The Chicago Philosophy Meetup

Online meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/moderated/90411e38a0af35dad141f5479eb902f1a13df4115c47e3a8b66f88916f8cdeba

This is the first meeting of Either/Or, and we'll be starting at page 148 (Danish 126). At the last meeting, we started on page 143 (Danish 120).

Kierkegaard’s masterpiece in experimental literature and philosophy, Either/Or, explores themes that permeate his work as a whole. In Part I, Kierkegaard presents his most extensive treatment of the aesthetic worldview, which understands life as governed by fate and seeks to assert itself by taking the reins of existence through imagination.

Text
Part I: pdf, epub
Part II: pdf, epub

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

• Sophocles - Antigone
• Scribe - The First Love
• Goethe - Faust
• Video of a production of Faust I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaogjXLdPow

Additional works you could look at while we read 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)

Meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/moderated/3a0e5ab74d311938358f82a075568a48c1d47ab6d5fe86398e72d80ab11b4925

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, Fowler (HTML): https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=plat.+stat.+257a

Plato's Complete Works:

PDF: https://annas-archive.gl/md5/b670e9aea7c9f52b2d40d63ff84f5600

August 16 - Having informed us finally in X.7 (1177a12–1178a8) what he means by the life of theōria and why it is the most flourishing sort of life that is possible for any being with the god-like power of nous, Aristotle in X.8 (1178a9–1179a32) will now focus his attention on us human beings and on how we are to live our best sort of a flourishing life, given our compound nature.
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August 9 - Back in NE book I chapter 5 (1095b14–1096a10), Aristotle names four ways of living that stand out as representative of how any human being might choose to live his own life for the sake of flourishing. Aristotle elaborates on three of these four ways of living in the chapter: the life of pleasure, the life of honor, and the life of money making. As for the fourth way, the life of theōria, Aristotle promises to get to it later (1096a4–5).
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It is now later. After having discussed matters concerning the virtues, friendships, and pleasures, and after again summarizing the conditions of human flourishing, Aristotle at book X chapter 7 (1177a12–1178a8) will finally tell us what he means by the life of theōria.
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We are live-reading and discussing Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, book X, which is about pleasure and human flourishing.
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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 the full-time job of being a human being?
2. What is the systematic structure of the human potential?
3. What is a virtue of character {ēthikē aretē}?
4. How does one come to acquire any of it? (E.g. pride, ambition, bravery, gentlemanliness, generosity, candor, fairness, friendliness, …)
5. How does one formulate right desires?
6. How is one to recover from being bad to becoming a good person?
7. What is entailed in and what is required of being a friend?
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The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows.

(* 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 do 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 doings 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.