The San Diego Philosophers' Roundtable

This lecture is sponsored by the San Diego Independent Scholars. The location is at the North University Community Library, 8820 Judicial Drive, San Diego, CA 92122. Attendance is free to the public. The lecture will be Zoomcast.

Speaker's Bio: Christopher Baylor is a political scientist and author of The Case Against Political Parties (2026, Palgrave Macmillan) and First to the Party: The Group Origins of Political Trans­form­ation (2018, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press). His research focuses on American political parties, interest groups, and political reform. His writings have been published by Studies in American Political Development, Political Science Quarterly, the Washington Post, and Fortune. He received his doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles and received his master’s degree from Brown University. He was also a Congressional Fellow in Washington, D.C., where he worked in the U.S. House of Representatives. He has taught at Wellesley College, the College of the Holy Cross, and currently as a lecturer at UCLA.


Oct. 25 – We will resume Politics I.2. In the first two paragraphs, Aristotle distinguishes the woman from the slave, saying that they are not the same for civilized people, but they are the same for barbaric people. The household naturally arises from a combination of the man-and-woman partnership and the master-and-slave association. In this household, children presumably are treated as non-masters.
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How fascinating! Let us read on.
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We are live-reading Aristotle's Politics, the treatise on the practical governance of the city-state for the sake of enabling and promoting its citizens individually to flourish.
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The prerequisite to this treatise is a familiarity with Aristotelian ethics—whether that be Nicomachean ethics, Eudemian Ethics, or Magna Moralia.
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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.