Concept tag
#reading-group
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Reading group: Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (2001), from plants and wolves to people
I coached rugby for thirty years, and every season there was one boy who never tackled. He was fast, he scored, and the team was worse for having him. I never had the words for what was wrong with him beyond “he's…
Started by Gerrit Venter0 replies78 views -
Reading group: Saadia Gaon’s Book of Beliefs and Opinions, starting with the roots of knowledge
I teach Jewish thought to adults in Jerusalem, and many of my students arrive convinced that philosophy and religion are enemies. My favourite answer is a tenth-century one. Saadia Gaon (882–942) was born in Egypt and became head of the academy at…
Started by Miriam Adler0 replies104 views -
Reading group: al-Ghazālī’s Deliverance from Error, the chapters on doubt
Al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl, usually translated Deliverance from Error, is short enough to read in an evening and deep enough to read for a lifetime. I would like to read the first part, the account of his doubt, slowly over three weeks with…
Started by Imam Bilal Hussain7 replies252 views -
Reading group for complete beginners: Plato’s Apology, slowly, in three sittings
Several newcomers have asked where to start, and my answer is always the same: Plato's Apology. It's short (an evening's reading), it's a real trial (Athens, 399 BCE), and it's the founding scene of philosophy as a way of life. Socrates, accused…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies234 views -
Reading group: Epictetus, Discourses II.19, where the Master Argument meets a bus driver
I drive the 413 route across Ankara and listen to philosophy lectures between stops. Epictetus is my favourite. Last month a lecture mentioned that the only clear report we have of the "Master Argument" of Diodorus Cronus is at the start of…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 replies250 views -
Reading group: Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), chapter one
I am the resident sceptic in my university's effective altruism group, and the question I keep asking them is what “ought” means in “you ought to give”. Someone told me to read Mackie before I asked again. So here is a reading…
Started by Ethan Mercer5 replies244 views -
Reading group: Bergson’s Laughter (1900), one chapter a fortnight
Bergson's Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic is short, odd and still the most useful thing I've read as a working comic. His idea is that we laugh at ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’: the moment a person…
Started by Gemma Pritchard5 replies258 views -
Reading group: Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, starting with ‘Nature and Significance of Play’
My father kept Zhuangzi on his shelf unread for forty years. I am trying not to do the same with Huizinga, so I'd like company. Homo Ludens (1938) argues that play is older than culture, since animals play without anyone teaching them,…
Started by Liu Jianguo5 replies187 views -
Reading group: J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words
Austin gave these as the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1955, and they were published after his death, in 1962, from his notes. Twelve short lectures. It is one of the most readable classics in philosophy of language, and it has…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies222 views -
Reading group: Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste, aphorisms and first meditations
I translate for a living and grew up an hour from Belley, where Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was born, so this book has followed me around. Physiologie du goût appeared in 1825, a couple of months before he died. He was a lawyer…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies114 views -
Reading group: the first book of the Nyāya Sūtra with Vātsyāyana’s commentary
The Nyāya Sūtra, traditionally attributed to Gautama Akṣapāda and dated around the second century CE in its current form, is the root text of the school that made Indian logic and debate into a system. About three centuries later Vātsyāyana wrote the…
Started by Vikram Sethi6 replies207 views -
Reading group: Kant’s Groundwork, Section I, the good will and the honest shopkeeper
I taught ethics at a Gymnasium for many years and always skipped to the formulas of the categorical imperative. Now, retired, I want to read the beginning properly: Section I of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), where Kant starts…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies182 views -
Reading group: Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982), read forty years on
In a Different Voice is one of the most cited books in the history of ethics and one of the most misremembered. Gilligan was a psychologist, not a philosopher, and the book began as a response to Lawrence Kohlberg's scale of moral…
Started by Femke Bosman6 replies150 views -
Reading group: Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Part One on the body
I've read Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) in French more times than I can count, and I'd like to read the first part with people who come to it from bodies rather than from books: dancers, players, nurses, craftspeople. Translation: Donald Landes's…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies200 views -
Reading group: Anselm’s Proslogion 2–4, with Gaunilo’s reply and Anselm’s answer
I am a philosophy and theology student and I have heard the ontological argument "refuted" in three different modules without ever reading it properly. Proposal: we read it slowly, together with the objection that came immediately and Anselm's own answer to it.…
