Philadelphia Philosophy Meetup

(note this is an in person event, an online is posted here) Few philosophers have inspired as much fascination, consternation and confusion as George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In his own day, he enacted a revolution within German universities, so that before long everyone was a “hegelian”. Figures as diverse as Kierkegaard, Peirce, Stirner, and Marx are unthinkable without him. American pragmatism, especially in Peirce and Dewey, and George Herbert Mead shows the long arm of his influence. And for a short time in the latter half of the 19th century, he was also the most influential philosopher in Britain. And if any philosopher signifies the severing point of the analytic-continental divide, it is Hegel, for continental philosophy, in particular, is unthinkable without him.
At the same time, very few philosophers have also inspired such disgust, both for their obscurity, perceived mysticism, or their pan-rationalism. Many philosophers who were thought to have sympathy with Hegel's doctrine have professed that they have never been able to understand a single word of his work. Despite his clear influence, Kiekegaard launched an endless Guerrilla campaign against Hegel for his perceived overrationalization of religious and cultural experience, Marx turned him upside down for his neglect of material conditions, the liberal Popper labeled him a crypto-totalitarian for his holistic conception of politics and history and Russell and Moore, in founding the analytic philosophy largely saw themselves as fighting against Hegelianism. Schopenhauer hated him and saw him as betraying Kant’s legacy. And so it is that Hegel has had the remarkable distinction of being held to be incomprehensible and at the same time highly misguided and dangerous.
In this Meetup, we wish to cut through the haze, the smoke, and the noise surrounding Hegel, by attempting a very close and careful reading of an important but brief part of the text that originally made him famous, the Phenomenology of the spirit. Our aim will be to demystify Hegel and to get a clear idea of some of the basic considerations that drive his philosophy.
In particular, we will concern ourselves with Hegel's idea of a dialectical critique of forms of consciousness and his application of this idea to the problems of modern theory of knowledge, for while Hegel applies this dialectical method to everything, it first and foremost manifests itself in problems arising in the theory of knowledge.
This notion of such a critique emerged out of Hegel's profound engagement with early modern European epistemological writings from Descartes to Kant. The dominant idea of this tradition has been the idea that the mind strives to know reality through the means of its cognitive faculties. We have on one hand, reality and on the other hand, means of making contact with reality, such as sensation, imagination, intuition, conceptualization, and reason.
Since the time of Descartes, the idea of transitioning from one's personal and private cognition to knowledge of a shared and public objective world has been the primary problem of epistemology, and it has generated a series of puzzles that have proved nearly intractable.
Hegel's method begins with the suspicion that there is something doomed and contradictory in the very idea of such a project. By setting up a profound opposition between cognition on one hand and reality on the other, a puzzle always remains about whether our cognitions really map up to reality.
To attempt to overcome this opposition, Hegel takes a cue from Kant, and suggests that we ought to perform a critical examination of the evolution of consciousness itself. In other words, in order to understand if our cognition can ever reach reality, we have to examine the way that our cognition evolves in its pursuit of a coherent understanding of its objects. It's only by examining this evolving story that we can become confident that cognition has reached its goal. This story Hegel argues, proceeds by a method of trial and error, whereby consciousness postulates an object of knowledge and finds it to be inadequate by its own internal standards. This leads to various attempts to reconcile the contradiction, which lead to ever more elaborate forms of consciousness until we reach a kind of consciousness that is liberated from contradiction, and which arrives at complete or “absolute knowledge”.
What such a complete kind of consciousness looks like forms one of the ultimate questions of the Hegelian system, and also remains highly controversial. Our prime aim in this Meetup will be to understand how this method proceeds, and how it begins with a critique of immediate experience, of naive empiricism, that while having debts to Kant, has remained profoundly influential up to this current day, even by those who are very distant from Hegel in their conclusions.
Readings are linked here but they consist of three brief sections from the phenomenology, Hegel's very helpful introduction, on sense certainty and on perception:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iKEa5WFVZLDhTGjYrBXYn-uL9nDpAiV4/view?usp=sharing

July 27 - We will read NE VII.4. This chapter 4 attempts to answer the question of whether lacking self-control (aka incontinence or weakness of will) is a condition applicable to a specific weakness or temptation to an appetite (e.g., cigarette, alcohol, porn, cheesecake, ice cream, etc.) or whether it is a general weakness of one's character as a person. There are two "takes" in this chapter. Some scholars say the two takes pretty much say the same thing; others say they are different in content. Regardless, we will read 8 translations, giving us 16 takes in English. That should give us plenty of material to discuss.
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My summary of chapter 3 can be found here to help you catch up to us. https://mega.nz/file/fu50RKRC#BT1rMXg2W3X-W0Fip2CDm0r-ViNIT5xVyrhWCV_wq9Q Bring your own questions about the text if you are interested in joining this Sunday's meeting.
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We are live-reading and discussing Aristotle's ~Nicomachean Ethics~, book VII, which is about troubleshooting the virtues.
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The prerequisite to this book is our answering for ourselves these questions from the prior books, to which we will briefly review:
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1. What is a virtue of character {ēthikē aretē}?
2. How does one come to acquire it? (E.g. [Aristotle’s], ambition, bravery, gentlemanliness, generosity, candor, …)
3. From a first-person perspective in being virtuous, how does one feel and what does one see (differently, discursively) in a given situation of everyday living?
4. From a third-person perspective, how is the virtuous person (of a specific virtue) to be characterized?
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The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows.

