Tradition
Greek & Roman
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Reading group: Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
A short essay, easily read in two sittings. Seneca addresses it to Paulinus, who was in charge of Rome's grain supply. His thesis is that life is not short; we make it short by wasting it. He describes the occupati, the busy…
Started by Elin Hedqvist3 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: Plato’s Phaedo, weeks 1–3
I'd like to read the Phaedo slowly with anyone who is interested. It is the dialogue I return to most, and it reads differently every decade. Proposed plan: Week 1: the frame story and Socrates' claim that philosophers spend their lives practising…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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 -
Reading group: Stoic logic in Diogenes Laertius, Lives Book VII
Chrysippus is said to have written hundreds of books, a large share of them on logic, and almost all are lost. What we have of Stoic logic comes mostly through later writers: Diogenes Laertius, who gives a summary of Stoic dialectic in…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies