esthetic effect and imbue the work with a capacity for esthetic experience. The viewer has esthetic experience insofar as the artist did while making it.

    • The measure of excellence in execution is determined by the consumer, viewer, or audience of the work.

    • “The doing or making is artistic when the perceived result is of such a nature that its qualities as perceived have controlled the question of production.”

  • Esthetic Perception (Doing Audience; Receptive-Activity): See below, How is [esthetic] perception also a form of doing-making (through surrender)?

• How do artworks make themselves?

  • “The doing or making is artistic when the perceived result is of such a nature that its qualities as perceived have controlled the question of production.”

  • Production is regulated by the qualities of the product as perceived.

  • Until the artist is satisfied in perception with what she is doing, she continues shaping and reshaping. The making comes to an end when its result is experienced as good, in direct perception.

  • “In as far as the development of an experience is controlled through reference to these immediately felt relations of order and fulfillment, that experience becomes dominantly esthetic in nature.”

  • “He makes it in a way so regulated by the series of perceptions that sum up the serial acts of making, that the bowl is marked by enduring grace and charm.”

  • Present esthetic perception of the work redirects what the artist does; the materials, in tandem and interaction with the artist, refine and determine the final product. Qualities are perceived either as belonging together or as jarring, as reinforcing or as interfering, and such perceptions determine making. Perception as gestation of a work of art is a form of organization, which in turn creates a further depth for a piece of art, possibly creating an entirely new piece.

  • Artworks make themselves by informing the artist of how the vision should change. They reshape what the artist intends. If they do not, then the artist is not undergoing esthetic perception in the act of production-doing-making, and the product will not produce esthetic experience in other viewers.

  • Recognition (reducing the present to the past for some other purpose) vs. perception (letting the present redirect the past; the past surging forth and enriching the consummate present moment [of esthetic perception which always involves consummation])

• What three traits are required of the artist?

  • Relations of Qualities (i.e., Causal Intelligence; Doings and Undergoings)

  • Skillful action; technique; mechanical prowess; powers of execution; dexterity in production (i.e., Excellent Doing)

  • Acuity and sensitivity of perception; unusual sensitivity to the qualities of things (i.e., Excellent Undergoing)

• How is perception also a form of doing-making (through surrender)?

  • “Taking in” requires activities comparable to those of the creator.

  • Receptivity is not passivity, but rather a series of responsive acts, otherwise there is not perception (past  [informs and empowers] present; can change directions) but recognition (present  [reduced to] past; narrow-minded; traditionalist; ritualistic; proceduralist; dogmatic).

  • “Recognition is perception arrested before it has the chance to develop freely.”

  • “An ordering of the elements of the whole[…]”

  • “Recognition is too easy to arouse vivid consciousness [no friction].”

  • “Perception is an act of the going-out of energy in order to receive, not a withholding of energy. To steep ourselves in a subject-matter we have first to plunge into it.”

  • “We must summon energy and pitch it at a responsive key in order to take in.”

  • “For to perceive, a beholder must create his own experience.”

  • “Without an act of recreation the object is not perceived as a work of art.”

  • Perception makes the present with the materials of the past. Perception is always interpretive. Experiences and perceptions change over time, even from the same person. Years later, you experience your hometown or familiar favorites (e.g., comfort foods; memorable songs; etc.) differently, strangely. (Present, unique, coherent) perceptions are the consummation-fulfillment of the original making, as fresh makings. The viewer creates a specific construction of the work of art unique to them.

  • Active yielding of the self to meet the demands of a present perception (effortful listening).

  • There is a different listening-making the first time a piece of music is heard (imperfectly) versus a later, more detailed perception when the same piece of music is heard and understood more perfectly.

  • The viewer must recreate the artwork in their own experience (learning).

  • Summon energies to match the demands of what you’re perceiving, pitch it at a responsive key. Receptivity is not passivity.

• How do emotions permeate their material occasions?

  • An act of perception proceeds by emotional waves that extend serially throughout the entire organism. If emotion does not permeate the material perceptions or is not thought of by proceeding in this way, then the aroused emotion is either:

    • Preliminary (developing; still in germ)

    • Pathological (delusional; not grounded or anchored in reality)

  • Experiences are material emotions, emotional material.

  • Superimposed permeation (pathological; recognition — reducing a present environment to a previously felt, predetermined emotion) vs. grounded perception of emotion (present perception redirects action, knowing, vision, feeling, emotion, quality).

• Which characteristics of experience are dominant in esthetic experience?

  • Esthetic experience emphasizes those characteristics which are subterranean, subordinate, architectonically proto-structural, and subdued in other common (i.e., intellectual and practical) experiences — namely the characteristics which make all experiences coherent and integral, integrated, consummate, and unified. The end, the terminus, is significant not by itself, but as the integration of parts. It has no other existence. Discretion is emphasized. Esthetic experience involves “the conversion of resistance and tensions into a movement toward an inclusive and fulfilling close.”

  • Esthetic experience has worth only in itself; it does not produce a conclusion that can be acted upon for further work. The overlooked, subterranean elements which harmonize all integral experiences are emphasized in dominantly, distinctively esthetic experiences, controlling its production.

  • “The end, the terminus, is significant not by itself but as the integration of the parts.”

  • “That which distinguishes an experience as esthetic is conversion of resistance and tensions, of excitations that in themselves are temptations to diversion, into a movement toward an inclusive and fulfilling close.”

  • Esthetic experience emphasizes those characteristics which are ignored, beneath the surface of all other experiences, but which are necessary for any integral experience, in themselves, for their own sake; the end, the terminus, is significant only as the integration of its parts.

• What do James’s birds’ flights and perchings symbolize or represent?

  • Growth involves nested back-and-forth rhythms, undulating within each other, always inchoate and developing in germ and out of germ.

  • Flights-Perchings

  • Doing-Undergoing

  • Making-Perceiving

  • Activity-Rest (Accruing Energy)

  • Accumulation-Consolidation

  • Intaking-Outgivings

  • Outgivings-Intakings

  • Producing-Incubating

  • Expressing-Impressing

  • Always in each other at every moment, in oscillating-alternating rhythms.

• When (i.e., under what conditions) is an object peculiarly and dominantly esthetic?

  • An object is peculiarly and dominantly esthetic “when the factors that determine anything which can be called an experience are lifted high above the threshold of perception and are made manifest for their own sake,” becoming relevant and beneficial to all live creatures.

This episode is part three of four of the lecture series [HTA 13] on John Dewey’s Art as Experience [1934], Chapters 1-3, of which the entire text’s fourteen chapters were delivered in some format as a ten-lecture series in 1931 at Harvard for the honorary William James lecture series, with the assigned topic being the philosophy of art.

Primary Source

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

Ch. 2, The Live Creature and “Etherial Things”

• How does art’s capacity for emotional resonance and affection across diverse bodies and histories provide the foundations for a common civil life of democracy and for sharing being-existence-consciousness-experience?

  • The fact that works of art can have overlapping, pseudo-universal common impacts despite our differences implies a common biological life, which simultaneously can serve and function as the stable grounding of democracy; moreover, art promotes this democratic grounding.

  • Artworks (in experience) intensify and crystallize universal biological processes and struggles as previous experiences, i.e., as histories, and as future goals, i.e., as needs. This common biological life stably grounds democracy in shared interactions.

