Denver Philosophy Book Club

Sally will host our discussion of Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness by Patrick House. Sally suggested this book.

A concise, elegant, and thought-provoking exploration of the mystery of consciousness and the functioning of the brain.

Despite decades of research, remarkable imagery, and insights from a range of scientific and medical disciplines, the human brain remains largely unexplored. Consciousness has eluded explanation.

Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness offers a brilliant overview of the state of modern consciousness research in twenty brief, revealing chapters. Neuroscientist and author Patrick House describes complex concepts in accessible terms, weaving brain science, technology, gaming, analogy, and philosophy into a tapestry that illuminates how the brain works and what enables consciousness. This remarkable book fosters a sense of mystery and wonder about the strangeness of the relationship between our inner selves and our environment.

If you would like to host one of our events and you have a book in mind, please let me, Karl Kiefer, or Mark Hopkins know, and we will create a Meetup event for your book, assuming your suggested title qualifies as a book on philosophy in our view. Our criteria are somewhat vague, but let's just say that we are not interested in books on the supernatural. We are interested in books that you might find in a syllabus for a college philosophy course. You can always email me at camkruger@gmail.com if you have questions and/or suggestions.

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

Happy reading!

Richard will host our discussion of Open Socrates, the Case for a Philosophical Life, by Agnes Callard. Richard suggested this book.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

"[C]harming, intelligent…Open Socrates encourages us to recognize how little we know, and to start thinking." ―Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

An iconoclastic philosopher revives Socrates for our time, showing how we can answer―and, in the first place, ask―life’s most important questions.

Socrates has been hiding in plain sight. We call him the father of Western philosophy, but what exactly are his philosophical views? He is famous for his humility, but readers often find him arrogant and condescending. We parrot his claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” yet take no steps to live examined ones. We know that he was tried, convicted, and executed for “corrupting the youth,” but freely assign Socratic dialogues to today’s youths, to introduce them to philosophy. We’ve lost sight of what made him so dangerous. In Open Socrates, acclaimed philosopher Agnes Callard recovers the radical move at the center of Socrates’ thought, and shows why it is still the way to a good life.

Callard draws our attention to Socrates’ startling discovery that we don’t know how to ask ourselves the most important questions―about how we should live, and how we might change. Before a person even has a chance to reflect, their bodily desires or the forces of social conformity have already answered on their behalf. To ask the most important questions, we need help. Callard argues that the true ambition of the famous “Socratic method” is to reveal what one human being can be to another. You can use another person in many ways―for survival, for pleasure, for comfort―but you are engaging them to the fullest when you call on them to help answer your questions and challenge your answers.

Callard shows that Socrates’ method allows us to make progress in thinking about how to manage romantic love, how to confront one’s own death, and how to approach politics. In the process, she gives us nothing less than a new ethics to live by.

If you would like to host one of our events and you have a book in mind, please let me, Karl Kiefer, or Mark Hopkins know, and we will create a Meetup event for your book, assuming your suggested title qualifies as a book on philosophy in our view. Our criteria are somewhat vague, but let's just say that we are not interested in books on the supernatural. We are interested in books that you might find in a syllabus for a college philosophy course. You can always email me at camkruger@gmail.com if you have questions and/or suggestions.

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

Happy reading!

Evelyn will host our discussion of The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics by Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb. Evelyn suggested this book.

The story of four remarkable women who shaped the intellectual history of the 20th century: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch.

On the cusp of the Second World War, four women went to Oxford to begin their studies: a fiercely brilliant Catholic convert; a daughter of privilege longing to escape her stifling upbringing; an ardent Communist and aspiring novelist with a list of would-be lovers as long as her arm; and a quiet, messy lover of newts and mice who would become a great public intellectual of our time. They became lifelong friends. At the time, only a handful of women had ever made lives in philosophy. But when Oxford's men were drafted in the war, everything changed.

As Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch labored to make a place for themselves in a male-dominated world, as they made friendships and families, and as they drifted toward and away from each other, they never stopped insisting that some lives are better than others. They argued that courage and discernment and justice--and love--are the heart of a good life.

This book presents the first sustained engagement with these women's contributions: with the critique and the alternative they framed. Drawing on a cluster of recently opened archives and extensive correspondence and interviews with those who knew them best, Benjamin Lipscomb traces the lives and ideas of four friends who gave us a better way to think about ethics, and ourselves.

If you would like to host one of our events and you have a book in mind, please let me, Karl Kiefer, or Mark Hopkins know, and we will create a Meetup event for your book, assuming your suggested title qualifies as a book on philosophy in our view. Our criteria are somewhat vague, but let's just say that we are not interested in books on the supernatural. We are interested in books that you might find in a syllabus for a college philosophy course. You can always email me at camkruger@gmail.com if you have questions and/or suggestions.

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

Happy reading!

Karl will host our discussion of "All Concepts Are Ad Hoc Concepts"
by Daniel Casasanto & Gary Lupyan. Karl suggested this paper. Download the PDF by clicking on the link above.

This 19-page paper is not difficult to read nor technically obscure, but will likely challenge your intuitions about the meaning of meaning, and should provide for a lively and stimulating discussion.

From the introduction: "To explain how people think and communicate, cognitive scientists posit a repository of concepts, categories, and word meanings that are stable across time and shared across individuals. But if concepts are stable, how can people use them so flexibly? Here we explore a possible answer: maybe this stability is an illusion. Perhaps all concepts, categories, and word meanings (CC&Ms) are constructed ad hoc, each time we use them. On this proposal, which we call the ad hoc cognition (AHC) framework, all words are infinitely polysemous, all communication is 'good enough,' and no idea is ever the same twice.... If this is true, then a central goal of research on language and cognition should be to elucidate the fleeting, idiosyncratic neurocognitive representations that people actually use for thinking and communicating, rather than to discern the nature and origin of context-independent CC&Ms, which, we argue, only exist as theoretical abstractions. Thinking depends on brains, and brains are always changing; therefore thoughts are always changing. Rather than trying to explain concepts, categories, and word meanings as things that we have in our minds, like entries in a mental dictionary or mental encyclopedia, it may be more fruitful to build theories of conceptualizing, categorizing, and constructing word meanings: things that we do with our minds."

If you would like to host one of our events and you have a book in mind, please let me, Karl Kiefer, or Mark Hopkins know, and we will create a Meetup event for your book, assuming your suggested title qualifies as a book on philosophy in our view. Our criteria are somewhat vague, but let's just say that we are not interested in books on the supernatural. We are interested in books that you might find in a syllabus for a college philosophy course. You can always email me at camkruger@gmail.com if you have questions and/or suggestions.

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

Happy reading!