- Aristotle's On Interpretation - Live-Reading--European StyleLink visible for attendees
Organon means "instrument," as in, instrument for thought and speech. The term was given by ancient commentators to a group of Aristotle's treatises comprising his logical works.
Organon
|-- Categories ---- 2023.02.28
|-- On Interpretation ---- 2023.12.12
|-- Prior Analytics
|-- Posterior Analytics
|-- Topics
|-- On Sophistical Refutations
|-- Rhetoric*(* Robin Smith, author of SEP's 2022 entry "Aristotle's Logic," argues that Rhetoric should be part of the Organon.)
Whenever we do any human thing, we can either do it well or do it poorly. With instruments, we can do things either better, faster, and more; or worse, slower, and less. That is, with instruments they either augment or diminish our doings.
Do thinking and speaking (and writing and listening) require instruments? Yes. We need physical instruments like microphones, megaphones, pens, papers, computers. But we also need mental instruments: grammar, vocabulary words, evidence-gathering techniques, big-picture integration methods, persuasion strategies. Thinking while sitting meditatively all day in a lotus position doesn't require much instrumentation of any kind, but thinking and speaking well in the sense of project-planning, problem-solving, negotiating, arguing, deliberating--that is, the active engagements in the world (whether romantic, social, commercial, or political)--do require well-honed mental instruments. That's the Organon in a nutshell.
Are you an up-and-coming human being, a doer, go-getter, achiever, or at least you're choosing to become one? You need to wield the Organon.
Join us.
- Kant 300: Critique of Pure Reason (Week 11)Link visible for attendees
We will be covering Transcendental Logic Appendix 'Amphiboly'
pp A260 - 292, B316 - 349
pp 366 - 383 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 323 - 345 (Pluhar)Online meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/CPM-Kant-Wednesdays
(links to text at bottom)
(Tentative) Schedule for Critique of Pure Reason:
Week 1:
Preface (A and B editions)
pp Avii - xxii, Bvii - xliv
pp 99 - 124 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 5 - 40 (Pluhar)Week 2:
Introduction (A and B editions)
pp A1 - 16, B1 - 30
pp 127 - 152 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 43 - 68 (Pluhar)Week 3:
Transcendental Aesthetic (A and/or B editions)
pp A19 - 49, B33 - 73
pp 155 - 192 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 71 - 104 (Pluhar)Week 4:
Transcendental Logic Introduction, Book I Chapter I
pp A50 - 83, B74 - 116
pp 193 - 218 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 105 - 140 (Pluhar)Week 5:
Transcendental Logic Chapter II 'Deduction' (A edition)
pp A84 - 130
pp 219 - 244 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 141 - 174 (Pluhar)Week 6:
Transcendental Logic Chapter II 'Deduction' (B Edition)
pp B116 - 169
pp 245 - 266 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 175 - 203 (Pluhar)Week 7:
Transcendental Logic Book II Introduction and Chapter I on the Schematism
pp A130 - 147, B169 - 187
pp 267 - 277 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 204 - 219 (Pluhar)Week 8:
Transcendental Logic Book II Chapter II
pp A148 - 176, B187 - 218
pp 278 - 295 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 220 - 247 (Pluhar)Week 9:
Analogies of Experience up to Transcendental Logic Book II Chapter III 'Phenomena and Noumena'
pp A176 - 235, B218 - 294
pp 295 - 337 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 247 - 302 (Pluhar)Week 10:
Transcendental Logic Book II Chapter III 'Phenomena and Noumena' (A and/or B editions)
pp A235 - 260, B294 - 315
pp 338 - 365 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 303 - 322 (Pluhar)Week 11:
Transcendental Logic Appendix 'Amphiboly'
pp A260 - 292, B316 - 349
pp 366 - 383 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 323 - 345 (Pluhar)Week 12:
Transcendental Dialectic Introduction, Book I
pp A293 - 340, B349 - 398
pp 384 - 410 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 346 - 381 (Pluhar)Week 13:
Transcendental Dialectic Paralogisms (A and/or B editions)
pp A341 - 405, B399 - 332
pp 411 - 458 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 382 - 441 (Pluhar)Week 14:
Transcendental Dialectic Antinomies Section I - IV
pp A405 - 484, B432 - 512
pp 459 - 507 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 442 - 501 (Pluhar)Week 15:
Transcendental Dialectic Antinomies Section V - IX
pp A485 - 567, B513 - 595
pp 508 - 550 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 502 - 559 (Pluhar)Week 16:
Transcendental Dialectic Ideal of Pure Reason
pp A567 - 642, B513 - 670
pp 551 - 589 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 560 - 616 (Pluhar)Week 17:
Appendix to Transcendental Dialectic
pp A642 - 704, B670 - 732
pp 590 - 623 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 617 - 662 (Pluhar)Week 18:
Doctrine of Method Introduction, Chapter I
pp A705 - 794, B733 - 822
pp 627 - 671 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 663 - 727 (Pluhar)Week 19:
Doctrine of Method Chapter II
pp A795 - 830, B823 - 858
pp 672 - 690 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 728 - 755 (Pluhar)Week 20:
Doctrine of Method Chapter III and IV
pp A832 - 856, B860 - 884
pp 691 - 704 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 755 - 774 (Pluhar)Two different translations are recommended - both are good:
Preserves original sentence structure: Guyer/Wood
Updates for readability: PluharLinks to the text:
PDF of Guyer/Wood translation:
https://libgen.li/edition.php?id=136607414EPUB of Guyer/Wood translation:
https://libgen.li/edition.php?id=137975974PDF of Pluhar translation:
https://libgen.li/edition.php?id=136394041Buy the book on Amazon (or find it someplace else if you don't like Amazon):
Guyer/Wood:
https://www.amazon.com/Critique-Reason-Cambridge-Works-Immanuel/dp/0521657296/ref=sr_1_3Pluhar (All three Critiques):
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Critiques-3-Set-Practical/dp/0872206297/ref=sr_1_3Pluhar hardcovers recommended (if available): https://www.amazon.com/Three-Critiques-3-Set-Practical/dp/0872206300/ref=sr_1_2
- Schematizing Kant: A Novel Approach for Intuitive UnderstandingLink visible for attendees
Welcome to Part Two of our two-part special event for the Kant 300!
