This week in Everyday Morality: Moral Philosophy v. Gut Feelings. How do you decide what's right or good? With your rational brain or your emotional brain? Did you know that your opinions of people may vary depending upon whether you are in a smelly, or not-smelly room, when asked? Join us Sunday at 12:30 for the small of coffee.
If this is inconvenient for you, try Politics and Prose on Saturday at 2. They are hosting weekly discussions of this same MOOC. Also with coffee.
Syllabus:
week 1. the big questions
week 2. compassion
week 3. origins of morality
week 4. differences
week 5. family, friends and strangers
week 6. the big answers
For the 1st week Paul Bloom prepared seven video lectures totaling about two hours. You can access them by signing in to coursera.org (get a free account if you don't already have one) and finding this course. Once you locate Everyday Morality you will find, on the left, a link to course videos.
The "readings" include Steven Pinker's 2008 The Moral Instinct article in the New York Times Magazine, Sam Harris' 2010 TED Talk Science Can Answer Moral Questions, and Jonathan Haidt's 2008 TED Talk The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives, which are all relatively short, as well as two much longer lectures by philosopher Tamar Gendler.
You can skip all this if you want, we don't care. We just want you to come talk to us.
We have Blooms’s new book, Just Babies, at the library. (It is currently checked out but you can put a hold on it.)
The optional readings include a story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," by Ursula Le Guin, who was one of the authors we studied in the Fantasy and Science Fiction MOOC we just finished. In some strange ways all these courses seem to connect.
Planning to park? If there is no space in the library lot, turn right onto Philadelphia, take the very next right (at the end of Birch) and follow the ramp up for parking near the Takoma Park Elementary School. At the back of the school playground, the black fence has a door that leads to the library parking lot, via either ramp or stairs.
The Library is closed today, Tuesday January 21, because of the snowstorm forecast for the region. That means today's Circle Time programs are canceled. City offices also are closed.
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Did you get stuck on a holiday without a book and all the libraries are closed? For streaming e-books or audiobooks visit TumbleBookCloud or AudioBookCloud. If you want to download an e-book, try Freading.
Please go here for instructions if you have not used Freading before.
No library card is necessary to access our TumbleBook accounts. You will need one to download books from Freading. And it needs to be currently valid. (Not expired, no big fines or long overdue books.)
We hope you also frequent Project Gutenberg and LibriVox where public domain works are saved. They are scanned, or read, for you by volunteers.