WE CANNOT REALLY KNOW

Marcelo Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (New York: Basic Books, 2014) (From the bookjacket: Gleiser "reaches a provocative conclusion: science, the main tool we use to find answers, is fundamentally limited. The essence of reality is unknowable.").

JOHN DEWEY, Part 2

John Dewey, The Essential Dewey, Volume 2: Ethics, Logic, Psychology, edited by Larry A. Hickman & Thomas M. Alexander (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U. Press, 1998) (From "Moral Judgment and Knowledge": "There is a difference which must be noted between valuation as judgment (which involved thought in placing the thing judged in its relations and bearings) and valuing as a direct emotional and practical act. There is difference between esteem and estimation, between prizing and appraising. To esteem is to prize, hold dear, admire, approve; to estimate is to measure in intellectual fashion. One is direct, spontaneous; the other is reflex, reflective. We esteem before we estimate, and estimation comes in to consider whether and to what extent something is worthy of esteem. Is the object one which we should admire? Should we really prize it? Does it have the qualities which justify our holding it dear? All growth in maturity is attended with this change from a spontaneous to a reflective and critical attitude. First, our affections go out to something in attraction or repulsion; we like and dislike, Then experience raises the question whether the object in question is what our esteem or disesteem took it to be, whether it is such as to justify out reaction to it." Id. at 329. I would suggest we seriously consider (that is, reflect upon) whether we are living at a time of a chronic deficiency in the practice of questioning whether the things and people we admire (or, on the flip side, despise) should be.).

JOHN DEWEY, Part 1

John Dewey, The Essential Dewey, Volume 1: Pragmatism, Education, Democracy, edited by Larry A. Hickman & Thomas M. Alexander (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U. Press, 1998) (From "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy": "We pride ourselves upon being realistic, desiring a hardheaded cognizance of facts, and devoted to mastering the means of life. We pride ourselves upon a practical idealism, a lively and easily moved faith in possibilities as yet unrealized, in willingness to make sacrifice for their realization. Idealism easily becomes a sanction of waste and carelessness, and realism a sanction of legal formalism in behalf of things as they are--the rights of the possessor. We thus tend to combine a loose and ineffective optimism with assent to the doctrine of take who take can: a deification of power. All peoples at all times have been narrowly realistic in practice and have then employed idealization to cover up in sentiment and theory their brutalities. But never, perhaps, has the tendency been so dangerous and so tempting as with ourselves. Faith in the power of intelligence to imagine a future which is the projection of the desirable in the present, and to invent the instrumentalities of its realization, is our salvation. And it is a faith which must be nurtured and made articulate: surely a sufficiently large take for our philosophy." Id. at 69. From "Nationalizing Education":. "I find that many who talk the loudest about the need of a supreme and unified Americanism of spirit really mean some special code or tradition to which they happen to be attached. They have some pet tradition which they would impose upon all. In thus measuring the scope of Americanism by some single element which enters into it they are themselves false to the spirit of America. Neither Englandism nor New-Englandism, neither Puritan nor Cavalier any more than Teuton or Slav, can do anything but furnish one note in a vast symphony." Id at 266-267. From "Education in Relation to Form": "[U]pon its intellectual side education consists in the formation of wide-awake, careful, thorough habits of thinking." Id. at 274.).

KNOW WHO YOU ARE!

 David Kiley, Driven: Inside BMW, the Most Admired Car Company in the World (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004) ("It wasn't until July 2002 interview with BMW chairman Dr. Helmut Panke that I realized the secret of BMW's success corresponded with some of the best advice I ever received from my own parents. [] 'Remember who you are.' [] I asked Panke, who was a consultant at McKinsey & Co. before joining BMW in 1982, what he would tell companies seeking insights from BMW if he were still charging McKinsey big bucks for his advice. Said Panke, 'I would say: Focus on understanding who you are, what you stand for. What are the values you have in the organization? What are the values you believe in for the products and services that you sell and provide? People like to play charades when they are children. But in real life you cannot impersonate other values and characters and basic principles. There is a sentence I often use to crystallize what we are about. And I think it's important to be able to do that: to articulate the one idea in one sentence that captures the company's character so that everyone understands and believes it. "BMW builds high-performance products because BMW is a high-performance organization." This is an idea that speaks not just to our products. It is across seemingly unrelated fields and organizations within the company. Striving for better performance than our competitors is something that drives our controllers and our human resources people, not just our designers and engineers." Id. at 3-4.).

BLACK REPUBLICANS: "INCONGRUOUS INTERSECTION OF CIVIL RIGHTS AND AMERICAN CONSERVATISM"

Leah Wright Rigueur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America) (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("One lingering question that this book hopes to address has been a topic of regular debate and discussion since the political realignment of black votes in the 1936 presidential election: Are black voters irrevocably lost to the Republican Party? The short answer s no, at least not at the local level, This study demonstrated that black voters were willing to support the right Republican candidate, so long as he or she (and the supporting state and local party organizations) demonstrated a genuine empathy toward African Americans, conducted sincere and aggressive outreach, and presented solutions that addressed issues of black concern; local politics undoubtedly offers a level of nuance that allows individual politicians to sidestep the rancor between African Americans and the GOP." Id. at 308. "The fundamental dilemma for the Republican Party in winning black voters at the national level boils down to issues of politics and policy. To put it another way, African Americans interpret the GOP's 'colorbling' approach as insensitive to their history and lived experience--a disconnect that is sorely exacerbated by the fact that Republicans rarely consider race except to use it as an antagonism. More to the point, colorblindness as a political strategy presents a quandary, because it presumes that everyone shares the same set of problems, histories and racial experiences; it sees the nation as a meritocracy, assumes equality, and sidesteps the complexities of race. Certainly there are commonalities that cross racial lines, kike economics and religion. Appealing to African American solely on these merits, though, does not work because the country, even as it professes to be race neutral, is in fact, race, conscious. As we have seen in this study,  not only did black Republicans understand this truth, but white Republican often did as well; yer many of matter group shied away from this approach, out of fear of alienating white voters." Id. at 309-310. From the bookjacket: "The Loneliness of the Black Republican provides a new understanding of the interaction between African Americans and the Republican Party, and the seemingly incongruous intersection of civil rights and American conservatism.).

EMPTINESS, or ABSOLUTE NOTHINGNESS

Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, translated with an Introduction by Jan Van Bragt; Foreword by Winston L. King (Berkeley & Los Angles: U. of California Press, 1982) (From the "Foreword": "In passing it is of some interest to inquire why there has been little or no inclusion of any Anglo-American materials in Professor Nishitani's writings. Perhaps the reasons are not far afield. Since Japan's 'opening to the West' her philosophers, for various incidental and cultural reasons, h ave been interested primarily in the Germanic tradition--and Nishitani was educated in this tradition. But doubtless the main reason is that the Anglo-American tradition has had little in it that has appealed to an Eastern and Buddhist-oriented culture. In the British tradition, for example, we have Reid's commonsense realism, practical, simplistic Utilitarianism, the empiricism and political philosophy of Locke, the God-centered idealism of Berkeley--none of which could have much appeal for a Buddhist-oriented thinker. As for American thought, almost the only American philosopher in whom Japan has taken an interest at all is John Dewey and his pragmatic 'learning by doing' educational theories. Indeed for most of Japan, America is not a land of thinkers but of merchants, manufacturers, technical entrepreneurs, and practical-minded enterprise." Id. at xv-xvi. From the bookcover:"In Religion and Nothingness the leading representative of the Kyoto School of Philosophy lays the foundations of thought for a world in the making, for a world united beyond the differences of East and West. Keiji Nishitani notes the irreversible trend of Western civilization to nihilism, and singles out the conquest of nihilism as the task for contemporary philosophy. Nihility, or relative nothingness, can only be overcome by being radicalized to Emptiness, or absolute nothingness. Taking absolute nothingness as the fundamental notion in rational explanations of the Eastern experience of human life, Professor Nishitani examines the relevance of this notion for contemporary life, and in particular for Western philosophical theories and religious beliefs. Everywhere his basic intention remains the same: to direct our modern predicament to a resolution through this insight." "The challenge that the thought of Keiji Nishitani presents to the West, as a modern version of an Eastern speculative tradition that is every bit as old and as variegated as our own, is one that brings into unity the principle of reality and the principle of salvation. In the process, one traditional Western idea after another comes under scrutiny: the dichotomy of faith and reason, of being and substance, the personal and the transcendent notions of God, the exaggerated rile given to the knowing ego, and even the Judeo-Christian view of history itself.")

SUSPICIOUS CIRCLES

OR, ON THE NATURE OF THE 1973-1976 POLITICAL DIVIDE AMONG AMERICANS WHICH HAS YET TO BE BRIDGED 40+ YEARS LATER.

Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014) (THIS IS A MUST-READ BOOK!! From the bookjacket: "The Invisible Bridge is the story of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown--an account of the unprecedented loss of national confidence that took place in the United States between 1973 and 1976, the year when President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace and Governor Ronald Reagan began his long march to the White House." Also, see Frank Rich, "A Distant Mirror," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 8/3/2014.).