About us
This is a group for people who create and consume philosophy. Members will have the opportunity to read and discuss each others' work, as well as texts from pre-established philosophers. Each meeting will be partially structured, with chosen topics/texts from a rotating member; and partially un-structured, with free-form discussion.
Featured event
(In Person Event): Plato on the Love of Beauty and Philosophy
(This is an in person event. An online event is linked here.) Philosophy and the aesthetic way of life have always had an interesting and productive dialogue. Plato, legend has it, originally wanted to be playwright, and the platonic dialogue is of course, an evolution out of dramatic forms. Confucius believed that poetry and music bookended the moral education of a human being. Schopenhauer likewise put music up in the highest pedestal and his own philosophical analysis of it inspired elements of the mature style of Wagner, who likewise inspired the writings and aspirations of the early Nietzsche. Some great poets have made significant contributions to philosophy. Schiller wrote a significant philosophical treatise, and Holderlin’s influence on Hegel is well documented. In the 20th century there have been underappreciated examples of philosophical novelists, Robert Musil and Herman broch being too prominent examples, but also Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse. The fact that Dante integrated philosophy and theology into his poetry is equally well known, and many modern poets have also been philosophy students.
This raises the question about the relationship of philosophy to aesthetics, to the arts and to fascination we have with beauty.
If we wish to understand this issue in its fullness, it may be useful to address it at its point of origin, at the moment where the question of this relationship first to arose in written form in culture, and this is to be found In the works of Plato.
Plato's complicated and conflicted relationship with aesthetics, beginning with his own renunciation of dramatic aspirations, seems to arise from the fundamental concern with appearance and reality that drives much of the Platonic corpus.
Plato was born into a deeply competitive, contentious and fractious society, and one in which opinions and questions of good and bad were profoundly in question, but also one that was deeply steeped in a poetic tradition that was kept alive in annual religious festivals. In many ways, his work emerges out of a sense of the failure of poetry to provide a moral education to citizenry. And he likewise saw a relationship between the poetic education of the average citizen and the rhetorical modes of manipulation typical of Athenian politicians.
For Plato, philosophy must go beyond such rhetorical manipulation of plausibilities and particulars, in which judgment is governed by our emotional reaction to concrete situations, and seek to rise to knowledge of the general structure of reality as it is in itself. This entails, of course, a rational, disciplined inquiry into the general nature of things, and poetry and the other imitative arts, in training our mind to focus on particulars and our emotional and instictinve reaction to particulars, are a distraction from this ultimate moral goal.
But despite these worries about the moral impact of the arts, Plato’s negative attitudes towards imitation was counterbalanced by his fascination with the experience of beauty and his belief in its capacity to direct us away from an obsession with particulars towards the universal and the eternal. In seeing the function of beauty in terms of rising our minds to such a conception of the universal and thh eternal, Plato laid down the building blocks of a way of thinking about the beautiful and its relationship to both truth and goodness, that has haunted Western speculation about the role of beauty in our lives ever since.
This positive view of beauty and its significance in human life is brought out in two platonic dialogues ostensibly focused on the topic of love, but more concerned with love as an emotionally oriented practice towards beauty that, when practiced properly, both reminds us of, and facilitates contact with the eternal.
In this meetup We will explore this platonic vision of aesthetics through meditation on the Symposium, the iconic text in which this vision is worked out, supplemented by the famous speech in the Phaedrus concerning the transcendent power latent in love and the criticisms of poetry and art in the Republic.
Readings are linked here
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1rmtOw1H_sfWDRtS-I0UCO_v0ole9K6bE?usp=sharing
Upcoming events
64
Pleasure and Flourishing — Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
·OnlineOnlineJuly 5 - Chapters 1 through 3 will cover the prevailing opinions about pleasure: On the one hand, (1) pleasure is the supreme good. All things see pleasure and shun pain, and seek pleasure as an end in itself. On the other hand, (2) no pleasure is good. What all things seek is not necessarily good; the opposite of pain may also be bad (or at least neutral); some pleasures are disgraceful.
.
Which opinion, if any, is Aristotle's own view about pleasure?
.
----
.
We are live-reading and discussing Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, book X, which is about pleasure and human flourishing.
.
The prerequisite to this book is our answering for ourselves these questions from the prior books, to which we will briefly review:
.
1. What is the full-time job of being a human being?
2. What is the systematic structure of the human potential?
3. What is a virtue of character {ēthikē aretē}?
4. How does one come to acquire any of it? (E.g. pride, ambition, bravery, gentlemanliness, generosity, candor, fairness, friendliness, …)
5. How does one formulate right desires?
6. How is one to recover from being bad to becoming a good person?
7. What is entailed in and what is required of being a friend?
.
