Format
Reading Group
One text read together, section by section
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Reading group: Plato’s Phaedo, weeks 1–3
I'd like to read the Phaedo slowly with anyone who is interested. It is the dialogue I return to most, and it reads differently every decade. Proposed plan: Week 1: the frame…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies0 views -
Reading group: Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, “On Violence”
The Wretched of the Earth was published in 1961, the year Fanon died of leukaemia at thirty-six. The first chapter, "On Violence", is the most famous and the most misunderstood. Fanon argues…
Started by Sana Mir5 replies0 views -
Reading group: Iqbal’s Reconstruction, Lecture I (“Knowledge and Religious Experience”)
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam began as lectures Iqbal delivered in Madras, Hyderabad and Aligarh in 1928–29. They were published in Lahore in 1930, and the 1934 Oxford edition added…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies0 views -
Reading group: The Muqaddimah, the introduction on historians’ errors
Before the Muqaddimah proper begins, Ibn Khaldun explains why historians get things wrong. His list includes partisanship for opinions and schools, overconfidence in one's sources, failure to understand what was intended, mistaken…
Started by Youssef Benali4 replies0 views -
Reading group: the Mandukya Upanishad and Gaudapada’s Karika
The Māṇḍūkya is the shortest of the principal Upanishads, only twelve verses. It analyses the syllable AUM in terms of four "quarters" of the self: the waking state (vaiśvānara), the dream state…
Started by Arjun Iyer4 replies0 views -
Reading group: Ibn Rushd, The Decisive Treatise
The Faṣl al-Maqāl (c. 1178–80) is short and lucid. It's the best introduction to Ibn Rushd's thought, and it's written in the form of a legal opinion: what is the status, under…
Started by Layla Haddad4 replies0 views -
Reading group: Nagarjuna, Mulamadhyamakakarika chapter 1 (on conditions)
The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā opens with an examination of causal conditions (pratyaya). The first verse says that nothing arises from itself, from something else, from both, or without a cause. The chapter then examines…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies0 views -
Reading group: the Analects, Books 1–4
After a year with Kant I want to read an ethics built on something other than rules. The Analects (Lunyu) were compiled by Confucius's disciples and their students after his death, and…
Started by Henrike Vogel4 replies0 views -
Reading group: The Second Sex, Introduction and Part One (“Destiny”)
Let's begin The Second Sex (1949) with the Introduction and Part One of the first volume, the three chapters on biology, psychoanalysis and historical materialism. A note on translations. The 1953 English…
Started by Claire Dubois4 replies0 views -
Reading group: Kant’s “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784)
This short essay appeared in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in December 1784. It can be read in an evening, but it repays a week. Kant defines enlightenment as leaving behind a self-incurred immaturity,…
Started by Henrike Vogel3 replies0 views -
Reading group: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, propositions 1–3
A short, dense text, so let's go slowly. Use the Ogden translation (1922) or the Pears–McGuinness (1961). I'll quote proposition numbers, not pages. Plan: Week 1: 1–2.063. The world as the totality…
Started by Tomasz Wójcik3 replies0 views -
Reading group: Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
A short essay, easily read in two sittings. Seneca addresses it to Paulinus, who was in charge of Rome's grain supply. His thesis is that life is not short; we make it…
Started by Elin Lindqvist3 replies0 views -
Reading group: Suhrawardi’s Philosophy of Illumination, introduction and Part One
Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi (1154–1191) was executed in Aleppo, still young, after falling foul of the authorities. His Philosophy of Illumination (Hikmat al-Ishraq), completed in 1186, founded a school that shaped Persian philosophy…
Started by Reza Tehrani2 replies0 views -
Reading group: Tagore’s The Religion of Man (1931)
Rabindranath Tagore gave the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in 1930, and they were published the next year as The Religion of Man. It isn't a work of systematic philosophy but an extended…
Started by Kavya Menon2 replies0 views -
Reading group: Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974)
A short classic, first published in The Philosophical Review. Nagel argues that an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism.…
Started by Priya Raghavan1 reply0 views -
Reading group: Hobbes, Leviathan, chapters 13–17
These five chapters of Leviathan (1651) contain the core of Hobbes's political argument. Ch. 13: the natural condition of mankind. Rough equality, competition, distrust and glory lead to a war of every…
Started by Javier Morales1 reply0 views -
Reading group: Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
Thomas Kuhn's Structure is probably the most cited philosophy of science book ever. It describes science as moving through periods of "normal science" within a paradigm, the accumulation of anomalies, crisis, and…
Started by Emeka Nwosu0 replies1 view -
Reading group: Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950)
Turing's paper appeared in Mind in 1950, and it is far more playful and far less dated than its reputation suggests. He replaces the question "can machines think?" with the imitation game,…
Started by Pieter de Jong0 replies0 views