[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #8
1. The basic rule of Stoicism is to concern yourself only with things you can control.
2. For beginners, the first step is to get rid of all desires, because all that a beginner desires are things they can’t control, so they must first repress all desires until desires in their control can be found.
3. In our control are: our opinion (our beliefs, judgments, values), our pursuit (our goals (but attaining them is out of our control)), our desires (what we like and feel), our aversions (our fears, dislikes, anger), and our own actions.
4. Our health is out of our control because we cannot prevent death or illness in any full sense. Eating well and taking care of myself will not prevent me from getting all sorts of cancers and diseases, being born with genetic disorders, and it surely won’t stop me from being murdered or killed in a car accident.
5. d. a cup
6. First, they would remind themselves that they cannot control how the teacher grades their work nor how grades are determined in the class. Then, they would reflect on what they can control and realize whether they did their best on the assignment…if they did, then they would be fine, knowing they did their best at what they can control… and if they didn’t do their best, then they would also be fine, because they deserved the “F” and so it all makes perfect sense.
7. Providence (or God, fate, nature, etc,) must be trusted to be in control of all of the things that we cannot control.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #7:
1. The Marcuse piece is mainly about real versus false/artificial needs.
2. Herbert comes back for several reasons: first, the world out there is no longer conducive to meeting his real needs, second, he does not know how to seek and meet his real needs, and, third, he is so conditioned to accept artificial needs that he finds them sort of satisfying. (Note: Of course, most of the time his bad faith (collar) will keep him from even trying to escape to seek his real needs.)
3. The key steps in the cycle are: You work a job that is alienating, so your real needs are frustrated as as a result of alienation. You “treat yourself” to some expensive artificial need because you worked so hard. These needs are not actually fulfilling of your real needs for your real self, so they must be constantly replaced and cause you to go into debt. You overwork at your alienating job just to make as much money as you can to afford them. This increases your alienation which makes your dissatisfaction even worse. So you buy even more false needs to compensate for your alienated and dissatisfying life. Work, frustration, false needs, frustration, debt, overwork, repeat…
4. Our alienation is hidden from us for four reasons (provide two): 1. We are too busy to do anything about it, because we are in the spiral of alienation and false needs, 2. We are convinced society is fair and equal because everyone has the same false needs, so we must all be rich, 3. We have no one to blame, because everyone is just playing their replaceable roles in the system that we support, 4. Our minds contain only images, which we means we lack the concepts and ideals that would allow us to challenge the status quo with a better way it could be.
5. You believe Apple, because the ads and social effects of the brand is like hypnosis, with no real evidence given to support why you should agree with them. Then, you act and feel on the belief by buying the phone and feeling joy that you are now rad, too. Finally, you repeat or make up total lies to try to make sense of your totally irrational belief and actions. Your real reasons are something like, “People will see that I have the same overpriced phone as millions of people and think I fit in and am rich,” but you will tell yourself “It has a great camera, my old phone is uncool, and I’m an Apple person.”
6. “Marketing Orientation” explains how we value ourselves as if we are products to be bought, so we go to the gym because we think if we improve our looks we will be worth more in other’s eyes and so we’ll feel better about ourselves as shiny products to be sold on a shelf.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #6
1. The working classes produces all of our tangible products that we need to live our daily lives…food, clothing, cars, house, technology, etc. The more products you produce and the more sophisticated those products are, the less you are worth by comparison. Think of the Chinese workers making incredibly expensive iphones. The upper classes do not produce anything. They manage or own production.
2. Product alienation is caused by the product never being yours but the owners, and it reflects only their choices.
3. Activity alienation stems from your choices and actions being dictated by the owners, so you should have many examples of your actions and even words being dictated by a manager or teacher.
4. Activity alienation robs the worker of expression, and the result of this inability to meet your need for free, self-expression and creativity are mental exhaustion, deep boredom, aggression, neurotic means of expression, etc.
5. Georg avoided product alienation because his products belonged to him and reflected his choices and skills. He avoided activity alienation because his time and actions were not dictated but the result of his own choices and skills.
6. Marx says that our social self is a result of how we are situated as workers. The socio-economic situation as well as the way the work is organized will dictate our key beliefs, values, and social identity, such as whether humans are good or bad, what people we relate to, our goals, what political ideologies we will support, etc. (Tangent: Notice that this means that the organization of society will be a major cause of what type of society we think is possible and how our motivations and goals play out. So, of course, if you are working in a thoroughly capitalist sector of the economy, you will think that no other model is possible because humans are selfish, work is miserable, etc.)

