FNDL Review Conference Worksheet

Complete this form and return by email to fundamentals@uchicago.edu.

A. Info
Your Name: Akash Mehta

Class: 2020

Fundamentals Advisor: John McCormick

Are you a double-major? No


If so, with what other department?

B. Foreign Language
What is your foreign language?

French

What courses have you taken in this language?

Advanced French; French Poetry in Translation

What text would you like to read in your foreign language?

Baudelaire’s poetry

Do you know yet how you will read your preferred text (e.g. course, independent
study)?

Professor Rosanna Warren’s course

C. Fundamentals Question
What is your question in its current form?

Followed through, where can philosophy lead but paralysis?

Read and rewrite your Question Statement (between 1–2 pages single-spaced) and turn
it in with this worksheet (either use the space at the end of this worksheet to write, or
aYach a second document to your email).

D. Junior Paper (for third-years)

What text will you write on?

Currently I’m considering writing on the Philosophical Investigations if I write on my

Fundamentals question. However I’m still interested in writing on corruption, if I can
think of the right text to study. Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy (which I read part of at
Deep Springs and intend to read more of) would be an obvious candidate.
What topic will you write on?

See above

What faculty member(s) would you like to work with as your JP advisor?

If I write on the Philosophical Investigations, it would be wonderful to work with

Professor Conant. If I write on corruption, it would be wonderful to work with Professor
McCormick.

!
!
E. Fundamentals Course Requirements
When asked to name courses on this worksheet, please write in the name of the course – don’t just
use the course number.

1. Introductory course
List the course you have taken for your FNDL introductory sequence.

Course Title Quarter and Year

French Poetry and Translation (pending) Autumn 2019

2. Exam Texts
List the six texts you think you would like to include in your senior exam. This list may
include texts studied in the introductory courses. Third-year students, this list might be
quite approximate.

Text (Faculty Instructor) Quarter and Year Studied

The Republic (John Ellison) Spring 2019

Nie\sche—The Gay Science, The Genealogy of Morals, Deep Springs

Beyond Good and Evil (David McNeil)

Arendt—On the Origins of Totalitarianism, the Human Deep Springs

Condition, On Revolution (David McNeil)

The Philosophical Investigations (Amos Browne; David Winter 2019; Deep Springs
McNeil)

The Critique of Pure Reason (MaYhew Boyle) Autumn 2019

SchmiY and Strauss (John McCormick) Winter 2020 (expected)

3. Text Courses
Do not include the course you took as Fundamentals Introductory courses. If you have
not yet taken the course, please list it in bold type.

Course Title Quarter and Year

The Republic (John Ellison) Spring 2019

Nie\sche—The Gay Science, The Genealogy of Morals, Deep Springs

Beyond Good and Evil (David McNeil)

Arendt—On the Origins of Totalitarianism, the Human Deep Springs

Condition, On Revolution (David McNeil)
The Philosophical Investigations (Amos Browne; David Winter 2019; Deep Springs
McNeil)

The Critique of Pure Reason (MaYhew Boyle) Autumn 2019

SchmiB and Strauss (John McCormick) Winter 2020 (expected)

Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Writings Winter 2019

Foucault Autumn 2018

4. Supporting Courses
If you have not yet taken the course, please list it in bold type.

Course Title Quarter and Year

--Democracy's Life and Death (Winter 2019)
--Modernity and its Discontents from Dawn to Decline (Spring 2019)
--Varieties of Philosophical Skepticism (Spring 2019)
--The Good Life Deep Springs

5. Remaining College Requirements

Specify the courses and the quarter(s) and year you intend to take these courses.

Course Requirement Quarter and Year

STEM Core Winter 2020

Arts Core Winter 2020

F. 2019-2020 Academic Schedule

List the courses you are taking or planning to take this academic year:

Autumn Winter Spring

Global Warming SchmiY and Strauss [intend to only audit

courses this quarter]

French Poetry The Big Bang

Kant’s CPR Creative Writing or Art

History
American Pragmatism Indian Philosophy?

