- 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.
.
From the translator's "Note" on the text:
.
"This translation is conservative in interpretation and traditional in aim. It aims to translate the text as accurately as possible.
.
"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.)
.
"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.
.
"I will occasionally refer to the scholars’ dialect (‘Gringlish’) and its traditional glossary in the Notes."
.
.
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. - Descartes' Meditations: Sixth Meditation (Live Reading)Pro Musica, Chicago, IL
We'll be reading from the fifteenth paragraph of the sixth meditation!
Let's go back to the drawing board with a live reading of Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy!
Descartes' Meditations are a classic of philosophy typically taken as kicking off the modern period of philosophy. In the text, Descartes seeks to knock down and rebuild all of what he knows in order to finally find security in his cognitions and a path forward for securing knowledge of God and man's nature.
We welcome beginners and advanced readers alike.
Various translations are available, please select any you'd like or have around.
Text links (Amazon):
Cottingham translation (Cambridge)
Cress translation (Hackett)
Heffernan translation (English/Latin, Notre Dame)
There is also a translation by Norman Kemp Smith, but it is out of print
Digital links:
Cottingham translation (Libgen, Cambridge)
Cress translation (Libgen, Hackett)
Latin text (Project Gutenberg)
- 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.
- The Great Philosophers EP10 ⟩ “Frederick Copleston on Schopenhauer”Link visible for attendees
Climax time is here! This is the episode that I’ve been looking forward to watching for 36.66 years! In it, the world’s greatest philosophical conversationalist, Bryan Magee, talks with the world’s greatest historian of philosophy (and its second most famous Jesuit), Frederick Copleston.
Copleston, whose gargantuan nine-volume and 4610-page A History of Philosophy has both daunted and inspired generations of undergraduates, brings a depth of knowledge and insight matched by none. Who hasn’t browsed their favorite professor’s bookshelves, only to see those nine volumes and wonder, with despair, “Who could be the peer of such a one?”
Throughout the 24 conversations we’ve already experienced, we’ve been continually amazed by Magee’s peerless mastery of each and every philosopher, school, system, period, and theory he’s covered. His comments and summaries have often penetrated deeper, and explained more clearly, the topics of which his guests are the world’s supreme experts.
But in this episode, Bryan Magee, just like Darth Vader in Episode IV, can rightfully claim, “Now I am the master”—because this time he is discussing his speciality, Arthur Schopenhauer. Even if Magee were to engage in this philosophical exploration solo, we would still receive a masterclass in Schopenhauer’s thought. But he is not alone! He is joined by Father Frederick Copleston, the only person in the world whose profound understanding and appreciation of Schopenhauer can rival Magee’s own. Together, they explore the legacy of one of the most articulate, compelling, clear, reader-friendly, and enjoyable writers in the entire history of Western philosophy.
Both loved Schopenhauer so much that they wrote books about him. Magee’s book, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (1983; 1997), is still regarded as the most substantial and wide-ranging treatment of Schopenhauer in English. Copleston’s book, Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosopher of Pessimism (1946), was the world’s go-to Schopenhauer companion for the generation prior.
Arthur Schopenhauer, born in 1788 in Danzig (now Gdańsk), started his academic career by sidestepping an intended career in commerce. Throughout his life, he crafted a philosophical system that drew significantly on Vedānta and Buddhism and expressed an appreciation for the arts that hasn’t been matched since.
Special Bonus: The revised and enlarged director’s cut edition of Bryan Magee’s book, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, is now available for download from THORR. (Look for Magee Book Vault 2.0.) The download is, as always, FREE for SADHO Platinum members. (Note: You’ll be cheered to know is one of the highest rated biographical-philosophical companions on Amazon. Check it out here.)
METHOD
Please watch the episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A new high-def/pro-audio version of this episode can be found here:Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the Magee Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:
Topics Covered in 15 Episodes
- Plato, Aristotle, Medieval Philosophy, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, Locke and Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel and Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger and Modern Existentialism, The American Pragmatists, Frege, Russell and Modern Logic, Wittgenstein.
View all of our coming episodes here.
- Kierkegaard: Works of Love (Live Reading)Link visible for attendees
Online meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/Kierkegaard-Friday-CPM
We'll start reading from page 71 (Danish page 72).
Works of Love; Some Christian Deliberations in the Form of Discourses is a collection of reflections and discourses that reflect on love from various perspectives and with respect to various occasions. The theme of love is a frequent topic in Kierkegaard's work, so this should provide us an occasion to reflect on much of Kierkegaard's earlier works.
Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/Works-Love-Kierkegaards-Writings-Vol/dp/0691059160/
PDF: https://annas-archive.org/md5/93afa222d5c3cd524e68739aef47d444
On the Friday Meetings:
The Friday meetings started on January 1st, 2016 with an initial goal of reading through the first half of 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 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)
- 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.
.
From the translator's "Note" on the text:
.
"This translation is conservative in interpretation and traditional in aim. It aims to translate the text as accurately as possible.
.
"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.)
.
"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.
.
"I will occasionally refer to the scholars’ dialect (‘Gringlish’) and its traditional glossary in the Notes."
.
.
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.