This event is for everyone. Experts will enjoy it for finally explaining Kant’s hitherto inexplicable story about grammar “determining” physical objects, and beginners will like it because the answer is so simple that they can understand it as well.
The Key to Understanding the Critique of Pure Reason
In the darkest and most oracular passage of the First Critique, Kant claims that the grammatical rules that combine words in a proposition also combine sensations into objects:
“The same function that gives unity to the various presentations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various presentations in an intuition. … Hence the same understanding—and indeed through the same acts whereby it brought about, in concepts, the logical form of a judgment by means of analytic unity—also brings into its presentations a transcendental content, by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition as such” [A79/B104].
As laws of grammar, these rules are called logical functions of judgment, but as rules of objects, they are called categories.
Our goal is to explain clearly and precisely both (a) how Kant conceives of these innate “logical functions” and (b) the process whereby they transform the passing pixels of sensation into law-abiding physical objects, i.e., into substantial bodies whose properties are quantities that conform to mathematical law and can be calculated.
Our mission will be carried out seriously, by means of real phenomenological experiments that we will carry out live during the event—using illustrations, computer animations, diagrams, guided meditation and visualization, the choicest artisanal and small-batch metaphors, and some mild hypnosis; all in order to elevate you into actual-experiential meta-cognition of your faculty of (propositional) knowing.
You will taste the effects of logic and grammar on intuition like never before. More importantly, you will see the “synthetic” procedures you use to build the physical object that, as Hume, rightly noted, does not show up on the screen of empirical reality. You will both catch and understand Kantian synthesis “in the act.” You’ll catch it by knowing what to look for. And you’ll understand it because you’ll be able to schematize it—possibly for the first time.
Our mission’s method is simple: schematism. As Kant says, real understanding requires intuition. If he’s right, then we need to bring Kant’s system itself into intuition. We will then be dissecting our minds with Kant, but also schematizing Kant himself as we do so. And this double exercise will take us literally out of our minds. All we need is the right pedagogy.
Kant’s Problem
Kant defends the mathematically deterministic world of physics by arguing that its essential features arise necessarily from innate forms of intuition and rules of understanding through combinatory acts of imagination. Knowing is active: it constructs the unity of nature by combining appearances in certain mandatory ways. What is mandated is that sensible awareness provide objects that conform to the structure of ostensive judgment: “This (S) is P.” Sensibility alone provides no such objects, so the imagination compensates by combining passing point-data into “pure” referents for the subject-position, predicate-position, and copula. The result is a cognitive encounter with a generic physical object whose characteristics—magnitude, substance, property, quality, and causality—are abstracted as the Kantian categories. Each characteristic is a product of “sensible synthesis” that has been “determined” by a “function of unity” in judgment. Understanding the possibility of such determination by judgment is the chief difficulty for any rehabilitative reconstruction of Kant’s theory.
Can Kant’s theory of experiencing, knowing, understanding, and our power of calculating facts across space and time really be made so simple? Can Kant be made truly intuitive? Can we picture how Kant’s sensation transformation machine works?
According to our Guest Expert, the answer is Yes.
An outrageous claim. Even worse, he also says that anyone can attain this state of awareness, no matter what their level of expertise, Kantgefühl, or philosophical acuity.
Our Guest Expert
Our presenter studied philosophy at Duke under Rick Roderick, Anthony Appiah, and Fredric Jameson, and later earned his PhD from the University of Texas, where he also taught classes for the Plan II Honors Program. He is editor of the Tibetan-Sanskrit-English Dictionary, and author of the first mathematically rigorous account of Kant’s theory of a priori cognition. He has transformed his dissertation into the entertaining pedagogical initiation process described above just for this event.
To see the other events in this series, click here.
