+ Hive

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

"[O]ur treasure is where the hives of our knowledge are."

—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

What is Hive?#

Hive is an open-source repository containing notes, ideas, and questions about our course readings and class discussions. We will build this resource together as a class—sharing the work of interpreting, analyzing, and questioning the complex course readings we encounter. The “hive mind” is capable of discovering far more than any one individual. With luck, Hive will become a central resource in our class discussions and an indispensable aid to you as you craft your essays.

On Field Notes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Field Notes#

Erick Greene

Another value of field notebooks is their ability to serve as an incredibly fertile incubator for your ideas and observations. By jotting down interesting observations, questions, and miscellaneous ideas, your field notebook can serve as a powerful catalyst for new experiments and projects.

— Erick Greene, “Why Keep a Field Notebook?”

S. S. Seward

Our notes should, indeed, be useful for purposes of review; yet that usefulness is not their chief value. . . . The practical value of our notes will take care of itself as a matter of secondary importance, if we devote ourselves wholly to their main purpose—to make us alert, clear-headed, and responsible . . . . To take good notes is not preliminary to study, but study itself of the most vital kind; calling at once on all one’s powers of concentration, judgment, and craftsmanship.

On Reading

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On Reading#

On Reading#

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen tells a story about a relative who had planned a long European vacation with friends — touring museums, seeing operas, having long dinners. But the entire trip was ruined by her friends’ relationship with their Fitbits. They would skip the opera: not enough steps. They would cancel dinner plans: they hadn’t met their daily goal. Nguyen’s guess is that the friends never consciously decided that step counts were more important than art or friendship; instead, the “Fitbit just spoke more loudly in their internal deliberation, and there was no Artbit or Friendbit to compete. The clarity of those metrics just swamped quieter considerations” (469). Nguyen argues that the Fitbit provided prefabricated values — ones that replaced the rich, varied reasons the friends had for exercising with a single number that was easy to measure and hard to ignore. Nguyen calls this phenomenon value capture: it happens when we internalize some institutional value from outside ourselves and permit it to dominate our reasoning.

FAQs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Course FAQs#

1. May I email you my essay for extra comments?

No.#

I always give each essay draft a full set of written comments. And I’m committed to meet with any student who would like to go over them as many times as necessary. However, I usually do not take requests for extra comments via email unless there is no other possible way a student can meet with me in an office hour or at some other scheduled time. Considering how easy it is to attach a file to an email, almost every student would seek this additional help. As a result, I would be deluged with requests for help, often at the very last minute, making it impossible for me to thoughtfully respond to them all.