  • The fact that works of art can resonate with diverse sets of lived experience implies a universal common life of all live creatures deep below conscious awareness, which we might call “primitive relationships.” This grounding stabilizes democracy.

• How is animism related to esthetic experience?

  • Animism (i.e., spirits-gods animating-pervading the material world) speaks to uncanny and untimely experiences where the esthetic is not properly understood and does not transparently disclose-reveal itself.

  • The experience of spirits-gods in animals and nature (i.e., animism) is a misattribution of the inherent esthetic-spiritual-ideal qualities in culminative, consummative, harmonious, in-step, present, engaged environment-material experiences in (i.e., with-through) the world.

  • The belief that spirits animate matter (i.e., animism) is a fundamental misattribution of esthetic experience as a fluid hyper-awareness of the present.

• How does reasoning require deflection and abeyance of objections in favor of intuition and imagination?

  • True reason is impossible and instead requires grace but is fine when instinctive and impulsive; philosophers must ignore their counterarguments when writing. One must obey the overpowering intuition and esthetic imagination — i.e., emotionally charged sense.

  • All writers, if they don’t get stuck in their self-criticisms, have had to ignore foreseeable objections in pursuit of their conclusions. Reasoning as instinctive, as impulsive, is fine; it has grace. “Beauty is truth; truth, beauty.” – John Keats

  • Expression requires ignoring conflicting thoughts, but earnest, instinctive efforts are still fine; they have grace. Intuition seeks and pursues its goal.

• How does esthetic perception require acceptance of half-knowledge?

  • Half-knowledge frees the live creature onto the present moment in full force, simultaneously allowing for the effortful, tense strife which serves as the precondition for the esthetic consummation of experience doubling back on itself to intensify.

  • Esthetic perception and experience take the mysteries and half-knowledge of life and turn them back on themselves to intensify living itself.

  • Esthetic perception turns life’s uncertainties in on itself to intensify living; this is the production and refinement of art and esthetic experiences.

Ch. 3, Having an Experience

• How is an experience different (from inchoate experience)?

  • An experience has a beginning and an end, which is not a cutting stop but which is itself a consummation of the previous disorder (distinct but not disintegrated from the rest of your life or itself).

  • Self-organized; composed; integrated within; demarcated; self-sufficient; game of chess; dinner with family; political campaign

  • Interchange: flows freely without seams, unfilled blanks, mechanical junctions (dovetails), or dead centers; yet self-identity of parts-elements.

  • Experience at large vs. specific experiences; its own beginning and end

  • Each with its own unrepeated quality pervading it throughout

  • Real experiences; “that was an experience!” That meal; that storm; that quarrel with a friend

  • Chapters; acts; scenes; in a drama

  • Total integral experiences that are intrinsically worthwhile.

  • Stairsteps vs. incline vs. sinusoidal rhythms

  • Whole-phases as a unity-multiplicity hybrid; leads into another and carries on

  • Continuous merging, interchanging, and blending;

  • Pauses and places of rest that punctuate movement

  • Rounded out; whole

  • Premises and conclusion arise all at once.

• Why can the esthetic not be sharply marked off from intellectual experience?

  • Both involve engagement, perspectival interpretation, and personal value to yourself. A conclusion is the consummation of a movement — not a separate thing (interwoven). Without esthetic fulfillment, thinking is inconclusive.

  • The esthetic possesses internal integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized movement. Conclusions of thought are arrived upon as esthetic consummations, fulfillment of a process.

  • The conclusions of intellectual experience are fulfillments of an experience, the fulfillment which is itself esthetic consummation. “It possesses integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized movement.”

• What is required for a stone rolling down a hill to have an experience?

  • The stone starts from somewhere and moves, as consistently as conditions permit (such as experiencing gravity or hitting oppositional forces, e.g., trees, branches, rocks, walls, etc.), toward a place and state where it will be at rest — toward an end. In other words, experience needs a coherent, self-organizing process with gratification. The stone looks forward with desire to the final outcome, and it is interested in the things it meets on its way, conditions that accelerate and retard its movement with respect to their bearing on the end. The stone having an experience acts and feels toward them according to the hindering or helping function it attributes to them. The final coming to rest is related to all that went before as the culmination of a continuous movement.

• How are emotions related to experiences?

  • “Experience is emotional, but there are no separate things called emotions in it.” Unique emotions are attached to unique events and unique objects in their movement. Emotion is the moving and cementing force of the miracle of mind that provides unity in and through the varied parts of experience. (Not simple, compact, or discrete.)

  • Emotions are the felt quality carried by the vehicle of unique occasions and events. Different emotions from different qualitative feelings from different environmental interchanges and experiences. “Experience is emotional, but there are no separate things called emotions in it.” Emotions are attached to events and objects in their movement, as vehicles or occasion. Emotions unify and cohere a diverse history of past experiences in conscious thought, which is to say conscious perception.

  • “Experience is emotional, but there are no separate things called emotions in it.” Emotions are attached to events and objects in their environment. The dominant emotion pervades an experience and subtly changes throughout with different shades. The predominant emotion is attached to the whole event (both spatial whole of the environment and temporal whole of an experience), and the varying shades are attached to the objects, moments, scenes, and beats. The environment as occasion carries (like a vehicle) and produces emotions in the nexus of the subject (like a resonating chamber).

  • Different qualities of the same general kind of emotions (or sensual-emotional-qualitative perceptions) operate in different experiences, specific to each environmental (environing on the mental) and mental context (e.g., different fears, different joys, different loves, different reds, different blues, different senses each time). Specific emotions are carried and produced alongside the vehicle of the occasion-event-environment.

  • “Emotion is the moving and cementing force of the miracle of mind, selecting what is congruous and dying [painting, staining, coloring, or tinging] what is selected, thereby giving qualitative unity to materials externally disparate and dissimilar, in and through the varied parts of an experience.”

This episode is part two of four of the lecture series [HTA 13] on John Dewey’s Art as Experience [1934], Chapters 1-3, of which the entire text’s fourteen chapters were delivered in some format as a ten-lecture series in 1931 at Harvard for the honorary William James lecture series, with the assigned topic being the philosophy of art.

Primary Source

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

Ch. 1, The Live Creature

• How do the rhythms of disintegration and consummation between the live creature and its environment produce esthetic experience?

  • Esthetic experience itself is the gratifying feeling between rhythms of the live creature with its environment and past. Without disintegration, strife, conflict, and effort, consummation would not be possible. Without reunion and consummation, conflict would be painful without meaning or purpose.

• How does emotional sense in direct experience produce but also absorb intellectual, linguistic symbolism?

  • Because artworks are a language, we can see the continuity of expressive thought and communication. Sense is organized and refined into its more technical forms, such as math and science. Because sense evokes language and historical knowledge, we can infer that holistic sense absorbs such language.

Ch. 2, The Live Creature and “Etherial Things”

• What is the difference between mere recognition and esthetic perception?

  • Mere recognition is about identifying something without engaging with it on a deeper level, whereas esthetic perception is about experiencing it while also connecting an emotional response to it dependent on one’s past. Recognition is quickly identifying something familiar from past experiences without much thought. Perception involves a deeper engagement where you fully appreciate the details and emotions of what you are experiencing, without reducing it to what you already know and without assuming what it will become. In perception, the past surges forth to invigorate the present, rather than conquering the present and reducing it to the past idea or experience.

