David O'Hara

Thoughts as I prepare for today’s classes:

1. Philosophy occurs everywhere. Sometimes we notice it.
2. It occurs in a historic and cultural context. Contexts require some familiarity. Familiarity takes time.
3. The more we understand that context, the better we understand the philosophy.
4. Philosophy (the love of wisdom) begins in wonder. There are many ways to quench the flame of wonder; how can we kindle it again?
5. The love (philia) of wisdom (sophia) is friendship, mutual flourishing.
6. How do we foster the flourishing of wisdom, even as we hope wisdom will help us to flourish?

Today’s wonder journal page.

Do the leaves of a cup plant (silphium perfoliatum) give it any advantage? What about when they fill with rain, or with seeds, or both?

Ponderings from the garden. I take some time to observe, and to take note of something I don’t know. The notebook then becomes a source of topics to do more research about.

This morning as I taught my environmental philosophy class in one of the campus gardens the students were looking over my shoulder. So after class I turned to see what they were watching — and sketching. And then I made my own sketch of the turkey vultures that had been flying in from downtown where they roost each night.

Lots of teachers feeling stress these days.

But you know what’s great about teaching? Watching students gladly learning new things.

Heron on Skunk Creek in Sioux Falls yesterday. I painted it this afternoon from a photo I took yesterday while surveying for mussels.

If the sketch turned out well, I have John Muir Laws to thank. Took his Wild Wonder class this summer in California and it was remarkably helpful. He and Robin Lee Carlson, Mark Simmons, and Nina Sokolov are good and generous teachers.

Didn’t find any live mussels, and only a few fragments of dead shells, but I’m still hopeful. Life finds a way. 🎨

Part of my “wonder journal” — a practice I am asking my environmental philosophy students to engage in this semester. Since I am asking them to do it, I am doing it as well. “The love of wisdom begins in wonder,” says Aristotle.

It is a little cumbersome, but I carry a bag with notebooks, pens and watercolors, and usually a field guide and a book or two — poetry, science, philosophy — and I allow myself (force myself, sometimes) to stop and wonder at something in nature, and to turn that wonder into words and images.

Two herons in Sioux Falls yesterday. Blue heron at Skunk Creek, green heron at Covell Lake.

Wild Four O’Clock (Mirabilis nyctaginea)

A quick sketch while having coffee with a colleague in a campus garden today.

The last generation of monarch butterflies is passing through. My garden is full of them feasting on late summer blossoms, and perching in the trees overnight. Here’s a quick morning watercolor of one I saw yesterday. Wish it well on its long journey.

Ten years ago today an accident nearly killed me.

This morning I’m reflecting on a how grateful I am for a supportive community, co-workers who stepped up to carry my workload, friends far and near who offered prayers and words of encouragement,and especially my family, who put up with me during a long and slow recovery. My wife is a saint.

Of course today is just another day. But it’s also a milestone, a marker along the road, reminding me how far I have come. And reminding me I have not walked this road alone.

My first two grandchildren were born this year. Both of them have fallen asleep in my arms several times. What a gift it is to meet them, to be alive to see them come into this world.

I’m grateful for the thousand kindnesses, and for ten years to begin to pay them forward to others who need similar care.

Vanessa cardui (painted lady) butterfly in my garden when I got home today.

Agapostemon bee on Aster flowers in the campus prairie restoration garden this morning.

Walked some ditches in an especially rural part of our very rural state last week, and filled my field coat pocket with seeds from native grasses and flowers. Looking forward to seeing what comes of those seeds in the gardens where I will scatter them. At least a dozen species came into view: liatris, prairie clover, small bluestem, and so many others. The prairie knows how to gladden a heart in late summer.

Two recent book purchases. Curiosity and wonder are not limited by geography. Philosophy springs up wherever minds are moved by wonder.

My teaching career began with ancient Mediterranean philosophy and American (U.S.) philosophy. In grad school I mentioned that to a German philosopher who laughed at me and said there was no philosophy in America.

It would have been more correct to say that he was not curious enough to ask what philosophy had rooted in the soil of this continent.

Over the decades of my university career I’ve enjoyed teaching Ancient Greek thought and American Transcendentalist and Pragmatist philosophies, but I’ve also loved developing new courses in the other philosophies of the Americas, and in classical philosophies of India, China, Japan, and beyond.

In recent years some colleagues and I have been reading all the African philosophers we can find. Naturally, we often run into problems of translation. But that makes every new book we can read a newfound treasure. The ideas are often old and deeply rooted, but new to my eyes. And what is new to me sparks wonder, curiosity, and new appreciation and admiration.

Pictured: Africana Philosophy by Peter Adamson and Chile Jeffers (Oxford University Press, 2025) and An African History of Africa, by Zeinab Badawi (Mariner Books, 2024) 📚🌍

Arrived at my office to find that one of my students had dropped off a copy of their handwritten notes. Friday’s class on the pre-Socratic philosophers and the origins of physics appears to have led to a weekend of deep thinking.

The notes are about matter, the concept of the void, the nature of mind, our place in the universe, and our responsibilities.

This is a great way to start the day.

J.B.S. Haldane famously quipped that if he learned anything about religion from his biological studies, it was that “God has an inordinate fondness for beetles.”

Yesterday I was thinking something similar about mollusks. They’re in the deep ocean and in my kitchen garden. Snails live in salt water, fresh water, and on the trees here on the prairie. Mollusks are everywhere, it seems.

When we encounter them we often flinch at their boneless, wet bodies.

Alternatively, when I say I study freshwater mussels, the first question many people ask me is “Can you eat them?”

We ecologists often speak more loftily of the “ecosystem services” that other species provide. Mollusks filter water, feed other species, and decompose other organisms.

It is a challenge to value our neighbors beyond the ways we can profit from their existence.

It’s a challenge, but I believe we are up to the challenge, and I think that if we try, we will find that rising to the challenge is good for all of us—and for our neighbors. 🐌🐚🦪

When we make education about employment, we neglect all the parts of life that are not employment.

Life is more than employment.

Interior view of the same shell as the previous sketch.

Last year I completed the Freshwater Mussel Workshop at the Museum of Biological Diversity at The Ohio State University. It was a great workshop that included lectures by experts, lots of time with specimens in the museum, and fieldwork in several nearby rivers.

There are a lot of species of mussels in North America, though, and many look alike to novices like me.

Much of my work in sketching mussels is about identification and gaining familiarity with each species.

I spend time on the river each week (don’t try this at home without appropriate permits, which I have) but sometimes I have to make a best guess when recording species I observe in my notebook. Later, sketching from photos and looking at my field measurements, I can usually make a more accurate determination of species. 🐚🦪🎨