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Reading group: Nāgārjuna on causes and conditions, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 1, 20 and 24
The Nyāya–Madhyamaka debates all lead back to the opening of Nāgārjuna's Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, so I'd like to read three chapters of it together. Translation. Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (1995), which has the verses…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Reading group: Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan as a book about learning without teachers
I have spent years with Hayy ibn Yaqzan, and I would love company for a slow reading with one question in mind: what does this book think a teacher is for? Ibn Tufayl, writing in twelfth-century al-Andalus, imagines a child raised on…
Started by Hessa Al Mazrouei6 replies -
Reading group: Nāgasena’s chariot and flame in the Questions of King Milinda
The Milindapañha, the Questions of King Milinda, is a dialogue between a king usually identified with the Indo-Greek ruler Menander and a monk called Nāgasena. It is a composite text that grew over centuries, so I read Nāgasena as a literary interlocutor…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara6 replies -
Reading group: al-Ghazālī and Ibn Rushd on whether the world had a beginning
The longest chapter of al-Ghazālī's Incoherence of the Philosophers is the first, on the philosophers' doctrine that the world is eternal. Nearly a century later Ibn Rushd answered it, line by line, in The Incoherence of the Incoherence. I have read summaries…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam6 replies -
Reading group: Nāgārjuna’s Middle Verses, chapter 24, where emptiness is accused of nihilism
If you want to know what Nāgārjuna means by emptiness, the best place to look is the chapter where he is accused of destroying everything. Chapter 24 of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā opens with an opponent's objection: if all things are empty, nothing arises…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
Reading group: aboutness from Brentano to Husserl, with Xuanzang alongside
Yogācāra and Husserl are two traditions that share more vocabulary than either admits and differ more than enthusiasts claim. I propose a three-week reading on intentionality, the property of mental states of being about something, with one Buddhist text set beside the…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
Reading group: Plotinus, “On Beauty” (Ennead I.6), the treatise he is said to have written first
I work in a library in Alexandria, and Plotinus studied philosophy here with Ammonius Saccas before he moved to Rome. That is reason enough for me to propose reading him together. "On Beauty" is the obvious place to start. It is short,…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies -
Reading group: Aristotle’s Metaphysics Gamma on the firmest principle
Several recent threads keep coming back to Aristotle's defence of the principle of non-contradiction, usually second-hand. Let's read it. It's short and much stranger than its reputation. Text: Metaphysics Book Gamma (IV), chapters 3 to 7. Ross's translation is freely available; Christopher…
Started by Nikos Theodoridis5 replies -
Reading group: Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, about a hundred remarks a week
On Certainty consists of notes Wittgenstein wrote in the last year and a half of his life, largely provoked by G. E. Moore's papers defending common sense against scepticism. It was published in 1969, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G.…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
Reading group: Longinus, On the Sublime, in four sittings
Before Burke and Kant there was a short Greek treatise, probably from the first century CE, by an author we do not really know. The manuscript names "Dionysius or Longinus", and scholars have argued about who wrote it and when ever since.…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Reading group: Miskawayh, The Refinement of Character, on happiness
I keep a secondhand bookshop off Mutanabbi Street, and the book I most often press on young customers who say they want philosophy is Miskawayh's Tahdhīb al-akhlāq, The Refinement of Character. Miskawayh (c. 932–1030) worked as a librarian and treasurer in the…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
Reading group: al-Ghazālī on the remembrance of death, the last book of the Revival
The book I return to most often when I visit the sick is the fortieth and final book of al-Ghazālī's Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, the Revival of the Religious Sciences: Kitāb dhikr al-mawt wa-mā baʿdahu, the book of the remembrance of death and…
Started by Bilal Rashid5 replies -
Reading group: Prior Analytics I.1–7, slowly, with a Nyāya inference on the table
Everyone says Aristotle invented formal logic, and I realise I have never read the Prior Analytics closely in company. So here is a proposal: the first seven chapters of Book I, over five weeks, which is where the whole assertoric system is…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies -
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: Dummett’s ‘The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic’
I keep noticing that people defend intuitionistic logic for two very different reasons. Brouwer's reason was a picture of mathematics as mental construction. Dummett's reason, in his 1973 paper "The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic", was a theory of meaning. I'd like…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira5 replies -
Reading group: Feyerabend’s Against Method, with the Galileo chapters at the centre
Anyone who reads psychoanalysis learns early that Popper used Freud as his model of a theory that explains everything and therefore says nothing. So I've always had a soft spot for Feyerabend, who argued that no methodological rule survives contact with the…
Started by Martín Iriarte5 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: Benacerraf’s “What Numbers Could Not Be” and “Mathematical Truth”
Paul Benacerraf wrote two short papers that between them set the agenda for half a century of philosophy of mathematics. Both are in the Benacerraf and Putnam anthology Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings, and both are easy to find. Plan, three weeks:…
Started by Derek Hollis5 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: Russell’s ‘On Denoting’ (1905), and the puzzle of the hare’s horn
Bertrand Russell's "On Denoting", published in Mind in 1905, has been called a paradigm of philosophy, and it is also short. It is the best example I know of predicate logic being turned on ordinary language, so I'd like to read it…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 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: Miskawayh’s Refinement of Character, and Tusi’s Persian reworking of it
I'd like to read Miskawayh's Tahdhib al-Akhlaq together over the next couple of months. It is one of the most systematic works of philosophical ethics in Arabic, and it is a good place to watch Greek ethics being made at home in…
Started by Layla Sfeir6 replies