• Why is art primary to science, i.e., why is science merely a handmaiden to the arts?

  • The purpose of the arts is to enrich life’s intrinsic meaning; science as a specific, refined, technological art is only ultimately useful or meaningful insofar as it supports esthetic enrichment. Art is the complete culmination of nature. Therefore, science is its handmaiden that conducts natural events to this happy issue.

• What is art’s relation to material and etherial things?

  • Art is a bridge between material and etherial things. Art acts as a ley line from past to present, unifying supposed dualities. Art is a material expression of etherial things through-via-with-as the medium of matter.

  • Artmaking is the transformation (organization) of material (matter) into etherial things.

  • Art is the melding of material things to express, symbolize, convey, and form etherial experiences. Our relation to art is not just with the complete art piece but with our experiences and formation of the art. Works of art transform material (matter) into etherial things.

This episode is part one of four of the lecture series [HTA 13] on John Dewey’s Art as Experience [1934], Chapters 1-3, of which the entire text’s fourteen chapters were delivered in some format as a ten-lecture series in 1931 at Harvard for the honorary William James lecture series, with the assigned topic being the philosophy of art.

Primary Source

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

Ch. 1, The Live Creature

• How does mind-body dualism separate art from everyday experience and thereby estrange the live creature from intrinsic spiritual fulfillment?

  • Compartmentalization of life prevents esthetic consummation and privatizes access to what should be a universal right to fulfillment. The spiritual is a refinement of the material, in a living body.

This episode is part three of three of the lecture series [HTA 12] on William James’s “What Pragmatism Means” [1904], in Everyman’s Selected Writings, Second [Revised] Edition [1995], with an introduction by Graham H. Bird.

Primary Source

James, William. “What Pragmatism Means.” In Selected Writings: with Introduction by G.H. Bird, xii-xliii, 3–19. Vermont/London: Everyman, 1995 [1904].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• How does the pragmatic method hinge on the functionalist account of meaning?

  • The pragmatic method is to compare the world-states of adopting two contradictory beliefs. The world-state is a function of the meaning of the idea; the full meaning of the idea includes its causal consequences out in the world itself, enacted by those who hold the given belief-systems or at least are indirectly impacted by their consequences and corollaries. The pragmatic method uses meaning as function to evaluate the worth of ideas.

• How is the genetic theory of truth different from universal claims of truth?

  • The genetic theory of truth offers a descriptive account of the natural, unavoidable, idiosyncratic (unique to each person) process of making sense and making meaning out of one’s experiences. This process involves new experiences which disrupt the previous stock of belief and require the participant to rethink their beliefs, categories, and various truth-systems of stabilized perception and coherence. This reciprocal fine-tuning of truth allows optimization unique to each person’s differential lived experience and embodied historicity, empowering a pluralism of survival strategies.

This episode is part two of three of the lecture series [HTA 12] on William James’s “What Pragmatism Means” [1904], in Everyman’s Selected Writings, Second [Revised] Edition [1995], with an introduction by Graham H. Bird.

Primary Source

James, William. “What Pragmatism Means.” In Selected Writings: with Introduction by G.H. Bird, xii-xliii, 3–19. Vermont/London: Everyman, 1995 [1904].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• How does the pragmatic method hinge on the functionalist account of meaning?

  • The pragmatic method is to compare the world-states of adopting two contradictory beliefs. The world-state is a function of the meaning of the idea; the full meaning of the idea includes its causal consequences out in the world itself, enacted by those who hold the given belief-systems or at least are indirectly impacted by their consequences and corollaries. The pragmatic method uses meaning as function to evaluate the worth of ideas.

• How is the genetic theory of truth different from universal claims of truth?

  • The genetic theory of truth offers a descriptive account of the natural, unavoidable, idiosyncratic (unique to each person) process of making sense and making meaning out of one’s experiences. This process involves new experiences which disrupt the previous stock of belief and require the participant to rethink their beliefs, categories, and various truth-systems of stabilized perception and coherence. This reciprocal fine-tuning of truth allows optimization unique to each person’s differential lived experience and embodied historicity, empowering a pluralism of survival strategies.

This episode is part one of three of the lecture series [HTA 12] on William James’s “What Pragmatism Means” [1904], in Everyman’s Selected Writings, Second [Revised] Edition [1995], with an introduction by Graham H. Bird.

Primary Source

James, William. “What Pragmatism Means.” In Selected Writings: with Introduction by G.H. Bird, xii-xliii, 3–19. Vermont/London: Everyman, 1995 [1904].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• How does the pragmatic method hinge on the functionalist account of meaning?

  • The pragmatic method is to compare the world-states of adopting two contradictory beliefs. The world-state is a function of the meaning of the idea; the full meaning of the idea includes its causal consequences out in the world itself, enacted by those who hold the given belief-systems or at least are indirectly impacted by their consequences and corollaries. The pragmatic method uses meaning as function to evaluate the worth of ideas.

• How is the genetic theory of truth different from universal claims of truth?

  • The genetic theory of truth offers a descriptive account of the natural, unavoidable, idiosyncratic (unique to each person) process of making sense and making meaning out of one’s experiences. This process involves new experiences which disrupt the previous stock of belief and require the participant to rethink their beliefs, categories, and various truth-systems of stabilized perception and coherence. This reciprocal fine-tuning of truth allows optimization unique to each person’s differential lived experience and embodied historicity, empowering a pluralism of survival strategies.

This episode is part five of five of the lecture series [HTA 11] on John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism [1861], in Hackett’s The Classical Utilitarians [2003], with an introduction by John Troyer.

Primary Source

Mill, John Stuart. “Utilitarianism.” In The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill, with Introduction by John Troyer, edited by John Troyer, 94–115. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket Publishing Company, Inc., 2003 [1863].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• What is hedonism?

• What is the difference between instrumental and intrinsic goods?

• How is utilitarianism different from consequentialism?

• What is general utilitarianism?

• How is act-utilitarianism different from rule-utilitarianism?

• What are the two difficulties of utilitarianism?

• What is an example of how/when utilitarianism is unfair to the individual / violates individual rights?

• What is the utility monster?

• What is the prisoner’s dilemma?

• What is Roko’s basilisk?

This episode is part four of five of the lecture series [HTA 11] on John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism [1861], in Hackett’s The Classical Utilitarians [2003], with an introduction by John Troyer.

Primary Source

Mill, John Stuart. “Utilitarianism.” In The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill, with Introduction by John Troyer, edited by John Troyer, 94–115. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket Publishing Company, Inc., 2003 [1863].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• What is hedonism?

• What is the difference between instrumental and intrinsic goods?

• How is utilitarianism different from consequentialism?

• What is general utilitarianism?

• How is act-utilitarianism different from rule-utilitarianism?

• What are the two difficulties of utilitarianism?

• What is an example of how/when utilitarianism is unfair to the individual / violates individual rights?

• What is the utility monster?

• What is the prisoner’s dilemma?

• What is Roko’s basilisk?

This episode is part three of five of the lecture series [HTA 11] on John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism [1861], in Hackett’s The Classical Utilitarians [2003], with an introduction by John Troyer.

Primary Source

Mill, John Stuart. “Utilitarianism.” In The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill, with Introduction by John Troyer, edited by John Troyer, 94–115. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket Publishing Company, Inc., 2003 [1863].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• What is hedonism?

• What is the difference between instrumental and intrinsic goods?

• How is utilitarianism different from consequentialism?

• What is general utilitarianism?

• How is act-utilitarianism different from rule-utilitarianism?

• What are the two difficulties of utilitarianism?

• What is an example of how/when utilitarianism is unfair to the individual / violates individual rights?

• What is the utility monster?

• What is the prisoner’s dilemma?

• What is Roko’s basilisk?

This episode is part two of five of the lecture series [HTA 11] on John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism [1861], in Hackett’s The Classical Utilitarians [2003], with an introduction by John Troyer.

Primary Source

Mill, John Stuart. “Utilitarianism.” In The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill, with Introduction by John Troyer, edited by John Troyer, 94–115. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket Publishing Company, Inc., 2003 [1863].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• What is hedonism?

• What is the difference between instrumental and intrinsic goods?

• How is utilitarianism different from consequentialism?

• What is general utilitarianism?

• How is act-utilitarianism different from rule-utilitarianism?

• What are the two difficulties of utilitarianism?

• What is an example of how/when utilitarianism is unfair to the individual / violates individual rights?

• What is the utility monster?

• What is the prisoner’s dilemma?

• What is Roko’s basilisk?

This episode is part one of five of the lecture series [HTA 11] on John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism [1861], in Hackett’s The Classical Utilitarians [2003], with an introduction by John Troyer.

Primary Source

Mill, John Stuart. “Utilitarianism.” In The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill, with Introduction by John Troyer, edited by John Troyer, 94–115. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket Publishing Company, Inc., 2003 [1863].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• What is hedonism?

• What is the difference between instrumental and intrinsic goods?

• How is utilitarianism different from consequentialism?

• What is general utilitarianism?

• How is act-utilitarianism different from rule-utilitarianism?

• What are the two difficulties of utilitarianism?

• What is an example of how/when utilitarianism is unfair to the individual / violates individual rights?

• What is the utility monster?

• What is the prisoner’s dilemma?

• What is Roko’s basilisk?

This episode is part three of three of the lecture series [HTA 10] on Immanuel Kant’s Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals [1785].

Primary Source

Kant, Immanuel. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: with On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns. Translated by James W. Ellington. Third Ed. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993 [1785].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• What is a good will?

• Instead of happiness, what is the purpose of reason?

• What is duty?

• What is respect?

• There are five formulations of the categorical imperative; these five are different ways of saying the same principle that cannot be put directly into words in only one way. What are the two forms of the categorical imperative related to universal law and end-in-itself? Explain what these two formulations in particular emphasize and signify. Also explain how they are derived from other aspects of the argument, a priori.

• What is the difference between a priori and a posteriori? Why is this significant to the definition of a good will as well as to the transition from respect (respect for what?) to respect for universal law as such, i.e., universalizability of all my actions?

• What is the difference between means and ends?

This episode is part two of three of the lecture series [HTA 10] on Immanuel Kant’s Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals [1785].

Primary Source

Kant, Immanuel. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: with On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns. Translated by James W. Ellington. Third Ed. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993 [1785].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• What is a good will?

• Instead of happiness, what is the purpose of reason?

• What is duty?

• What is respect?

• There are five formulations of the categorical imperative; these five are different ways of saying the same principle that cannot be put directly into words in only one way. What are the two forms of the categorical imperative related to universal law and end-in-itself? Explain what these two formulations in particular emphasize and signify. Also explain how they are derived from other aspects of the argument, a priori.

• What is the difference between a priori and a posteriori? Why is this significant to the definition of a good will as well as to the transition from respect (respect for what?) to respect for universal law as such, i.e., universalizability of all my actions?

• What is the difference between means and ends?

This episode is part one of three of the lecture series [HTA 10] on Immanuel Kant’s Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals [1785].

Primary Source

Kant, Immanuel. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: with On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns. Translated by James W. Ellington. Third Ed. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993 [1785].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• What is a good will?

• Instead of happiness, what is the purpose of reason?

• What is duty?

• What is respect?

• There are five formulations of the categorical imperative; these five are different ways of saying the same principle that cannot be put directly into words in only one way. What are the two forms of the categorical imperative related to universal law and end-in-itself? Explain what these two formulations in particular emphasize and signify. Also explain how they are derived from other aspects of the argument, a priori.

• What is the difference between a priori and a posteriori? Why is this significant to the definition of a good will as well as to the transition from respect (respect for what?) to respect for universal law as such, i.e., universalizability of all my actions?

• What is the difference between means and ends?

This episode is part one of one of the lecture series [HTA 9] on Immanuel Kant’s “An Answer to the Question, ‘What is Enlightenment?’” [1784]

Primary Source

Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment.’” Translated by Ted Humphreys, 1992 [1784]. https://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/kant_whatisenlightenment.pdf.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• What is enlightenment, for Kant?

• What produces enlightenment?

• What is the difference between the public and private uses of reason?

• Why is it always a violation of human rights to set down a set of rules that can never be questioned, altered, revised, or rewritten?

• What does the monarch owe to its people regarding freedom of reason/thought?

This episode is part five [Massumi, 2015] of seven of the lecture series [HTA 8] on affect theory grounded in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics [1677], excerpt from Part III, and developed through the writings, seminars, and interviews of Walter Benjamin [1940], Gilles Deleuze [1981], Brian Massumi [2015], Justin Hill [2019], and Ed Casey [2022].

Primary Source

Massumi, Brian. Politics of Affect. Cambridge, UK / Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Massumi, Brian. “Affect, Fields of Immi(a)Nence, and Differential Attunement in Massumi’s Politics of Affect [by Justin A. Hill].” In Politics of Affect, Supplementary Material. Cambridge, UK / Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

Brian Massumi [2015]

• How does Massumi bring Spinozan affect into process-relational thought?

• What real-world impacts does affect theory have? What crises does affect theory (e.g., Spinoza, Benjamin, Deleuze, Massumi, Whitman) resolve or inform?

• How can understanding historicized zonal process affect aid global well-being?

This episode is part two [Spinoza, 1677] of seven of the lecture series [HTA 8] on affect theory grounded in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics [1677], excerpt from Part III, and developed through the writings, seminars, and interviews of Walter Benjamin [1940], Gilles Deleuze [1981], Brian Massumi [2015], Justin Hill [2019], and Ed Casey [2022].

Primary Source

Spinoza, Baruch. “Ethics.” In Philosophy of Benedict De Spinoza, translated by R.H.M. Elwes, New Ed., 127–35. New York: Tudor Publishing, Co., 1936 [1677].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Spinoza, Baruch. “Introduction [by Frank Sewall, M.A.].” In Philosophy of Benedict De Spinoza, translated by R.H.M. Elwes, New Ed., v-xii. New York: Tudor Publishing, Co., 1936.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

Baruch Spinoza [1677]

• How does affect refer to emotion, gesture, mood, feeling, impact, cause, effect, capacity, potential, power, and knowledge all at once?

• How does affect get at self-other all at once in the simultaneity of (1)affecting-(2)being-affected, i.e., (1)being-affected-(2)affecting?

• How does affect offer conceptual constructions for a non-linear and zonal metaphysics, i.e., how does affect allow us to think about environments and systems of causation more fluidly and flexibly as a field rather than as causal ‘arrow’ or throughline? Use an example.

• How does individual and environmental historicity impact affect and freedom?

