Denver Philosophy Book Club

Cameron will host our discussion of The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper. Cameron suggested this book.

One of the most important books of the twentieth century, Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies is an uncompromising defense of liberal democracy and a powerful attack on the intellectual origins of totalitarianism. Popper was born in 1902 to a Viennese family of Jewish origin. He taught in Austria until 1937, when he emigrated to New Zealand in anticipation of the Nazi annexation of Austria the following year, and he settled in England in 1949. Before the annexation, Popper had written mainly about the philosophy of science, but from 1938 until the end of the Second World War he focused his energies on political philosophy, seeking to diagnose the intellectual origins of German and Soviet totalitarianism. The Open Society and Its Enemies was the result.

An immediate sensation when it was first published in two volumes in 1945, Popper's monumental achievement has attained legendary status on both the Left and Right and is credited with inspiring anticommunist dissidents during the Cold War. Arguing that the spirit of free, critical inquiry that governs scientific investigation should also apply to politics, Popper traces the roots of an opposite, authoritarian tendency to a tradition represented by Plato, Marx, and Hegel.

Since we are always planning ahead, I've started the survey for our Meetups two months out. To complete the survey, click on this link.

Anyone who is a member of this Meetup can submit a title for the survey. Just send me an email, and I'll add your selection. However, I will only include one title from each member. If you submitted a title last month, I've rolled it over into the new survey. If you want to change your recommendation, please let me know.

As always, it's essential that everyone who comes to the meeting reads the book in its entirety.

Happy reading!

Glenn will host our discussion of Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation by Jonathan Lear. Glenn suggested this book.

Shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, told his story―up to a certain point. “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground,” he said, “and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.” It is precisely this point―that of a people faced with the end of their way of life―that prompts the philosophical and ethical inquiry pursued in Radical Hope. In Jonathan Lear’s view, Plenty Coups’s story raises a profound ethical question that transcends his time and challenges us all: how should one face the possibility that one’s culture might collapse?

This is a vulnerability that affects us all―insofar as we are all inhabitants of a civilization, and civilizations are themselves vulnerable to historical forces. How should we live with this vulnerability? Can we make any sense of facing up to such a challenge courageously? Using the available anthropology and history of the Indian tribes during their confinement to reservations, and drawing on philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Lear explores the story of the Crow Nation at an impasse as it bears upon these questions―and these questions as they bear upon our own place in the world. His book is a deeply revealing, and deeply moving, philosophical inquiry into a peculiar vulnerability that goes to the heart of the human condition.

Since we are always planning ahead, I've started the survey for our Meetups two months out. To complete the survey, click on this link.

Anyone who is a member of this Meetup can submit a title for the survey. Just send me an email, and I'll add your selection. However, I will only include one title from each member. If you submitted a title last month, I've rolled it over into the new survey. If you want to change your recommendation, please let me know.

As always, it's essential that everyone who comes to the meeting reads the book in its entirety.

Happy reading!