- Live-Reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics--American StyleLink visible for attendees
Let's try something new. For the next many weeks, we are going to live-read and discuss Aristotle's ~Nicomachean Ethics~. What is new and different about this project is that the translation, by Adam Beresford (2020), happens to be rendered in standard 'Murican English.
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From the translator's "Note" on the text:
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"This translation is conservative in interpretation and traditional in aim. It aims to translate the text as accurately as possible.
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"I translated every page from scratch, from a clean Greek text, rather than revising an existing translation. ... I wanted to avoid the scholars’ dialect that is traditionally used for translating Aristotle.
...
"I reject the approach of Arthur Adkins, Elizabeth Anscombe, and others who followed Nietzsche in supposing that the main elements of modern thinking about right and wrong were unknown to the Greeks, or known to them only in some radically different form. My view of humanity and of our shared moral instincts is shaped by a newer paradigm. This is a post-Darwinian translation. (It is also more in line with the older, both Aristotelian and Christian view of human character.)
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"Having said that, I have no interest at all in modernizing Aristotle’s ideas. All the attitudes of this treatise remain fully Greek, very patriarchal, somewhat aristocratic, and firmly embedded in the fourth century BC. My choice of dialect (standard English) has no bearing on that whatsoever. (It is perfectly possible to express distinctively Greek and ancient attitudes in standard English.) ... I have also not simplified the text in any way. I have translated every iota, particle, preposition, noun, verb, adjective, phrase, clause, and sentence of the original. Every premise and every argument therefore remains – unfortunately – exactly as complex and annoyingly difficult as in any other version in whatever dialect.
...
"Some scholars and students unwarily assume that the traditional dialect has a special connection with Greek and that using it brings readers closer to the original text; and that it makes the translation more accurate. In reality, it has no special tie to the Greek language, either in its main philosophical glossary or in its dozens of minor (and pointless) deviations from normal English. And in my view it certainly makes any translation much less accurate.
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"I will occasionally refer to the scholars’ dialect (‘Gringlish’) and its traditional glossary in the Notes."
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Here is our plan:
1. Read Intro excerpts or a summary to gain the big picture.
2. Read a segment of the translated text.
3. Discuss it analytically and interpretively.
4. Repeat again at #2 for several more times.
5. Discuss the segments evaluatively.
.
.
Zoom is the project's current meeting platform, but that can change. The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows. - Designing The Perfect Society – 1on1 philosophical & political discussion (COH)Link visible for attendees
IMPORTANT NOTICE:
To be the speaking participant you must RSVP via Calendly.
The link to my Calendly calendar is available in my Egora profile:
Egora-ILP.org/philosopher/Cezary_JurewiczAll others are welcome to join to listen, use the chat, use the breakout rooms, and comment at the end.
About Citizen Office Hours:
If the Citizen is to be the highest authority in democracy, should we not have office hours to make ourselves available and accountable to our fellow citizens? The answer is YES – yes, we should.Also, in a democracy, there is no power without responsibility. If the citizens do not accept the responsibility of being citizens, then we do not really have any power – the power we might think we have is illusory. Therefore, all responsible citizens should make themselves available at their own "Citizen Office Hours".
This event is a publication of my Citizen Office Hours. I am making myself available to discuss any of my or your ideas published in Egora. Please be already registered for Egora before our meeting and at least somewhat familiar with my Ideological Profile so we can have a proper and thorough discussion. If you share your Ideological Profile in the comments in advance, i will take some time to study it before our meeting (ideally, the audience will do so too).
- Aristotle's On Interpretation - Live-Reading--European StyleLink visible for attendees
Organon means "instrument," as in, instrument for thought and speech. The term was given by ancient commentators to a group of Aristotle's treatises comprising his logical works.
Organon
|-- Categories ---- 2023.02.28
|-- On Interpretation ---- 2023.12.12
|-- Prior Analytics
|-- Posterior Analytics
|-- Topics
|-- On Sophistical Refutations
|-- Rhetoric*(* Robin Smith, author of SEP's 2022 entry "Aristotle's Logic," argues that Rhetoric should be part of the Organon.)
Whenever we do any human thing, we can either do it well or do it poorly. With instruments, we can do things either better, faster, and more; or worse, slower, and less. That is, with instruments they either augment or diminish our doings.
Do thinking and speaking (and writing and listening) require instruments? Yes. We need physical instruments like microphones, megaphones, pens, papers, computers. But we also need mental instruments: grammar, vocabulary words, evidence-gathering techniques, big-picture integration methods, persuasion strategies. Thinking while sitting meditatively all day in a lotus position doesn't require much instrumentation of any kind, but thinking and speaking well in the sense of project-planning, problem-solving, negotiating, arguing, deliberating--that is, the active engagements in the world (whether romantic, social, commercial, or political)--do require well-honed mental instruments. That's the Organon in a nutshell.
Are you an up-and-coming human being, a doer, go-getter, achiever, or at least you're choosing to become one? You need to wield the Organon.
Join us.