Concept tag
#reading-group
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Reading group: Gettier’s three pages, with Russell’s clock and Dharmottara’s mirage alongside
The thing I love most about Gettier's paper is that it works like a failing test case. One counterexample, cleanly stated, and a definition that looked settled stops compiling. It is also the shortest famous paper I know, so it is an…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Reading group: Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses, and whether ‘mind-only’ means idealism
Vasubandhu's Twenty Verses (Viṃśatikā), with his own short commentary, is the most compact argument for the Yogācāra claim that there is "only consciousness" (vijñaptimātra). It is also the text that most invites the question of whether Yogācāra is a form of idealism,…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
Reading group: Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), five weeks with Austin’s translation
Frege's Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884) is short, sharp and still the best place to see why someone would think numbers are objects. J. L. Austin's translation (1950) has German and English on facing pages, which helps if anyone reads German. I…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira6 replies -
Reading group: Kit Fine, ‘Vagueness, Truth and Logic’ (1975)
Vagueness is my obsession, and I've realised that many people know supervaluationism only from summaries. The original is better than the summaries. So: a slow read of Kit Fine's "Vagueness, Truth and Logic", first published in Synthese in 1975 and reprinted in…
Started by Oskar Nyberg4 replies -
Reading group: how grief becomes rasa, from Lollaṭa to Abhinavagupta
The rasa debate is one of the great sustained arguments in Indian philosophy, and it is usually presented in a single paragraph that flattens it. I propose we read it slowly, commentator by commentator. The main difficulty is that the commentaries of…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Reading group: Kripke, Naming and Necessity, Lectures I and II
Naming and Necessity began as three lectures given at Princeton in January 1970, transcribed with very light editing. It reads like a man talking, digressions and all, which makes it more fun than most philosophy and occasionally harder to pin down. Plan…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
Reading group: Frank Ramsey, “Truth and Probability” (written 1926)
Ramsey wrote “Truth and Probability” in 1926, when he was twenty-three, and it was published only after his death, in the 1931 collection of his papers edited by R. B. Braithwaite. It is the founding text of the idea that degrees of…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
Reading group: Mozi’s “Against Music” and Xunzi’s reply, with the Analects as prelude
The oldest sustained argument I know about whether art is morally good for us took place in warring-states China, and it deserves to be read in full rather than in a footnote. I propose three weeks. Week 1. The Analects on music.…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Reading group: Plato’s Theaetetus, the three definitions of knowledge
Every year I teach the Theaetetus to my liceo students in fragments, and every year I promise myself I'll read it whole again with adults. This is that promise. It is the founding text of epistemology and also one of Plato's most…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Reading group: al-Bīrūnī’s India, the preface and the chapter on why understanding is hard
Around 1030 the scholar al-Bīrūnī completed a book usually known in English as India (or Alberuni's India). He had learned Sanskrit, read Indian works with pandits, and set out to describe Indian religion, philosophy and science as their adherents understood them. It…
Started by Layla Sfeir5 replies -
Reading group: Plato’s Gorgias in five weeks, one interlocutor at a time
I teach theology at a secondary school in Thessaloniki, and every year a student asks whether politicians are "just good at talking". I always want to hand them the Gorgias, and I have never read it closely with adults. Let's do that.…
Started by Nikos Theodoridis5 replies -
Reading group: Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, one section a week for six weeks
"Two Dogmas of Empiricism" first appeared in The Philosophical Review in 1951 and was reprinted, revised, in From a Logical Point of View (1953). It is perhaps the most cited paper in twentieth-century analytic philosophy, and many people who cite it have…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
Reading group: Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, over four weeks
"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" is the essay where the phrase "the myth of the given" comes from. It is famous, hard and shorter than its reputation. I would like to read it slowly with whoever is willing. Text. The Harvard…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Reading group: Sen’s ‘Rational Fools’ and the problem of commitment
Amartya Sen's essay "Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory" appeared in Philosophy & Public Affairs in 1977 and is reprinted in his Choice, Welfare and Measurement. It's about thirty pages and it has been rattling around my…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Reading group: David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (1986), chapters 1–4
Most people meet modal realism as a punchline: the man who believed every possible world is as real as ours. I want to read the book properly, because the argument is far better than its reputation, and because I think most of…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Reading group: Pascal’s wager fragment and the pages around it, in French and English
I translate for a living, and Pascal is one of the writers whose sentences I envy most. The wager is usually taught as a three-line argument in a table. In the Pensées it is a long, broken, urgent fragment, and the context…
Started by Claire Dubois6 replies -
Reading group: Tarski’s “The Semantic Conception of Truth” (1944) in three sittings
Tarski's technical work on truth is hard going, but in 1944 he wrote a non-technical paper for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research that explains the ideas for philosophers. It is clear, polemical in places, and only thirty-odd pages. I propose we read it…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Reading group: Quine’s ‘On What There Is’, slowly, in three sittings
"On What There Is" first appeared in the Review of Metaphysics in 1948 and opens From a Logical Point of View (1953). It is short, funny in places, and much quoted by people who have not read it. I propose we read…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies