All topics
-
Reading group: Sima Qian’s postface and his letter to Ren An
My students meet Sima Qian as a name in a list of Han dynasty achievements. I would like to read him properly, as someone who thought hard about what a historian is for. The plan, three weeks: Week 1. The postface to…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Reading group: Eva Kittay’s Love’s Labor and the dependency critique of Rawls
Eva Kittay's Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (1999) is one of the books that turned care ethics from a set of intuitions into a challenge to political philosophy. I have dipped into parts of it for years, but I've…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
Reading group: Émilie du Châtelet’s Foundations of Physics, the opening chapters
Reading women in early modern philosophy, 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, the Institutions de physique (1740), is…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 replies -
Reading group: Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” and James’s “The Will to Believe” side by side
These two essays are a classic pairing and they are both short, so I'd like to read them together over four weeks. The question they share is the one at the center of debates about rationality: should you believe only what the…
Started by Dana Whitfield6 replies -
Reading group: Gould and Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco” (1979)
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin's paper, published in 1979 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, is one of the few biology papers whose title became a philosophical term. Its target is what they called the adaptationist programme: the habit of…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
Reading group: Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Parts I and III
Having started with Hume, I have moved on to Adam Smith, working through the Scottish Enlightenment in local order. Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments first appeared in 1759 and he kept revising it until the sixth edition of 1790, the year he…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies -
Reading group: al-Mawardi’s Ordinances of Government, on the conditions of legitimate rule
Al-Mawardi (972–1058) was a Shafi'i jurist and judge in Baghdad at a strange moment: the Abbasid caliph was the recognised head of the community, while real military power in the city belonged for most of his life to the Buyid emirs. His…
Started by Layla Sfeir5 replies -
Reading group: the chariot in the Milindapañha, read beside Hume’s “Of personal identity”
My working rule is that comparisons should be made text against text, not summary against summary. Here is a small experiment: read the most famous Buddhist passage on the self and the most famous Western one side by side, slowly, and see…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
Reading group: Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove, four weeks through al-Andalus
Córdoba is the city where Ibn Hazm was born in 994 and which he watched being torn apart in the civil wars of his youth. Visitors know Ibn Rushd and Maimonides; almost nobody knows that the same city produced one of the…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto5 replies -
Reading group: Hume’s Treatise on reason, passion and the source of moral distinctions
I have finally started reading Hume properly in retirement, and I would like company for the passages that underlie most modern arguments about moral motivation. Three short sections of A Treatise of Human Nature, one a week: Week 1. Book 2, Part…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Reading group: van Fraassen’s The Scientific Image, on realism and explanation
The Scientific Image (1980) is the book that made anti-realism respectable again after a period when scientific realism seemed to have won. It's short, dense and often witty. I'd like to read the parts that matter most for the realism debate. Plan,…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
Reading group: William James’s Varieties, from ‘Religion and Neurology’ to the mysticism lectures
James gave the Gifford Lectures here in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, and they became The Varieties of Religious Experience. I have walked past the building for decades without reading the book, which seems a poor show for someone who spent his…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies -
Reading group: Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, the first two chapters
Jonas published Das Prinzip Verantwortung in 1979 and the English version, which he prepared with David Herr, came out in 1984 as The Imperative of Responsibility. I taught ethics for years without reading it properly, and now that I have time I…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
Reading group: Rousseau’s Social Contract in four weeks, in French and English
Every year my terminale students in Dakar meet Rousseau on the syllabus, and every year I find something new in Du contrat social (1762). I'd like to read it slowly with people who will argue. Texts. I'll read the French. For English…
Started by Khady Sène6 replies -
Reading group: Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method, chapters 1 to 3
In my reading class at the prison, one of the men asked whether crime is “just normal” in every society. I said I would find out who had argued that. It turns out Durkheim did, in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895),…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma4 replies -
Reading group: Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), five chapters over five weeks
The Souls of Black Folk is the book I keep pushing onto the philosophy syllabus, because it was doing philosophy all along. Du Bois wrote much of it in my city, at Atlanta University. The ‘Forethought’ announces that the problem of the…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
Reading group: Augustine’s Confessions Book X, the books of memory, in Chadwick’s translation
There are already threads here on Book XI (time) and Book IV (the death of a friend), so I'd like to propose Book X, which sits between them and which I think is the most philosophical book of the Confessions. Having told…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 replies -
Reading group: Weitz, Danto and Dickie on whether art can be defined
My students keep asking "but who decides what counts as art?", and I'd like to read the classic papers properly before I try to answer. Join me. Plan (three weeks): Week 1: Morris Weitz, "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics" (1956), with…
Started by Keisha Monroe4 replies -
Reading group: Searle’s “Minds, Brains, and Programs” with the replies, over three weeks
The Chinese Room is cited constantly and read rarely, and most people who have opinions on it have only met the thought experiment, not the paper. So let's read it properly. Text: John Searle, "Minds, Brains, and Programs", Behavioral and Brain Sciences…
Started by Oskar Nyberg6 replies -
Reading group: Mencius Book 1, the conversations with the kings
Every year I tell my students that Mencius was a political philosopher before he was a theorist of human nature. They don't believe me, because the textbook only gives them the child at the well. So I'd like to read the opening…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
Reading group: McTaggart’s ‘The Unreality of Time’ and Prior’s ‘Thank Goodness That’s Over’
I spend most of my free time on modal and many-valued logics, and I owe a great deal to Arthur Prior, who founded tense logic partly because he thought the A-series was real and needed a logic of its own. So I…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
Reading group: the Elisabeth–Descartes letters of 1643, slowly
I have spent years reading Sor Juana, and one of the things she keeps teaching me is how much philosophy by women survives only in letters, prefaces and replies. So I would like to read the most famous case in early modern…
Started by Valentina Ríos6 replies -
Reading group: the Hippocratic Oath and the ethical writings around it, then and now
Everyone cites the Hippocratic Oath; few have read it, and fewer have read the other ethical texts in the Hippocratic collection. I'd like to read them with doctors, nurses and anyone curious, and then compare them with a modern code. Texts. The…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Reading group: A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), chapters 1, 2, 4 and 6
Every year a student asks me whether mathematics "says anything about the world". Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic gives the boldest answer I know (no, it is all tautology) and the boldest dismissal of metaphysics. He was in his mid-twenties when he…
Started by Vikram Sethi6 replies -
Reading group: Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful, chapter by chapter
Eduard Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) is short, polemical and still the book every philosopher of music has to answer. I teach music theory and play the organ, and I have argued with it for twenty years without reading it straight through with…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies -
Reading group: the Nāṭyaśāstra’s chapters on rasa and bhāva
Everyone in my literature classes mentions rasa, almost nobody has read the chapters where the theory is actually set out. I'd like to read them with company, and with people who know more Sanskrit than I do. Translation: Manomohan Ghosh's English translation…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Reading group: the Mozi’s three chapters on impartial caring (jian’ai), one a week
The later Mohist canons get most of my attention, but I keep returning to the core chapters, the three on jian'ai, usually translated as “universal love” or, better, “impartial caring”. They are short, vigorous and argumentative, and they make the case that…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
Reading group: Gadamer’s Truth and Method, Part Two, on prejudice and the fusion of horizons
I taught German literature for thirty years without ever reading Wahrheit und Methode (1960) from cover to cover, which is a confession. I would like to read the central part of it slowly with anyone willing. I propose the second part, the…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
Reading group: Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought, Part One, over four weeks
Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001) is long, so I suggest we read only Part One, which sets out the theory that the rest of the book applies to compassion and love. The book opens with Nussbaum's own…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
Reading group: Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological
Georges Canguilhem's essay began as his medical thesis in 1943, written while he was also active in the Resistance, and was reissued in 1966 with a second part, "New Reflections". It is one of the founding texts of the philosophy of medicine,…
Started by Claire Dubois4 replies