About Me
My name is Juliana Paradise Hunt. My mother gave me her maiden name for a middle name, and it represents to me an ideal we would all do well to live by ~ the way things might have been and might still become ~ if only we would remember what the ancients tried to teach us.
I'm retired from a career teaching philosophy and the history of ideas in the University of Wisconsin system, and as such, I'm all about applying ancient wisdom to the challenges of modern life. I'm a practicing philosophical counselor and educational consultant, and I'm the founder of the Institute for Dialectic-Complementarity Studies and director of the Madison Mentor Center in Madison, Wisconsin. I am also the designer of our Mind-to-Mind Dialectic Teaching and Learning System, still in development for the purpose of connecting us all across cultures, across generations, and across disciplines.
I'm a mother and a grandmother, and by extension, a teacher and student in all aspects of life. And all my work, including this blog, has its purpose in bringing people together over great ideas, mind to mind. True intelligence, Indigenous scholars remind us, comes from "putting our minds together as one mind."(OI, Melissa K. Nelson, 2007)
Someone once asked Socrates what he was good for, and he replied, in essence, "Pimping." By which he meant, he explained (once they'd all stopped laughing) bringing people together who have something good to share with one another. This is why he advocated what he called dialectic thinking - because "dialectic thinking ... is the same thing as the ability to see the connections between things."(Plato's Republic)
Unfortunately, there is little if anything like this in our education as we know it. As David Christian (author of the Big History Project) put it, “The average kid has no way to make sense between what happens with their first-period World History class and their second-period algebra class, third-period gym class, fourth-period literature — it’s all disconnected. It’s like if I were to give you a jigsaw puzzle and throw 500 pieces on the table and say, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m not going to show you the box top as to how they fit together.’ ”
Having studied and taught this method throughout my career, I've made it my retirement career to find as many ways as possible to proliferate this way of thinking, teaching and learning, and communicating. Because this ancient dialectic method promotes conflict resolution, peace and justice by way of healthy communication in all relationships - and there is - arguably - nothing we need more urgently in our world.
Why read a small-p philosophy blog?
Because philosophy the way the ancients did it was practical wisdom - the kind that will help you solve your problems, resolve your conflicts, and improve your relationships. They did not ask us to believe in anything, but only to take the hard learned lessons of the past and put them into practice to face the challenges of our lives. They understood that this is how we come to understand, not merely one truth, but all truth, the whole truth, to which everyone contributes something.
You might never realize any of this is you were to study Philosophy in any of most academic departments around the world, where very fine distinctions between words and arguments has been interesting enough to keep generations of scholars from paying any attention to the practical good that ancient philosophy could do for out lives and our social conditions. Every philosophy teacher will find, to their dismay, that first year college students are more likely to have learned about So-crates from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure than from and meaningful study of the parallel birth of philosophy and democracy. And an actual understanding of the danger of empty rhetoric and the poison of fallacy is lost on even the most educated among us.
And students are not likely to realize what's missing from their education until much later, when something they read in those ancient dialogues proves useful in meeting life's challenges (danger, temptation, injustice, ignorance and arrogance), from which good character (courage, temperance, justice, wisdom and humility) grows.
The ancients understood that it's by way of this dialogic practical wisdom that true intelligence and true happiness develops. And it is for this reason that they understood their responsibility to pass it forward to us. But generations since have dropped the ball. This cumulative understanding of how to exercise good judgment, make intelligent choices, break bad habits, develop good communication patterns, and avoid survival strategies that backfire was replaced with dogma about supreme beings, inscrutable and indisputable truths, and promises about salvation from the damnation of so-called 'original sin'. The loss to human beings has been nothing short of tragic, and we'll never know what might otherwise have been. But it's not to late to learn. As George Elliot once said, "It's never too late to become the person you might have been."
I've been lucky to have learned all this from students so bright that they sparkle in memory, and to have had the likes of Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus and countless indigenous elders as my teaching assistants. And they each bring something essential to this dialogue, something they would like you to put it in your backpack and take with you for when you need it in your life's journey.
This is why you might want to read a blog on small-philosophy - because it's good for you. And if you have also learned in your own journey, then you too may wish to contribute to this dialogue... for your own sake, as well as for the sake of all those generations to come who may never learn of all this any other way.