This episode is part one [Overview, 1677-2022] of seven of the lecture series [HTA 8] on affect theory grounded in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics [1677], excerpt from Part III, and developed through the writings, seminars, and interviews of Walter Benjamin [1940], Gilles Deleuze [1981], Brian Massumi [2015], Justin Hill [2019], and Ed Casey [2022].

Primary Source

Spinoza, Baruch. “Ethics.” In Philosophy of Benedict De Spinoza, translated by R.H.M. Elwes, New Ed., 127–35. New York: Tudor Publishing, Co., 1936 [1677].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Spinoza, Baruch. “Introduction [by Frank Sewall, M.A.].” In Philosophy of Benedict De Spinoza, translated by R.H.M. Elwes, New Ed., v-xii. New York: Tudor Publishing, Co., 1936.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Massumi, Brian. Politics of Affect. Cambridge, UK / Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Massumi, Brian. “Affect, Fields of Immi(a)Nence, and Differential Attunement in Massumi’s Politics of Affect [by Justin A. Hill].” In Politics of Affect, Supplementary Material. Cambridge, UK / Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

Baruch Spinoza [1677]

• How does affect refer to emotion, gesture, mood, feeling, impact, cause, effect, capacity, potential, power, and knowledge all at once?

• How does affect get at self-other all at once in the simultaneity of (1)affecting-(2)being-affected, i.e., (1)being-affected-(2)affecting?

• How does affect offer conceptual constructions for a non-linear and zonal metaphysics, i.e., how does affect allow us to think about environments and systems of causation more fluidly and flexibly as a field rather than as causal ‘arrow’ or throughline? Use an example.

• How does individual and environmental historicity impact affect and freedom?

Walter Benjamin [1940]

• What is weak messianism? How does it differ from strong messianism?

• How can the dead speak again (through re-interpretation)?

• What do we owe to the dead and the suffered?

• How do history and interpretation impact affect? How does affect impact history and interpretation?

Gilles Deleuze [1981]

• What are Deleuze’s two types of power? (external power which delimits our energies and opportunities [sometimes away from danger]; and internal capacity which enables/empowers us)

• To which two general emotions do these two types of power correlate in direct experience, according to Spinoza? (joy and sadness; wild winds and depressions)

Brian Massumi [2015]

• How does Massumi bring Spinozan affect into process-relational thought?

• What real-world impacts does affect theory have? What crises does affect theory (e.g., Spinoza, Benjamin, Deleuze, Massumi, Whitman) resolve or inform?

• How can understanding historicized zonal process affect aid global well-being?

Justin A. Hill [2019]

• Why does Benjamin argue passive absorption is more effective than active contemplation, which Adorno nevertheless defends?

• How does Spinozan affect theory defend Benjamin’s position from Adorno’s critique?

Edward S. Casey [2022]

• Which aspects of affect theory are still unclear?

• How do periphanous models of emotion, of thinking, of consciousness, and of transpersonal interbeing flesh out Spinozism?

• How do edges and peri-phenomenology offer paths forward for thinking affect anew? How do they justify our perceptions and convictions?

This episode is part four of four of the lecture series [HTA 7] on René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations 1-3, as well as part two of two on the Third Meditation.

Primary Source

Descartes, René. Meditations On First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Edited & translated by John Cottingham. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013 [1641].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• How do I know God exists, and why does it lead to the Cartesian circle?

• What is the Cartesian Circle?

• What is clarity and distinctness?

• What is the difference between objective and formal reality?

• Why must there be at least as much reality in the cause as in the effect?

• How does Descartes go from qualitative to categorical justification?

• What is the relationship between henosis and the natural light? What is the relation between henosis, the natural light, and clarity and distinctness? Do we resolve the Cartesian Circle differently if understanding is partaking of God?

• How is rationalism different from empiricism?

This episode is part three of four of the lecture series [HTA 7] on René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations 1-3, as well as part one of two of the Third Meditation.

Primary Source

Descartes, René. Meditations On First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Edited & translated by John Cottingham. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013 [1641].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• How do I know God exists, and why does it lead to the Cartesian circle?

• What is the Cartesian Circle?

• What is clarity and distinctness?

• What is the difference between objective and formal reality?

• Why must there be at least as much reality in the cause as in the effect?

• How does Descartes go from qualitative to categorical justification?

• What is the relationship between henosis and the natural light? What is the relation between henosis, the natural light, and clarity and distinctness? Do we resolve the Cartesian Circle differently if understanding is partaking of God?

• How is rationalism different from empiricism?

This episode is part two of four of the lecture series [HTA 7] on René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations 1-3.

Primary Source

Descartes, René. Meditations On First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Edited & translated by John Cottingham. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013 [1641].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• Why can I not doubt cogito ergo sum, or I am thinking, therefore I exist?

• How do we know the wax is the same wax after changing form through melting?

• How does our judgment-perception of the automatons prove that all sense perception is actually and has always actually been mental judgment?

• What does this say about our perception, cognition, and mind in relation to the world we believe is external to us? In other words, are our worlds truly external?

• Is our belief that worlds are external to us sufficient evidence to prove they are?

• Are there any experiences which do not count as thinking or mental activity [in the Second Meditation]? Can we access non-thinking reality, non-thought?

This episode is part one of four of the lecture series [HTA 7] on René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations 1-3.

Primary Source

Descartes, René. Meditations On First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Edited & translated by John Cottingham. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013 [1641].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• What is the goal of The Protagonist of the Meditations?

• Why does doubt function the same as disproving inherited beliefs?

• Why does The Protagonist not have to doubt every single belief individually?

• What are the three reasons for skepticism of all inherited belief?

• How is the Evil Deceiver a rhetorical device without argumentative work?

This episode is part four of four of the lecture series [HTA 6] on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, excerpts from Books I, II, and VIII.

Primary Source

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Second Ed. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• How does eudaimonia mean happiness but not hedonistic/egoistic pleasure?

• How does “the mean” of virtue allow just action to depend on history/context?

• What are the three types of friendship, and which type is most ethical/just?

• What are the roles of habit and practice in the formation of enacted virtue?

• Why must reason be enacted, and how does this enacted reason relate to a diversity of pleasures unique to each activity, pleasant in the doing itself?

This episode is part three of four of the lecture series [HTA 6] on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, excerpts from Books I, II, and VIII.

Primary Source

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Second Ed. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• How does eudaimonia mean happiness but not hedonistic/egoistic pleasure?

• How does “the mean” of virtue allow just action to depend on history/context?

• What are the three types of friendship, and which type is most ethical/just?

• What are the roles of habit and practice in the formation of enacted virtue?

• Why must reason be enacted, and how does this enacted reason relate to a diversity of pleasures unique to each activity, pleasant in the doing itself?

This episode is part two of four of the lecture series [HTA 6] on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, excerpts from Books I, II, and VIII.

Primary Source

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Second Ed. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• How does eudaimonia mean happiness but not hedonistic/egoistic pleasure?

• How does “the mean” of virtue allow just action to depend on history/context?

• What are the three types of friendship, and which type is most ethical/just?

• What are the roles of habit and practice in the formation of enacted virtue?

• Why must reason be enacted, and how does this enacted reason relate to a diversity of pleasures unique to each activity, pleasant in the doing itself?

This episode is part one of four of the lecture series [HTA 6] on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, excerpts from Books I, II, and VIII.

