The Chicago Philosophy Meetup

Meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/CPM-Kant-Wednesdays

Continuing our glorious tradition, we will have another "Drunk Kant" event.

In this meeting, we drink and socialize and have a casual, open-ended conversation about Kant and whatever else comes up. (Both alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks are fine)

Speeches are welcome but not necessary, just make sure you are intoxicated sufficiently.

Why now? In the United States, we celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. The Wednesday just before Thanksgiving is often called Blackout Wednesday (AKA Drinksgiving) and is a popular time for people to get drunk.

Get Drunk

Always be drunk.

That's it!
The great imperative!
In order not to feel
Time's horrid fardel
bruise your shoulders,
grinding you into the earth,
Get drunk and stay that way.
On what?
On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.
But get drunk.
And if you sometimes happen to wake up
on the porches of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the dismal loneliness of your own room,
your drunkenness gone or disappearing,
ask the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock,
ask everything that flees,
everything that groans
or rolls
or sings,
everything that speaks,
ask what time it is;
and the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock
will answer you:
"Time to get drunk!
Don't be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"

Online meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/Kierkegaard-Friday-CPM

Before beginning another reading of Either/Or, we'll be reading a few plays together. These plays are all featured in Either/Or, and so they should help prepare us for encountering them, and will also provide a palate cleanser between works of Kierkegaard.

During the meetings, we'll decide on roles and read the plays. We will take breaks to discuss, likely between scenes or acts. Also, we'll have as many meetings as needed to finish the plays.

Here are the plays we'll read together before beginning Either/Or:

• Sophocles - Antigone
• Scribe - The First Love
• Goethe - Faust

Additional works you could look at before we begin Either/Or:

• Goethe - Clavigo
• Mozart/Ponte - Don Giovanni
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQBmLHSXQdg
• Mozart/Schikaneder - The Magic Flute
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om_qtZ-Hm7k
• Mozart/Ponte - The Marriage of Figaro
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55ik-PzAXsQ

On the Friday Meetings:
The Friday meetings began on January 1, 2016, with an initial goal of reading through the first half of Søren Kierkegaard's works. Due to continued interest, we have decided to return to previous works for review, study more background texts, and continue beyond the first half of Kierkegaard's writing.
Works read so far in the series:

• The Concept of Irony, With Continual Reference to Socrates (Kierkegaard)
• Notes of Schelling's Berlin Lectures (Kierkegaard)
• Either/Or (Victor Eremita, et al.)
• Two Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
• Fear and Trembling (Johannes de Silentio)
• Repetition (Constantin Constantius)
• Three Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
• Four Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
• Two Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
• Three Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
• Philosophical Fragments (Johannes Climacus)
• Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est (Johannes Climacus)
• Concept of Anxiety (Vigilius Haufniensis)
• Prefaces (Nicolaus Notabene)
• Writing Sampler (A.B.C.D.E.F. Godthaab)
• Four Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
• Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (Kierkegaard)
• Stages on Life's Way (Hilarious Bookbinder)
• Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (Johannes Climacus)
• The Sickness Unto Death (Anti-Climacus)
• Works of Love

Works read for background:

• The First Love (Scribe)
• The Berlin Lectures (Schelling)
• Clavigo (Goethe)
• Faust Part I (Goethe)
• Antigone (Sophocles)
• Axioms (Lessing)
• The Little Mermaid (Anderson)

Works read inspired (at least in part) by Kierkegaard

• The Escape from God (Tillich)
• You Are Accepted (Tillich)

We'll be continuing from Book VIII, 828a (the previous meeting started at Book VII, 817e)

The dramatic action is as follows: Three elders—an Athenian, a Spartan, and a Cretan—walk the path of Minos and discuss laws and law-giving.

Meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/CPM-Saturday-Afternoon-Meetings

No particular edition is required but we can discuss what we want to use during the meeting. Because of this, sharing some editions that are generally available digitally in the comments may be helpful. I'll also try to keep the Greek text handy (probably through a Loeb edition, but anyone can look at Perseus as well).

If you want to familiarize yourself with the text in advance here are some different editions:

On Perseus, Shorely (HTML): https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0166

Plato's Complete Works:

PDF: https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=B670E9AEA7C9F52B2D40D63FF84F5600

November 30 - Having finished chapters 1 through 10 on "Troubleshooting the Virtues," we are going to read chapter 11, which begins a new part of NE VII on the nature of pleasure. Everyone knows what that is, right? So what can we learn from Aristotle?
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Let's follow his train of thought starting at 1152b1.
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Our main translation from here on will be by Adam Beresford (Penguin Classics, 2020), but we will occasionally dip into other older English translations to get more insights and interpretations.
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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 and the nature of pleasure and pain.
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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.