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #5
1. Our list is: love/companionship, self-expression/freedom, acceptance/recognition, and purpose/achievement/meaning. (Synonyms are fine.)(And, of course, there are also our baseline physiological and negative/security needs.)
2. A neurosis is a failure in the Reality Principle. In other words, it is a behavior that shows an inability to accept reality in seeking to meet your needs. I am out of touch with reality if I think the shoes I bought express my genuine thoughts and feelings and not just my copying others to gain acceptance for a fake version of myself. The designer of the shoes is expressing her actual self; I’m not. I’m only gaining acceptance for my ability to have enough money to obey a trend and/or copy others as a fake self.
3. If our physiological needs are unmet, like our need for food, we die. If you psychological needs are unmet, we die psychologically, that is, we will go insane.
4. If our psychological needs are only partially met for long period we begin to psychologically deteriorate and will usually develop neurotic traits to try to artificially cope with these needs being unmet.
5. Fromm rejects the Sociological Relativist conception of sanity that says a person is sane if they “fit in” and are able to succeed in their given society, no matter how insane that society might be.
6. From defines sanity in a universal and objective way. A person who rationally seeks and meets their real needs is sane.
7. Selfishness is a defect in that it will lead to difficulties in meeting our real needs (like love), and it is socially patterned in that this is a common, and even encouraged, behavior in our society. (And so the selfish person has a hard time seeing their defect, because they see many others being selfish and being applauded for it…like being elected president…zing!)

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #4
1. Garcin cannot leave because Estelle and Inez aren’t accepting his social identity as a “tough guy” and so he must convince them or he can’t believe it himself. We are desperate for people to recognize us as what we think we are.
2. Estelle needs her mirror, because a mirror is how superficial people try to control how other people see them, and so without it her identity is up for grabs.
3. We spend a ton of effort altering our looks and buying things to get other people to accept us as the person we want to be (and this person is often a lie). The car, clothes, gadgets are tools for our social performance that is trying to get people to see us as the social identity we are trying to portray. And even if you aren’t purely superficial, we all still try to control the “self” we portray to others, whether it is Jeff’s “I’m a kind, nerdy dad that is not obsessed with my image” or your “I desperately want people to see me as a rebel who doesn’t care what they think.” (Wicked irony, eh?)
4. The core lesson of “No Exit” is that our need to forge a social identity and be recognized as that by other people is the cause of a ton of our desperation, insecurity, and self-deception.
5. Bad Faith is a fully conscious and intentional lie to oneself. In this lie we either deny our facts or deny that we can transcend those facts in our actions and values. Most importantly, we use these Bad Faith lies to avoid current choices and deny responsibility for our past choices.
6. The waiter doesn’t “have to” do any of this. What we choose is a choice to value that thing, and he won’t admit that he is choosing tips over being himself or doing something else for money. He makes the choice to act like a robot for tips instead of choosing to be himself, value authenticity over money, get another job, be nice because it makes others happy, etc.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #3
1. Dasein is the human being. Dasein is special, because it is a being whose Being is an issues for it. In other words, Dasein is unique in that it is thrown into the world without knowing what it “is” while also being concerned about when it will no longer “be” (death).
2. The pen in use is Ready-to-hand, which means that it must fade into the background of the task it is being used for. In order to pay attention to the in-order-to tasks (the writing), we must take the pen for granted.
3. If my pen stopped working, it may become Present-at-hand, which means that it becomes a problem that I must study objectively to repair it or reevaluate the project it is being used for.
4. If math or my job is directly related to my life goals (I want to be a mathematician or stay in this career), then to concentrate on my current task I have to let those goals fade into the background of my thoughts. This can be bad, because I might lose sight of those goals. For most people, however, math class and their job are not connected to their goals and those goals do not appear at all (they are no-thing) except when daydreaming. This is really bad because you are likely to continue at these irrelevant tasks and never reach anything you seek.
5. Present-at-hand is how broken or missing tools appear. They must be studied objectively to repair them back to the ready-to-hand. Very rarely these present-at-hand experiences can lead to seeing what the tool and projects are for and allow you to evaluate the value of the project.
6. If death became truly present-at-hand this would mean we are studying death objectively and realizing that all of our projects are ending (breaking), and this, if Jeff’s hopes are realized, would allow us to study all of the projects behind our everyday tasks and evaluate them to assess their worth. Maybe it would be something like this for you: “Since I am dying (we all are, by the way), do I really care about these projects? Wait, I am not even working toward any of the goals that matter. Damn it! Please help me Jeff, and here are some baked goods to repay you for revealing my world to me.” (Or, you know, something like that.)
7. The They says, “Sure, death will happen to you, but not soon, so don’t think about it. You have plenty of time to take control of your life someday. For now, just keep working at the Krusty Krab to buy another companion cube.” (Note: Krusty Krab = your job/school; companion cube = your phone)

