About us
Philosophers and Gamblers is a philosophy reading group for people who want to engage seriously with academic philosophy.
Our main weekly event is a Monday reading seminar where we work through philosophical papers slowly and carefully. We often spend multiple weeks on a single paper, reading passage by passage, reconstructing arguments, clarifying concepts, and debating what the author is actually claiming. The point is not to rush through material or collect impressive titles. The point is to understand the argument deeply enough that we can explain it, challenge it, and think with it.
Topics may include ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, social philosophy, philosophy of science, and other areas where serious arguments are being made. We keep a shared archive of past readings, so the group has continuity rather than just floating from topic to topic. You can see our past readings here: https://app.notion.com/p/Philosophy-Meetings-2332a602b2fc804f9be6e50c13d7d3a8?source=copy_link
This is not a casual opinion circle or a motivational discussion group. It is a place for people who enjoy reading difficult texts, asking precise questions, and staying with an argument until it finally starts to give up its secrets.
Some events in the group may be hosted by other organizers and may follow different formats, including online discussions. The Monday seminar is the core reading event: slow, focused, text-based, and argument-driven.
Upcoming events
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Hilary Putnam | The Entanglement of Fact and Value (Part 4)
·OnlineOnlineA live, text-driven seminar on major works in philosophy (mostly analytic). We read the paper together, slowly—stopping to clarify terms, reconstruct arguments, and stress-test claims. You can find the next week's reading here
WARNING
Browse the current and upcoming papers along with past Readings and meetings. Expect highly technical material, dense terminology, and high abstraction. It is full of philosophical jargon and complex technical terms. Your expectation should be to treat it as a graduate seminar in philosophy. We don't assume you have a degree in philosophy, but we do assume philosophical maturity and/or a crazy level of passion for deductive reasoning. This paper can be quite dense, and technical. It is also very counterintuitive. As such, we are going to do extra slow reading. Our regular format will be updated slightly to give more focus on what is being said, extra focus on intuition, and examples. We will do more reconstruction of arguments. We will start on page 12.
HELPFUL
Audio Brief: https://notebook.google.com/notebook/a4e58487-cecd-47dd-9928-e549aad536a2/artifact/2be4507b-4890-4641-9e97-2b140390b890?utm_source=nlm_web_share&utm_medium=google_oo&utm_campaign=art_share_1&utm_content=&utm_smc=nlm_web_share_google_oo_art_share_1_
Video Brief: https://notebook.google.com/notebook/a4e58487-cecd-47dd-9928-e549aad536a2/artifact/5940f3b7-bb10-429c-97ac-44186a2139a3?utm_source=nlm_web_share&utm_medium=google_oo&utm_campaign=art_share_1&utm_content=&utm_smc=nlm_web_share_google_oo_art_share_1_DETAIL
Can we really separate facts from values as sharply as modern philosophy often assumes?
We are frequently told that factual statements describe how the world is, while value judgments express how we think the world ought to be. On this picture, facts are objective and publicly verifiable, whereas values are subjective additions—feelings, preferences, or moral recommendations projected onto an otherwise neutral reality.
Hilary Putnam challenges this entire picture in “The Entanglement of Fact and Value.” His central argument concerns what philosophers call thick ethical concepts: concepts such as cruel, brave, selfish, honest, and exploitative. These words do not merely evaluate. They also describe people, actions, and institutions. Yet their descriptive and evaluative dimensions may be impossible to pull apart.
Consider the statement:
> “The teacher was cruel to the student.”
Does cruel simply mean that the teacher performed some neutrally describable action, followed by the speaker adding, “and I disapprove”? Or does recognizing the action as cruel already require understanding humiliation, suffering, intention, vulnerability, and the absence of justification? Could someone fully understand what cruelty is while remaining entirely outside its evaluative perspective?
Putnam extends the argument beyond morality. Scientific inquiry itself depends upon judgments about coherence, simplicity, plausibility, relevance, and explanatory power. These are values—but they are not therefore arbitrary preferences. If rational investigation necessarily employs epistemic values, then the familiar equation of “value” with “merely subjective” begins to fall apart.
Putnam does not claim that every fact automatically produces a moral obligation. His more subtle challenge is that the supposedly clean boundary between fact and value may never have existed. Our values influence which features of reality we notice, how we classify them, and what counts as an adequate description; meanwhile, factual investigation can correct and transform our evaluations.
In this seminar, we will examine whether thick concepts genuinely undermine the fact–value dichotomy or merely conceal evaluative assumptions inside apparently descriptive language. Can description and evaluation be disentangled? Can value judgments be objective? And if facts and values are already entangled, what remains of the famous gap between “is” and “ought”?24 attendees
Aristotle’s Dialectic — Topics I — Live-Reading
·OnlineOnlineSeptember 22 - We are reading chapter 18, still, of Topics, Book I, at Bekker lines 108a18–108b33. In chapter 13, we found Aristotle outlining four tools by means of which deductions come about: [ch14] obtaining premises, [ch15] distinguishing in how many ways things are said, [ch16] finding differences, and [ch17] seeing similarities. Chapter 18 will explain how the last three tools can be used to support obtaining premises.
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Our main translator is Robin Smith: Topics Books I & VIII (Oxford University Press, 1997).
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Smith in his helpful "Introduction" forewarns us that because we don't know what we are ignorant of, we barbarians don't know yet what dialectic is or why we need it. So there will be learning pain involved as we bootstrap ourselves toward knowing and practicing what we will learn. The payoff will be tremendous and will be commensurate with personal effort.
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A new reading adventure beckons you and your willpower. Join us.
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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
|-- Topics ---- 2025.10.21
|-- Topics Book II ---- 2026.10.06
|-- Sophistical Refutations
|-- Rhetoric*
|-- Prior Analytics
|-- Posterior Analytics(* 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.
2 attendees
Past events
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