Concept tag
#reading-group
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Reading group: Mencius and Gaozi on human nature (6A1–6A6), in one sitting
A short one, for anyone who wants a single sitting rather than a month. The first six sections of Mencius Book 6A are a debate with Gaozi about human nature, and they are some of the best arguments-by-image in any tradition. What…
Started by The Editors1 reply -
Reading group: Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, three short chapters a week
Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) is short, about seventy pages, in twelve chapters. I have listened to people talk about it in lectures for years and never read it properly. So I propose four weeks, three chapters a week, starting…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu1 reply -
Reading group: Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle, one set of dwelling places a week
I would like to read Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle (1577) together over four weeks, starting Monday 19 October. It is short, vivid and much more argumentative than its reputation. Teresa wrote it for the nuns of her order, at the request…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska4 replies -
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 Bilal Rashid7 replies -
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 replies -
Reading group: Epictetus, Discourses II.19, where the Master Argument meets a bus driver
Epictetus, as people here know by now, 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 one chapter of his Discourses (the lectures his…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 replies -
Reading group: Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), chapter one
The question I keep asking my effective altruism friends is what “ought” means in “you ought to give”. Someone told me to read Mackie before I asked again. So here is a reading group, partly so I do not do it alone.…
Started by Ethan Mercer5 replies -
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 replies -
Reading group: Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, starting with ‘Nature and Significance of Play’
Huizinga has sat unread on my shelf for too long, and I'd like company to finally read him. Homo Ludens (1938) argues that play is older than culture, since animals play without anyone teaching them, and that law, war, poetry, philosophy and…
Started by Liu Mingqiao5 replies -
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 replies -
Reading group: Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste, aphorisms and first meditations
I 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 and magistrate, briefly an exile…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
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 replies -
Reading group: Kant’s Groundwork, Section I, the good will and the honest shopkeeper
Most readers skip straight to the formulas of the categorical imperative, and for years so did I. I want to read the beginning properly: Section I of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), where Kant starts from what he calls…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies -
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 replies -
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 replies -
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 Kilbride6 replies -
Reading group: G. A. Cohen’s Why Not Socialism?, a short book for a long argument
The port doesn't leave me time for long books during the season, so I was glad to find this one: G. A. Cohen's Why Not Socialism? (2009), well under a hundred pages. Cohen asks us to imagine a camping trip. A group…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
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 replies -
Reading group: Christine de Pizan and Mary Astell, two arguments from reason three centuries apart
Women who claimed the right to think in earlier centuries kept reaching for the same tool against their opponents: argument from the opponents' own premises. I'd like to read two of them side by side. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the…
Started by Valentina Ríos5 replies -
Reading group: Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument, starting from the middle
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 of Argument (1958; the Cambridge updated edition…
Started by Sam Ellery6 replies -
Reading group: Aristotle’s Poetics as a craft manual, with the Nāṭyaśāstra beside it
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 medicine, carpentry, navigation and poetry alike, and the Poetics is less aesthetics than…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
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 replies -
Reading group: Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes), twelve chapters in six weeks
Every autumn Kohelet is read in synagogue on the Sabbath of Sukkot, and every year someone asks 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 Eliana Halpern5 replies -
Reading group: Bazin’s What Is Cinema?, starting with ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’
A friend sent me André Bazin's essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1945), and it begins with my trade: Egyptian mummies, portraits, the old human wish to preserve a being against time. Bazin calls it a ‘mummy complex’ at the origin…
Started by Chiara Bellandi5 replies -
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 replies -
Reading group: Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, three essays
Sitting in job centres and taking notes, as I often do, I've realised I'm doing amateur ethnography without having read the ethnographers properly, so I'm proposing three essays from Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Week 1: ‘Thick Description: Toward an…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt6 replies -
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 replies -
Reading group: Philip Anderson, “More Is Different” (Science, 1972)
Anderson's essay is about exactly the phenomena that drew me into physics as a student. It is four pages long, written by a physicist who later won the Nobel Prize, and it has probably done more to shape physicists' attitudes to reductionism…
Started by Lars Eriksen6 replies -
Reading group: Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (1998)
The question I'm asked most by students at the library 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. Dimitri Gutas's short book…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies -
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 replies