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #2
1. My belief is only true if it agrees with reality. (“Evidence” or “proof” are not accurate answers, because, sadly, we might have mistaken evidence, like those who see the sunset as evidence that the sun revolved around the earth. It is reality that makes a claim true, not the evidence.)
2. The idea of “personal truth” or some belief being “true to me” is saying no more than “I believe this” or “This is my perspective”. And, of course, your believing something has no bearing on whether it agrees with reality. People believe false things and are deceived by their limited perspective constantly.
3. We should judge others’ values when they are irrational and when they could harm others. This can be done fairly by judging others’ values based on their own consistency, that is, we can judge someone’s values as being irrational if they are inconsistent with reality or their own values.
4. Jeff immediately grows a beard (I am so ashamed of my immaturity), and you mock him and threaten to kill him when he tried to encourage you to escape the cave.
5. The Cave story mocks the “seeing is believing” mindset, because it shows the cave-dwellers (most people) staring at illusions and taking them for reality. If all you see is deception, then your beliefs will be delusions. And, in Plato’s view, the whole physical world of sight is deceptive.
6. Normal science studies things in the physical world. In the cave story, these would be the shadows, and thus science, to Plato, is just playing the “shadow game” of naming and predicting the shadows.
7. Our everyday, physical world is untrustworthy for three reasons (pick two): 1. The world is always changing, 2. Our perspectives are always changing, and 3. The theories we use to interpret the world are always changing. (But, note, that doesn’t mean that objective truth doesn’t exist, it just isn’t unchanging. Unchanging truth is found in the realm of ideals, like math and philosophy.)

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Mr. Ed,

Yasmine’s and Cocina Azul are great, but I haven’t been to either of them in years.

I have been recommended Cafe de Lat a few times but haven’t been yet.

Coda Bakery was in my original post, and that is some of the best food in town, period.

So, let’s see, what can I add… How about Pollito con Papas? Get the stuffed potato and yuka fries.

Jeff

P.S. First the apology: I create the categories based purely on what recommendations I am looking for at the time, and I have been looking for TV shows. So, sorry. Second, I’ll create a movie forum now.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #1
1. The tasks for each week are listed at the top of our webpage: (1) Do the reading while (2) answering the Reading Questions, then (3) use the lectures to get further clarity for your answers, then (4) take the Friday Quiz.
2. The absolute deadline for quizzes and exams is Saturday at noon.
3. The best prep for the Friday quizzes is the Reading Questions, because most of the quiz comes straight from those questions. (Note: But please be sure to read the questions carefully, because there are some subtle differences from the reading questions that I want you to think about. You can paste some of your reading questions answers straight over, but this won’t work for all of the quiz questions.)
4. The Friday quizzes cannot be made up, but there are many extra points built into the class to make up for missing a quiz or two. (The extra points are included in every quiz; these are not extra credit assignments.)
5. Grades are based on earning points. For example, a “B” is earned when you get 80 points. (Note: It is not a percentage; that’s much harder.)
6. If your quizzes or final exam include content that is not your own work, such as content from a search, AI, or a website, that question will receive a zero and be counted as plagiarism. Please don’t do this, because plagiarism is cheating and has to be reported to the Dean of Students.
7. Philosophy is the study of the presuppositions in all fields of thought. (Note: Philosophy is the home of genuine critical thinking, carefully checking the support for all of our ideas, even the ones that we assume and seem obvious.)