Join us for a penetrating discussion of Kenneth Smith’s philosophical meditation on the tragic dynamics of sin, ego, and civilization’s ironic collapse. In this session, we’ll explore the etymology of sin as a “splitting-off” — a rupture from wholeness — and its deeper form, hamartia, as a failure to grasp what is spiritually essential. Smith contrasts the unifying power of spirit with the slicing edge of ego, revealing how civilizations and individuals alike unravel when they elevate cleverness and desire over truth and order. Drawing on Aristotle and Kierkegaard, he unpacks paradoxes at the heart of moral life: how self-denial leads to fullness, and how cultures built on revulsion to ego can mutate into its most sophisticated forms. We’ll trace how classical Athens, early Christianity, and the modern West each reach their peripeteia—their fateful reversal—becoming what they once condemned. This is a conversation about blindness, irony, and the spiritual cost of forgetting what truly matters.
C: Selfless Love and The Encompassing https://kennethsmithphilosophy.com/end07.php

(note this is an online event, an in person one is posted here) Few philosophers have inspired as much fascination, consternation and confusion as George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In his own day, he enacted a revolution within German universities, so that before long everyone was a “hegelian”. Figures as diverse as Kierkegaard, Peirce, Stirner, and Marx are unthinkable without him. American pragmatism, especially in Peirce and Dewey, and George Herbert Mead shows the long arm of his influence. And for a short time in the latter half of the 19th century, he was also the most influential philosopher in Britain. And if any philosopher signifies the severing point of the analytic-continental divide, it is Hegel, for continental philosophy, in particular, is unthinkable without him.
At the same time, very few philosophers have also inspired such disgust, both for their obscurity, perceived mysticism, or their pan-rationalism. Many philosophers who were thought to have sympathy with Hegel's doctrine have professed that they have never been able to understand a single word of his work. Despite his clear influence, Kiekegaard launched an endless guerrilla campaign against Hegel for his perceived overrationalization of religious and cultural experience, Marx turned him upside down for his neglect of material conditions, the liberal Popper labeled him a crypto-totalitarian for his holistic conception of politics and history and Russell and Moore, in founding the analytic philosophy largely saw themselves as fighting against Hegelianism. Schopenhauer hated him and saw him as betraying Kant’s legacy. And so it is that Hegel has had the remarkable distinction of being held to be incomprehensible and at the same time highly misguided and dangerous.
In this Meetup, we wish to cut through the haze, the smoke, and the noise surrounding Hegel, by attempting a very close and careful reading of an important but brief part of the text that originally made him famous, the Phenomenology of the spirit. Our aim will be to demystify Hegel and to get a clear idea of some of the basic considerations that drive his philosophy.
In particular, we will concern ourselves with Hegel's idea of a dialectical critique of forms of consciousness and his application of this idea to the problems of modern theory of knowledge, for while Hegel applies this dialectical method to everything, it first and foremost manifests itself in problems arising in the theory of knowledge.
This notion of such a critique emerged out of Hegel's profound engagement with early modern European epistemological writings from Descartes to Kant. The dominant idea of this tradition has been the idea that the mind strives to know reality through the means of its cognitive faculties. We have on one hand, reality and on the other hand, means of making contact with reality, such as sensation, imagination, intuition, conceptualization, and reason.
Since the time of Descartes, the idea of transitioning from one's personal and private cognition to knowledge of a shared and public objective world has been the primary problem of epistemology, and it has generated a series of puzzles that have proved nearly intractable.
Hegel's method begins with the suspicion that there is something doomed and contradictory in the very idea of such a project. By setting up a profound opposition between cognition on one hand and reality on the other, a puzzle always remains about whether our cognitions really map up to reality.
To attempt to overcome this opposition, Hegel takes a cue from Kant, and suggests that we ought to perform a critical examination of the evolution of consciousness itself. In other words, in order to understand if our cognition can ever reach reality, we have to examine the way that our cognition evolves in its pursuit of a coherent understanding of its objects. It's only by examining this evolving story that we can become confident that cognition has reached its goal. This story Hegel argues, proceeds by a method of trial and error, whereby consciousness postulates an object of knowledge and finds it to be inadequate by its own internal standards. This leads to various attempts to reconcile the contradiction, which lead to ever more elaborate forms of consciousness until we reach a kind of consciousness that is liberated from contradiction, and which arrives at complete or “absolute knowledge”.
What such a complete kind of consciousness looks like forms one of the ultimate questions of the Hegelian system, and also remains highly controversial. Our prime aim in this Meetup will be to understand how this method proceeds, and how it begins with a critique of immediate experience, of naive empiricism, that while having debts to Kant, has remained profoundly influential up to this current day, even by those who are very distant from Hegel in their conclusions.
Readings are linked here but they consist of three brief sections from the phenomenology, Hegel's very helpful introduction, on sense certainty and on perception:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iKEa5WFVZLDhTGjYrBXYn-uL9nDpAiV4/view?usp=sharing