Started by Aoife Brennan6 replies223 views -
Reading group: G. A. Cohen’s Why Not Socialism?, a short book for a long argument
I operate a gantry crane at the container port in Marseille and I'm a union delegate. I don't have time for long books during the season, so I was glad to find this one: G. A. Cohen's Why Not Socialism? (2009), well…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies233 views -
Reading group: Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, one dialogue at a time
George Berkeley was born in County Kilkenny, studied at Trinity College Dublin, and spent the last part of his life as Bishop of Cloyne, about half an hour from where I'm writing. I've always felt we in Cork should know him better…
Started by Siobhán Keane5 replies150 views -
Reading group: Christine de Pizan and Mary Astell, two arguments from reason three centuries apart
My thesis is on Sor Juana, and I keep finding that women who claimed the right to think in earlier centuries used the same tool against their opponents: argument from the opponents' own premises. I'd like to read two of them side…
Started by Valentina Ríos5 replies293 views -
Reading group: Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument, starting from the middle
I coach high-school debate in Portland, and the Toulmin layout (claim, grounds, warrant, backing, qualifier, rebuttal) is on every debate camp handout in the country. Almost nobody has read the book it comes from. Let's fix that. Text. Stephen Toulmin, The Uses…
Started by Sam Ellery6 replies168 views -
Reading group: Aristotle’s Poetics as a craft manual, with the Nāṭyaśāstra beside it
I'm a poet and a literature postgraduate in Kochi, new to formal philosophy. I've always read the Poetics as "Aristotle's theory of art". Recently I came across the argument that this is a mistranslation of the whole enterprise: the Greek technē covered…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies198 views -
Reading group: Porphyry’s Isagoge and the three questions he refused to answer
Porphyry wrote the Isagoge, a short "Introduction" to Aristotle's Categories, in the late third century. In the opening lines he raises three questions about genera and species, and then declines to answer them because they need a deeper inquiry: Do they subsist,…
Started by Siobhán Keane6 replies138 views -
Reading group: Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes), twelve chapters in six weeks
Every autumn my congregation reads Kohelet on the Sabbath of Sukkot, and every year someone asks me afterward how such a book got into the Bible. It's a fair question. The rabbis asked it too. The Mishnah records a dispute over whether…
Started by Rabbi Eliana Gutman5 replies118 views -
Reading group: Bazin’s What Is Cinema?, starting with ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’
I restore Renaissance panel paintings, which means every day I decide how much of the past to bring back and how much to leave alone. A friend sent me André Bazin's essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1945), and it begins…
Started by Chiara Bellandi5 replies194 views -
Reading group: Wimsatt and Beardsley, then Barthes, then Hirsch on who owns a text’s meaning
My after-school reading circle keeps asking whether a story means what the writer meant, so I am going to read the three classic essays properly, and I would love company here. Week 1. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy"…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies216 views -
Reading group: Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, three essays
My doctorate is on recognition theory and the welfare state, which in practice means sitting in job centres taking notes. I've realised I'm doing ethnography without having read the ethnographers properly, so I'm proposing three essays from Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt6 replies208 views -
Reading group: William James, The Principles of Psychology, three chapters
William James published The Principles of Psychology in 1890, after twelve years of work. It is two huge volumes, and nobody should read it straight through. But three chapters are among the best things written about the mind, and they read like…
Started by Dana Whitfield5 replies292 views -
Reading group: Philip Anderson, “More Is Different” (Science, 1972)
I work on quantum many-body systems, which means I spend my days on exactly the phenomena Anderson's essay is about. It is four pages long, written by a physicist who later won the Nobel Prize, and it has probably done more to…
Started by Lars Eriksen6 replies316 views -
Reading group: Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (1998)
I'm a university librarian in Alexandria, and the question I'm asked most by students is some version of "why did the Abbasids translate the Greeks?" The usual answers are curiosity, or the generosity of an enlightened caliph, or the House of Wisdom.…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies193 views -
Reading group: the Nyāya-sūtra on debate, from the sixteen categories to the points of defeat
Several threads here have touched on the Nyāya distinction between vāda, jalpa and vitaṇḍā. I'd like to read the primary text together, since most of us (me included, honestly) know it through summaries. Text. The Nyāya-sūtra attributed to Gautama (Akṣapāda), with Vātsyāyana's…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies215 views -
Reading group: Émilie du Châtelet’s Foundations of Physics, the opening chapters
I work on Sor Juana and women in early modern philosophy, and I keep meeting Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749) in footnotes as Voltaire's companion and as the translator of Newton's Principia into French. Both true, and both shrink her. Her own book,…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 replies206 views