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Samuel,
Oh my gosh…I can’t believe I never read “East of Eden”. It is supposed to be amazing, and I just somehow missed it. I just put it in my reading list. Thanks.
-Jeff

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

For most of my like I read only serious books, but now I am reading many more fun books. In recent years I have finally found some SciFi books I really like, and just in the last few months I have started reading romance.

So far I’ve read Henry’s “Book Lovers” and Moyes’ “Me Before You”.

Those were both great. What would you recommend for my next romance book? Has anyone read either Hazelwood’s “Love Hypothesis” or Hoang’s “Kiss Quotient”, because those are on my list of recommended romance books to buy.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Hi Tiana,
I think you’ll find plenty of psychology and human nature issues in this class to make you happy.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Britney is right. Tap n Taco is genius. Just straight up good food and fairly priced.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

(More love for Slime Rancher! I just started playing “Planet Crafter” and it also scratches that, “collect and organize and then rearrange” itch that I love in Slime Rancher, Stardew Valley, Satisfactory, Shapez, etc.)

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Marijke! That is a hidden gem! I had never heard of it, but it is well liked on Steam. I’ll look into it. It seems similar to two of my favorites, Stardew Valley – as you mentioned – and Slime Rancher. Go check out Slime Rancher!

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Woohoo Regina!
You are in luck, my class has philosophy all over the place, and we will even be covering Stoicism. Oh, and reading. Jokes aside, I think you’ll like my class.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Maya,

Ichiban is our go-to sushi joint, but lately we have been impressed by the All-You-Can-Eat spread at Sushi King, even though they are usually just good but not great. But, for value, we are starting to go there more.

And let me second your endorsements of Kim’s, Naruto, and Taj Mahal (and also Taaj Palace…your name combined those two…you were trying to trick me!).

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

P.S. Just in case you never heard this, the movie “Oh Brother Where art Thou?” is a fun retelling of Homer’s Odyssey.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Kendra,
Nice. Thanks. I had not heard of “Pluribus” but it sounds perfect, and it is reviewed well. I just put it on my watch list.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Yes Gerry! Weir and Heinlein are brilliant. Anyone that is wanting to start reading SciFi, those are two of the very best. Weir’s “Project Hail Mary” and Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” are universally loved. (And they are currently making “Project Hail Mary” into a major movie.)

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Levin… How dare you. (Yes, I’m only kidding) Don’t hate on board games. I choose both. Most of the board games people play are awful, but if you were to give a game like “The Crew”, “Pandemic”, or “Spirit Island” a try, you’d get hooked.

“Stardew Valley” is one of my favorites. Similar ones I love are “Satisfactory”, “Slime Rancher, and “Planet Crafter”.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Samantha,

Me too! I always read one heavy, serious book that I keep at school, a fun nonfiction book that I read at home, and then a purely fun fantasy/SciFi book that I read when I take walks. (Yes, it is pretty easy to read and walk when you try it.)

If you want a bunch of book recommendations, click on the “propaganda” header near the top of these pages.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Kate,
That is very cool. I always cheat and buy a basic rig and then just swap out the parts to upgrade it. I have come close to building one from scratch but always go back to my cheater shortcut. I’m not as cool as you.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

I’ve still been too chicken to play D&D, but everything else you listed is basically my life. In the header of this website there’s a link to “propaganda” which is really just lists of my favorite books, games, etc.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

My wife and daughter keep going to Ma’s Tea House without me and love it. No fair!

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