Primary Source

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Second Ed. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• How does eudaimonia mean happiness but not hedonistic/egoistic pleasure?

• How does “the mean” of virtue allow just action to depend on history/context?

• What are the three types of friendship, and which type is most ethical/just?

• What are the roles of habit and practice in the formation of enacted virtue?

• Why must reason be enacted, and how does this enacted reason relate to a diversity of pleasures unique to each activity, pleasant in the doing itself?

[Holy Terrain Art would like to thank Prof. Casey for devoting his time to this event as well as to thank the Radical Philosophy Association for hosting and allowing secondary publication rights; this interview was originally hosted and published by the Radical Philosophy Association as the September 2025 event for their Radical Philosophy Hour series.]

This is an interview with Ed Casey, age 86, on his method of peri-phenomenology which emphasizes edges; place; mutual permeability; porousness; periphany as a blend of and alternative to endogeny-exogeny (internal-external); propulsion; extraversion; urgency to motion; exigencies to further avenues of living through transformation; differentiation; immanence; and multiplicity as the univocity of being – a ground not in the sense of an essence but at the very least in the sense of our most fundamental relational nature of being-with and being-towards-one-another.

This interview explores, charts, and anchors connections between peri-phenomenology (whose foci and method both reveals and allows for the being of peripheral phenomena) and the Real’s first principle as/of difference. Original metaphysical difference offers a unity-multiplicity where the multiple is not collapsed into a unity and unity is not pulverized into multiplicity, i.e., offers a clinamen weaving (tantra) difference not between transcendents but unfolding from an immanent unity-multiplicity. Peri-phenomenology brings us up to the metaphysical bones of this singular plural Nature of Being’s beings, or of beings’ Being. It thus proves necessary for us to ground flexible definitions of eidetics, which is a grasping of the essence or form of something, e.g., what/how is knowing, how are the different feelings of knowing life. Knowing, absent an infinite regress, must be grounded in a felt conviction and in commitments, understood as thrownness, as givenness, and as a finality to actions-perceptions which cannot be rescinded and thereby qualifies as a form of enactivistic knowing, i.e., Spinozan action as adequate (self)-causation, e.g., what ended up happening proved itself to be the necessary course of action only through its unfolding. Finally, a specific phenomenological method, with or without the reduction proper [which would forego the world-with-being and therefore preclude a variety of otherwise fruitful studies for peri-phenomenology], a peri-phenomenological method which commits to a set of perceptions through description of lived experience — especially of differend experiences and especially with commitments to ever-renewing experimental accesses to peripheral limits, ekstasis (i.e., ecstasy as crossing a threshold), and edge-cases, etc. — would implicitly justify the givenness of its convictions as perception commits to them by phenomenological description. Such enactivistic knowing would justify peri-phenomenological existential eidetics.

This episode is part two of two of the lecture series [HTA 4] on Plato’s Republic, excerpts from Books VI and VII.

Primary Source

Plato. “Republic.” In The Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper with assoc. ed. D.S. Hutchinson, translated by G.M.A. Grube with rev. C.D.C. Reeve, 971–1003, 1052–77, 1126–55. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• How does the Form of the Good illuminate experience? (Book VI; pp. 1127-30)

• Is the visible or the intelligible realm of being clearer to the mind? (Book VI; pp. 1130-32)

• How is the instrument [organ] of learning revealed through the Allegory of the Cave? (Book VII; pp. 1132-55)

This episode is part one of two of the lecture series [HTA 4] on Plato’s Republic, excerpts from Books VI and VII.

Primary Source

Plato. “Republic.” In The Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper with assoc. ed. D.S. Hutchinson, translated by G.M.A. Grube with rev. C.D.C. Reeve, 971–1003, 1052–77, 1126–55. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• How does the Form of the Good illuminate experience? (Book VI; pp. 1127-30)

• Is the visible or the intelligible realm of being clearer to the mind? (Book VI; pp. 1130-32)

• How is the instrument [organ] of learning revealed through the Allegory of the Cave? (Book VII; pp. 1132-55)

This episode is part five of five of the lecture series [HTA 3] on Plato’s Republic, excerpts from Books I, II, and IV.

Primary Source

Plato. “Republic.” In The Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper with assoc. ed. D.S. Hutchinson, translated by G.M.A. Grube with rev. C.D.C. Reeve, 971–1003, 1052–77, 1126–55. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• Why is listening important to personal wellbeing? (Book I; pp. 972-73)

• What determines virtue? How can objects have different virtues from humans? [arete]

• Would someone be happy with the Ring of Gyges? (Book II; pp. 998-1002)

• How does the tripartite soul relate to the just city? (Book IV; pp. 1059-77)

This episode is part four of five of the lecture series [HTA 3] on Plato’s Republic, excerpts from Books I, II, and IV.

Primary Source

Plato. “Republic.” In The Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper with assoc. ed. D.S. Hutchinson, translated by G.M.A. Grube with rev. C.D.C. Reeve, 971–1003, 1052–77, 1126–55. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• Why is listening important to personal wellbeing? (Book I; pp. 972-73)

• What determines virtue? How can objects have different virtues from humans? [arete]

• Would someone be happy with the Ring of Gyges? (Book II; pp. 998-1002)

• How does the tripartite soul relate to the just city? (Book IV; pp. 1059-77)

This episode is part three of five of the lecture series [HTA 3] on Plato’s Republic, excerpts from Books I, II, and IV.

Primary Source

Plato. “Republic.” In The Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper with assoc. ed. D.S. Hutchinson, translated by G.M.A. Grube with rev. C.D.C. Reeve, 971–1003, 1052–77, 1126–55. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• Why is listening important to personal wellbeing? (Book I; pp. 972-73)

• What determines virtue? How can objects have different virtues from humans? [arete]

• Would someone be happy with the Ring of Gyges? (Book II; pp. 998-1002)

• How does the tripartite soul relate to the just city? (Book IV; pp. 1059-77)

This episode is part two of five of the lecture series [HTA 3] on Plato’s Republic, excerpts from Books I, II, and IV.

Primary Source

Plato. “Republic.” In The Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper with assoc. ed. D.S. Hutchinson, translated by G.M.A. Grube with rev. C.D.C. Reeve, 971–1003, 1052–77, 1126–55. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• Why is listening important to personal wellbeing? (Book I; pp. 972-73)

• What determines virtue? How can objects have different virtues from humans? [arete]

• Would someone be happy with the Ring of Gyges? (Book II; pp. 998-1002)

• How does the tripartite soul relate to the just city? (Book IV; pp. 1059-77)

This episode is part one of five of the lecture series [HTA 3] on Plato’s Republic, excerpts from Books I, II, and IV.

Primary Source

Plato. “Republic.” In The Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper with assoc. ed. D.S. Hutchinson, translated by G.M.A. Grube with rev. C.D.C. Reeve, 971–1003, 1052–77, 1126–55. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• Why is listening important to personal wellbeing? (Book I; pp. 972-73)

• What determines virtue? How can objects have different virtues from humans? [arete]

• Would someone be happy with the Ring of Gyges? (Book II; pp. 998-1002)

• How does the tripartite soul relate to the just city? (Book IV; pp. 1059-77)

This episode is part four of four of the lecture series [HTA 2] on Plato’s Apology, a faithful rendition of Socrates’ aretaic voice at his death trial.