Juliana Paradise Hunt
My name is Juliana Paradise Hunt. My mother gave me her maiden name for a middle name, and it represents to me an ideal we would all do well to live by ~ the way things might have been and might still become ~ if only we would remember what the ancients tried to teach us.
I'm retired from a career teaching philosophy and the history of ideas in the University of Wisconsin system, and as such, I'm all about applying ancient wisdom to the challenges of modern life. I'm a practicing philosophical counselor and educational consultant, and I'm the founder of the Institute for Dialectic-Complementarity Studies and director of the Madison Mentor Center in Madison, Wisconsin. I am also the designer of our Mind-to-Mind Dialectic Teaching and Learning System, still in development for the purpose of connecting us all across cultures, across generations, and across disciplines.
I'm a mother and a grandmother, and by extension, a teacher and student in all aspects of life. And all my work, including this blog, has its purpose in bringing people together over great ideas, mind to mind. True intelligence, Indigenous scholars remind us, comes from "putting our minds together as one mind."(OI, Melissa K. Nelson, 2007)
Someone once asked Socrates what he was good for, and he replied, in essence, "Pimping." By which he meant, he explained (once they'd all stopped laughing) bringing people together who have something good to share with one another. This is why he advocated what he called dialectic thinking - because "dialectic thinking ... is the same thing as the ability to see the connections between things."(Plato's Republic)
Unfortunately, there is little if anything like this in our education as we know it. As David Christian (author of the Big History Project) put it, “The average kid has no way to make sense between what happens with their first-period World History class and their second-period algebra class, third-period gym class, fourth-period literature — it’s all disconnected. It’s like if I were to give you a jigsaw puzzle and throw 500 pieces on the table and say, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m not going to show you the box top as to how they fit together.’ ”
Having studied and taught this method throughout my career, I've made it my retirement career to find as many ways as possible to proliferate this way of thinking, teaching and learning, and communicating. Because this ancient dialectic method promotes conflict resolution, peace and justice by way of healthy communication in all relationships - and there is - arguably - nothing we need more urgently in our world.
Why read a small-p philosophy blog?
Because philosophy the way the ancients did it was practical wisdom - the kind that will help you solve your problems, resolve your conflicts, and improve your relationships. They did not ask us to believe in anything, but only to take the hard learned lessons of the past and put them into practice to face the challenges of our lives. They understood that this is how we come to understand, not merely one truth, but all truth, the whole truth, to which everyone contributes something.
You might never realize any of this is you were to study Philosophy in any of most academic departments around the world, where very fine distinctions between words and arguments has been interesting enough to keep generations of scholars from paying any attention to the practical good that ancient philosophy could do for out lives and our social conditions. Every philosophy teacher will find, to their dismay, that first year college students are more likely to have learned about So-crates from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure than from and meaningful study of the parallel birth of philosophy and democracy. And an actual understanding of the danger of empty rhetoric and the poison of fallacy is lost on even the most educated among us.
And students are not likely to realize what's missing from their education until much later, when something they read in those ancient dialogues proves useful in meeting life's challenges (danger, temptation, injustice, ignorance and arrogance), from which good character (courage, temperance, justice, wisdom and humility) grows.
The ancients understood that it's by way of this dialogic practical wisdom that true intelligence and true happiness develops. And it is for this reason that they understood their responsibility to pass it forward to us. But generations since have dropped the ball. This cumulative understanding of how to exercise good judgment, make intelligent choices, break bad habits, develop good communication patterns, and avoid survival strategies that backfire was replaced with dogma about supreme beings, inscrutable and indisputable truths, and promises about salvation from the damnation of so-called 'original sin'. The loss to human beings has been nothing short of tragic, and we'll never know what might otherwise have been. But it's not to late to learn. As George Elliot once said, "It's never too late to become the person you might have been."
I've been lucky to have learned all this from students so bright that they sparkle in memory, and to have had the likes of Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus and countless indigenous elders as my teaching assistants. And they each bring something essential to this dialogue, something they would like you to put it in your backpack and take with you for when you need it in your life's journey.
This is why you might want to read a blog on small-philosophy - because it's good for you. And if you have also learned in your own journey, then you too may wish to contribute to this dialogue... for your own sake, as well as for the sake of all those generations to come who may never learn of all this any other way.
Juliana Paradise Hunt