.
The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows.5 attendees
Aristotle’s Dialectic — Topics I — Live-Reading
·OnlineOnlineJuly 7 - We are reading the big chapter, chapter 15, of Topics, Book I, at Bekker lines 106a1–107b37. In chapter 14 we found Aristotle discussing the first of four tools by means of which deductions come about: obtaining premises. Chapter 15 will be on the second tool: in how many ways things are said. We will also review chapters 9 and 12 on induction.
.
We are using the translation by Robin Smith: Topics Books I & VIII (Oxford University Press, 1997). We will read from page 13 through page 17.
.
Smith in his helpful "Introduction" forewarns us that because we don't know what we are ignorant of, we barbarians don't know yet what dialectic is or why we need it. So there will be learning pain involved as we bootstrap ourselves toward knowing and practicing what we will learn. The payoff will be tremendous and will be commensurate with personal effort.
.
A new reading adventure beckons you and your willpower. Join us.
.
----
.
Organon means "instrument," as in, instrument for thought and speech. The term was given by ancient commentators to a group of Aristotle's treatises comprising his logical works.Organon
|-- Categories ---- 2023.02.28
|-- On Interpretation ---- 2023.12.12
|-- Topics ---- 2025.10.21
|-- Sophistical Refutations
|-- Rhetoric*
|-- Prior Analytics
|-- Posterior Analytics(* Robin Smith, author of SEP's 2022 entry "Aristotle's Logic," argues that Rhetoric should be part of the Organon.)
Whenever we do any human thing, we can either do it well or do it poorly. With instruments, we can do things either better, faster, and more; or worse, slower, and less. That is, with instruments they either augment or diminish our doings.
Do thinking and speaking (and writing and listening) require instruments? Yes. We do need physical instruments like microphones, megaphones, pens, papers, computers. But we also need mental instruments: grammar, vocabulary words, evidence-gathering techniques, big-picture integration methods, persuasion strategies. Thinking while sitting meditatively all day in a lotus position doesn't require much instrumentation of any kind, but thinking and speaking well in the sense of project planning, problem-solving, negotiating, arguing, deliberating--that is, the active doings in the world (whether romantic, social, commercial, or political)--do require well-honed mental instruments. That's the Organon in a nutshell.
Are you an up-and-coming human being, a doer, go-getter, achiever, or at least you're choosing to become one? You need to wield the Organon.
Join us.
1 attendeePleasure and Flourishing — Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
·OnlineOnlineWe are live-reading and discussing Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, book X, which is about pleasure and human flourishing.
.
The prerequisite to this book is our answering for ourselves these questions from the prior books, to which we will briefly review:
.
1. What is the full-time job of being a human being?
2. What is the systematic structure of the human potential?
3. What is a virtue of character {ēthikē aretē}?
4. How does one come to acquire any of it? (E.g. pride, ambition, bravery, gentlemanliness, generosity, candor, fairness, friendliness, …)
5. How does one formulate right desires?
6. How is one to recover from being bad to becoming a good person?
7. What is entailed in and what is required of being a friend?
.
.
The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows.1 attendeeAristotle’s Dialectic — Topics I — Live-Reading
·OnlineOnlineOrganon means "instrument," as in, instrument for thought and speech. The term was given by ancient commentators to a group of Aristotle's treatises comprising his logical works.
Organon
|-- Categories ---- 2023.02.28
|-- On Interpretation ---- 2023.12.12
|-- Topics ---- 2025.10.21
|-- Sophistical Refutations
|-- Rhetoric*
|-- Prior Analytics
|-- Posterior Analytics(* Robin Smith, author of SEP's 2022 entry "Aristotle's Logic," argues that Rhetoric should be part of the Organon.)
Whenever we do any human thing, we can either do it well or do it poorly. With instruments, we can do things either better, faster, and more; or worse, slower, and less. That is, with instruments they either augment or diminish our doings.
Do thinking and speaking (and writing and listening) require instruments? Yes. We do need physical instruments like microphones, megaphones, pens, papers, computers. But we also need mental instruments: grammar, vocabulary words, evidence-gathering techniques, big-picture integration methods, persuasion strategies. Thinking while sitting meditatively all day in a lotus position doesn't require much instrumentation of any kind, but thinking and speaking well in the sense of project planning, problem-solving, negotiating, arguing, deliberating--that is, the active doings in the world (whether romantic, social, commercial, or political)--do require well-honed mental instruments. That's the Organon in a nutshell.
Are you an up-and-coming human being, a doer, go-getter, achiever, or at least you're choosing to become one? You need to wield the Organon.
Join us.
1 attendee
Past events
900