Primary Source

Plato. “Apology.” In Five Dialogues, translated by G.M.A. Grube with rev. John M. Cooper, Second Ed., 21–44. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2002.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• How is Socrates able to confidently (i.e., with “serene spiritual and moral beauty of character”) face whatever may come his way, including his probable death-sentence and impending death?

• Why can no one harm Socrates, and how is this inability to be harmed related to the human soul’s virtue?

This episode is part three of four of the lecture series [HTA 2] on Plato’s Apology, a faithful rendition of Socrates’ aretaic voice at his death trial.

Primary Source

Plato. “Apology.” In Five Dialogues, translated by G.M.A. Grube with rev. John M. Cooper, Second Ed., 21–44. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2002.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• How is Socrates able to confidently (i.e., with “serene spiritual and moral beauty of character”) face whatever may come his way, including his probable death-sentence and impending death?

• Why can no one harm Socrates, and how is this inability to be harmed related to the human soul’s virtue?

This episode is part two of four of the lecture series [HTA 2] on Plato’s Apology, a faithful rendition of Socrates’ aretaic voice at his death trial.

Primary Source

Plato. “Apology.” In Five Dialogues, translated by G.M.A. Grube with rev. John M. Cooper, Second Ed., 21–44. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2002.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• How is Socrates able to confidently (i.e., with “serene spiritual and moral beauty of character”) face whatever may come his way, including his probable death-sentence and impending death?

• Why can no one harm Socrates, and how is this inability to be harmed related to the human soul’s virtue?

This episode is part one of four of the lecture series [HTA 2] on Plato’s Apology, a faithful rendition of Socrates’ aretaic voice at his death trial.

Primary Source

Plato. “Apology.” In Five Dialogues, translated by G.M.A. Grube with rev. John M. Cooper, Second Ed., 21–44. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2002.

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Guiding Questions

• How is Socrates able to confidently (i.e., with “serene spiritual and moral beauty of character”) face whatever may come his way, including his probable death-sentence and impending death?

• Why can no one harm Socrates, and how is this inability to be harmed related to the human soul’s virtue?

This episode is part seven of seven of the lecture series [HTA 1] on Bergson’s “Introduction to Metaphysics.”

Primary Source

Bergson, Henri. “Introduction to Metaphysics.” In The Creative Mind, translated by Mabelle L. Andison, 133–69. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2007 [1903; 1946].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Essay Prompt

• How does the intuition of concrete duration prove that I am connected to everyone else and everything else in existence?

  • In your answer, include, with personal examples:

    • the distinction between intuition and analysis;
    • the intuition of/to oneself in unity and multiplicity, in totality and detail;
    • the capacity of intuition vs. images vs. concepts to communicate duration;
    • the distinction between elements and parts;
    • the outward, listening movement from self to world/others; and

    • at least one image or metaphor from Bergson’s text, such as:

      • sketch of the tower of Notre Dame
      • the color orange on a spectrum with red and yellow
      • psychological studies
      • a ball moving through the air, in motion along a curve

Guiding Questions

• What is it like to experience the intuition of concrete duration, including the memory of one’s own concrete duration as well as the concrete duration(s) of others?

• How do we harmonize with our own concrete duration? How do we listen in order to augment and to dilate ourselves and our imaginations to others’ concrete durations and to their lived perspectives?

• Which is clearer to the mind: intuition or analysis?

• How are elements different from parts? Reference the argument about psychological studies isolating a specific element of consciousness.

• How am I connected to others through the intuition of concrete duration?

• Why does motion come before stasis? A curve before a point? An integral before a differentiation?

• What is the significance of the analogy of the artist in Paris sketching the tower of Notre Dame?

• Between which two extremes does metaphysics operate?

• Did concrete duration begin with my birth? Will it outlive me?

• What is the significance of the analogy of orange as one shade amidst many in a manifold, one shade on a fluid and notch-less continuum between shades across the visible light spectrum?

This episode is part six of seven of the lecture series [HTA 1] on Bergson’s “Introduction to Metaphysics.”

Primary Source

Bergson, Henri. “Introduction to Metaphysics.” In The Creative Mind, translated by Mabelle L. Andison, 133–69. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2007 [1903; 1946].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Essay Prompt

• How does the intuition of concrete duration prove that I am connected to everyone else and everything else in existence?

  • In your answer, include, with personal examples:

    • the distinction between intuition and analysis;
    • the intuition of/to oneself in unity and multiplicity, in totality and detail;
    • the capacity of intuition vs. images vs. concepts to communicate duration;
    • the distinction between elements and parts;
    • the outward, listening movement from self to world/others; and

    • at least one image or metaphor from Bergson’s text, such as:

      • sketch of the tower of Notre Dame
      • the color orange on a spectrum with red and yellow
      • psychological studies
      • a ball moving through the air, in motion along a curve

Guiding Questions

• What is it like to experience the intuition of concrete duration, including the memory of one’s own concrete duration as well as the concrete duration(s) of others?

• How do we harmonize with our own concrete duration? How do we listen in order to augment and to dilate ourselves and our imaginations to others’ concrete durations and to their lived perspectives?

• Which is clearer to the mind: intuition or analysis?

• How are elements different from parts? Reference the argument about psychological studies isolating a specific element of consciousness.

• How am I connected to others through the intuition of concrete duration?

• Why does motion come before stasis? A curve before a point? An integral before a differentiation?

• What is the significance of the analogy of the artist in Paris sketching the tower of Notre Dame?

• Between which two extremes does metaphysics operate?

• Did concrete duration begin with my birth? Will it outlive me?

• What is the significance of the analogy of orange as one shade amidst many in a manifold, one shade on a fluid and notch-less continuum between shades across the visible light spectrum?

This episode is part five of seven of the lecture series [HTA 1] on Bergson’s “Introduction to Metaphysics.”

Primary Source

Bergson, Henri. “Introduction to Metaphysics.” In The Creative Mind, translated by Mabelle L. Andison, 133–69. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2007 [1903; 1946].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Essay Prompt

• How does the intuition of concrete duration prove that I am connected to everyone else and everything else in existence?

  • In your answer, include, with personal examples:

    • the distinction between intuition and analysis;
    • the intuition of/to oneself in unity and multiplicity, in totality and detail;
    • the capacity of intuition vs. images vs. concepts to communicate duration;
    • the distinction between elements and parts;
    • the outward, listening movement from self to world/others; and

    • at least one image or metaphor from Bergson’s text, such as:

      • sketch of the tower of Notre Dame
      • the color orange on a spectrum with red and yellow
      • psychological studies
      • a ball moving through the air, in motion along a curve

Guiding Questions

• What is it like to experience the intuition of concrete duration, including the memory of one’s own concrete duration as well as the concrete duration(s) of others?

• How do we harmonize with our own concrete duration? How do we listen in order to augment and to dilate ourselves and our imaginations to others’ concrete durations and to their lived perspectives?

• Which is clearer to the mind: intuition or analysis?

• How are elements different from parts? Reference the argument about psychological studies isolating a specific element of consciousness.

• How am I connected to others through the intuition of concrete duration?

• Why does motion come before stasis? A curve before a point? An integral before a differentiation?

• What is the significance of the analogy of the artist in Paris sketching the tower of Notre Dame?

• Between which two extremes does metaphysics operate?

• Did concrete duration begin with my birth? Will it outlive me?

• What is the significance of the analogy of orange as one shade amidst many in a manifold, one shade on a fluid and notch-less continuum between shades across the visible light spectrum?