JP Senior exam

G. Additional comments, questions, or concerns:

!
!
II. Revised Fundamentals Question Statement
!
Followed through, where can philosophy lead but paralysis?
!
I know three or four people my age fully committed to philosophy—who consider it not a
pastime or an interest or an occupation, but as the most important thing they do. A
professor once advised me to pursue philosophy only if I felt I had no choice, if I just
couldn’t do anything else with my life; these three or four feel that urgent compulsion and
on some level view almost everything else they do as more or less frivolous. In particular,
they each take the dictum ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ seriously, and as such
are unsatisfied with any facet of their worldview or conduct whose underpinnings they
have not interrogated. For each of them, to live with integrity is to carry out this
interrogation, this inquiry into the grounds of our beliefs and actions and into the
foundations of the world around us.
!
Indeed the metaphor carried by these words we often use to describe the philosophical
project—examining ‘grounds’, ‘foundations’, ‘underpinnings’—captures these people's
ambition well. They feel that we are all living in a shaky house whose structural
soundness we’ve taken for granted (and are in danger of falling, like Bugs Bunny upon
realizing he’s walking on air? have already fallen?); they are bemused or even horrified at
our daily routines, our evening dinner parties, our long nights asleep. They descend with
flashlights to the basement, or lower still to the piles and supports—to find themselves in
a murky swamp, with nothing firm or lasting to hold on to, drowning.
!
Perhaps this seems too dramatic. But each of these people have indeed described to me
something akin to the feeling of drowning—and it’s what I’ve felt too when I’ve found
myself really in the grip of a philosophical problem. In these moments I’ve ended up
distracting myself, trying to forget about it, to go back to living insouciantly on some
high floor of my very comfortable house. I more or less cheerily return to my life not
worth living; they struggle to stay in the swamp. But if the upper floors can look
intellectually dishonest and craven from the perspective of the swamp, the swamp can
look selfish and self-indulgent from the house. The people I’m thinking of don’t seem to
prioritize service to others; all other virtues pale beside the intellectual virtue. This means
in particular that they tend to be politically inactive; any one of them might well say that
“it seems laughable for me to think about other things when I am still ignorant about
myself.”1

1 Phaedrus 230a. Of course I don’t mean to suggest that philosophy can’t as byproducts produce
political goods—indeed I take seriously Socrates’ claim to being “the greatest good that has ever
befallen" his city, his abstention from public affairs notwithstanding (Apology 30b). In any case,
I’m trying not to let my question become whether philosophy is a justifiable pursuit. Nevertheless
let me mention Arendt’s claim in Thoughts on Lessing that “only the genius is driven by his very
gifts into pubic life, and is exempted from any decision of this sort” and thus is exempted from
deliberate commitments to the public good; the rest of us are obligated to concern ourselves with
the world.
!
It’s possible that all this results from a shallow or misdirected view of what ‘following
through’ philosophy consists of. Maybe I’m thinking of philosophy too much like the last
stages of the children’s game in which you ask an everyday question and then ask why
seven successive times. Some philosophers—Nietzsche, with his call “to stop bravely at
the surface, the fold, the skin; to worship appearance,”2 comes to mind—at times seem to
want to do something quite different, but it’s difficult to articulate exactly what else
philosophy could strive for. The methodology of philosophy in the main, as I understand
it, is indeed that of relentless questioning; philosophy is the conversation with the
Socrates challenging your claim to know the good, the Descartes pushing you to justify
your conviction that you’re awake, the Kant asking you how it is so much as possible to
have a conviction about the world.
!
It’s also possible that I’m not taking seriously enough the possibility that you can build or
rebuild from the swamp on up, that you can firmly and fully establish the grounds of your
way of life, in other words that you can come to know the truth. Maybe my resignation to
the skeptic always having the last word (or to there not being any last word) is premature.
Socrates claimed that he knew nothing, but in the same breath he said he constantly had
looked for someone who did know something—meaning he always thought knowledge
was possible. Where does my confidence that the unthoroughly-examined life is the only
one possible come from?
!
Maybe these or other possibilities explain why the older people I know who seem fully
committed to philosophy don’t seem to be drowning (unless they’ve just gotten better at
hiding it). Much of my interest in reading philosophy has been considering these
possibilities, and inversely, much of my interest in reading political texts has been
considering where and how deeply they draw their philosophical support. My education
at UChicago, this strange period of my life in which I have to a great extent absolved
myself of present responsibilities to others in order to read and talk about books, has
centered on what the books have to do with the deferred responsibilities; how to get from
philosophy to politics, thought to action, and back again, other than more or less
arbitrarily stopping the one and starting the other, as Hume more or less arbitrarily
walked in and out of his study.

2 Gay Science, Preface to the 2nd Edition