This episode is part four of seven of the lecture series [HTA 1] on Bergson’s “Introduction to Metaphysics.”

Primary Source

Bergson, Henri. “Introduction to Metaphysics.” In The Creative Mind, translated by Mabelle L. Andison, 133–69. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2007 [1903; 1946].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Essay Prompt

• How does the intuition of concrete duration prove that I am connected to everyone else and everything else in existence?

  • In your answer, include, with personal examples:

    • the distinction between intuition and analysis;
    • the intuition of/to oneself in unity and multiplicity, in totality and detail;
    • the capacity of intuition vs. images vs. concepts to communicate duration;
    • the distinction between elements and parts;
    • the outward, listening movement from self to world/others; and

    • at least one image or metaphor from Bergson’s text, such as:

      • sketch of the tower of Notre Dame
      • the color orange on a spectrum with red and yellow
      • psychological studies
      • a ball moving through the air, in motion along a curve

Guiding Questions

• What is it like to experience the intuition of concrete duration, including the memory of one’s own concrete duration as well as the concrete duration(s) of others?

• How do we harmonize with our own concrete duration? How do we listen in order to augment and to dilate ourselves and our imaginations to others’ concrete durations and to their lived perspectives?

• Which is clearer to the mind: intuition or analysis?

• How are elements different from parts? Reference the argument about psychological studies isolating a specific element of consciousness.

• How am I connected to others through the intuition of concrete duration?

• Why does motion come before stasis? A curve before a point? An integral before a differentiation?

• What is the significance of the analogy of the artist in Paris sketching the tower of Notre Dame?

• Between which two extremes does metaphysics operate?

• Did concrete duration begin with my birth? Will it outlive me?

• What is the significance of the analogy of orange as one shade amidst many in a manifold, one shade on a fluid and notch-less continuum between shades across the visible light spectrum?

This episode is part three of seven of the lecture series [HTA 1] on Bergson’s “Introduction to Metaphysics.”

Primary Source

Bergson, Henri. “Introduction to Metaphysics.” In The Creative Mind, translated by Mabelle L. Andison, 133–69. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2007 [1903; 1946].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Essay Prompt

• How does the intuition of concrete duration prove that I am connected to everyone else and everything else in existence?

  • In your answer, include, with personal examples:

    • the distinction between intuition and analysis;
    • the intuition of/to oneself in unity and multiplicity, in totality and detail;
    • the capacity of intuition vs. images vs. concepts to communicate duration;
    • the distinction between elements and parts;
    • the outward, listening movement from self to world/others; and

    • at least one image or metaphor from Bergson’s text, such as:

      • sketch of the tower of Notre Dame
      • the color orange on a spectrum with red and yellow
      • psychological studies
      • a ball moving through the air, in motion along a curve

Guiding Questions

• What is it like to experience the intuition of concrete duration, including the memory of one’s own concrete duration as well as the concrete duration(s) of others?

• How do we harmonize with our own concrete duration? How do we listen in order to augment and to dilate ourselves and our imaginations to others’ concrete durations and to their lived perspectives?

• Which is clearer to the mind: intuition or analysis?

• How are elements different from parts? Reference the argument about psychological studies isolating a specific element of consciousness.

• How am I connected to others through the intuition of concrete duration?

• Why does motion come before stasis? A curve before a point? An integral before a differentiation?

• What is the significance of the analogy of the artist in Paris sketching the tower of Notre Dame?

• Between which two extremes does metaphysics operate?

• Did concrete duration begin with my birth? Will it outlive me?

• What is the significance of the analogy of orange as one shade amidst many in a manifold, one shade on a fluid and notch-less continuum between shades across the visible light spectrum?

This episode is part two of seven of the lecture series [HTA 1] on Bergson’s “Introduction to Metaphysics.”

Primary Source

Bergson, Henri. “Introduction to Metaphysics.” In The Creative Mind, translated by Mabelle L. Andison, 133–69. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2007 [1903; 1946].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Essay Prompt

• How does the intuition of concrete duration prove that I am connected to everyone else and everything else in existence?

  • In your answer, include, with personal examples:

    • the distinction between intuition and analysis;
    • the intuition of/to oneself in unity and multiplicity, in totality and detail;
    • the capacity of intuition vs. images vs. concepts to communicate duration;
    • the distinction between elements and parts;
    • the outward, listening movement from self to world/others; and

    • at least one image or metaphor from Bergson’s text, such as:

      • sketch of the tower of Notre Dame
      • the color orange on a spectrum with red and yellow
      • psychological studies
      • a ball moving through the air, in motion along a curve

Guiding Questions

• What is it like to experience the intuition of concrete duration, including the memory of one’s own concrete duration as well as the concrete duration(s) of others?

• How do we harmonize with our own concrete duration? How do we listen in order to augment and to dilate ourselves and our imaginations to others’ concrete durations and to their lived perspectives?

• Which is clearer to the mind: intuition or analysis?

• How are elements different from parts? Reference the argument about psychological studies isolating a specific element of consciousness.

• How am I connected to others through the intuition of concrete duration?

• Why does motion come before stasis? A curve before a point? An integral before a differentiation?

• What is the significance of the analogy of the artist in Paris sketching the tower of Notre Dame?

• Between which two extremes does metaphysics operate?

• Did concrete duration begin with my birth? Will it outlive me?

• What is the significance of the analogy of orange as one shade amidst many in a manifold, one shade on a fluid and notch-less continuum between shades across the visible light spectrum?

This episode is part one of seven of the lecture series [HTA 1] on Bergson’s “Introduction to Metaphysics.”

Primary Source

Bergson, Henri. “Introduction to Metaphysics.” In The Creative Mind, translated by Mabelle L. Andison, 133–69. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2007 [1903; 1946].

• HillJ_ Teacher Exemplar Annotations.

Essay Prompt

• How does the intuition of concrete duration prove that I am connected to everyone else and everything else in existence?

  • In your answer, include, with personal examples:

    • the distinction between intuition and analysis;
    • the intuition of/to oneself in unity and multiplicity, in totality and detail;
    • the capacity of intuition vs. images vs. concepts to communicate duration;
    • the distinction between elements and parts;
    • the outward, listening movement from self to world/others; and

    • at least one image or metaphor from Bergson’s text, such as:

      • sketch of the tower of Notre Dame
      • the color orange on a spectrum with red and yellow
      • psychological studies
      • a ball moving through the air, in motion along a curve

Guiding Questions

• What is it like to experience the intuition of concrete duration, including the memory of one’s own concrete duration as well as the concrete duration(s) of others?

• How do we harmonize with our own concrete duration? How do we listen in order to augment and to dilate ourselves and our imaginations to others’ concrete durations and to their lived perspectives?

• Which is clearer to the mind: intuition or analysis?

• How are elements different from parts? Reference the argument about psychological studies isolating a specific element of consciousness.

• How am I connected to others through the intuition of concrete duration?

• Why does motion come before stasis? A curve before a point? An integral before a differentiation?

• What is the significance of the analogy of the artist in Paris sketching the tower of Notre Dame?

• Between which two extremes does metaphysics operate?

• Did concrete duration begin with my birth? Will it outlive me?

• What is the significance of the analogy of orange as one shade amidst many in a manifold, one shade on a fluid and notch-less continuum between shades across the visible light spectrum?