Philosophers and Gamblers: Papers, Arguments, and Wagers

September 27 - We are reading the third, last portion of NE X.9 (1179a33–1181b23). Aristotle turns his attention toward the social context for human flourishing. We can only flourish, he says, in a civilized city (or state, or country). What is his argument? That is the subject of this chapter.
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September 6 - From the middle of X.8, Aristotle rejects the life of theōria for human beings. Given our compound nature, we flourish humanly by the fifth way of living: the life of moral goodness {aretē}, one that is enmeshed through and through with the activity of theōria, as befitting exclusively of human beings--gods and brutes excluded. (Cf. Adam Beresford's note 51.)
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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 argues in X.8 (1178a9–1179a32) that we human beings are compound in nature, requiring our distinguishing between the life of theōria as befitting exclusively of god(s) versus the activity of theōria as exercised by our choice-intention from the acquirable intellectual virtue and capacity {hexis} of intellect {nous}.
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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 all matters concerning the virtues, friendships, and pleasures, and after again summarizing in X.6 (1176a30–1177a11) 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.

Excellent free resources
https://soundcloud.com/emotionalbalance/sets/alan-wallace-guided-practices
https://dynamic.wakingup.com/shareOpenAccess/SC3D92926?share_id=440D041D
https://beherenownetwork.com/joseph-goldstein-insight-hour-ep-216-satipatthana-sutta-series-pt-13-mindfulness-of-mind/
excellent resources here also - with weekly group lessons
https://member.coreyjackson.com.au/share/ZYZLarLoPH8Fu3Ak?utm_source=manual

https://www.notion.so/Philosophy-Meetings-2332a602b2fc804f9be6e50c13d7d3a8?source=copy_link

WARNING

Browse the current and upcoming papers, along with past readings and meetings:
https://opaque-artichoke-859.notion.site/Philosophy-Meetings-and-Readings-2332a602b2fc804f9be6e50c13d7d3a8
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.

HELPFUL

https://notebook.google.com/notebook/149b4bde-aaf0-4e3f-b95f-21470db0d2e3/artifact/1f99edfa-d4b5-462f-a381-1bddcc0e448c?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_

and

https://notebook.google.com/notebook/149b4bde-aaf0-4e3f-b95f-21470db0d2e3/artifact/444f9869-2a85-4456-a75b-e830f9ed7d72?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_

DETAILS

What does it mean to harm someone?
At first, the answer seems obvious: you harm a person when you make their life worse than it otherwise would have been.
Derek Parfit’s famous Non-Identity Problem shows that things become much stranger when our choices affect not only how future people live, but which people exist at all.
Suppose someone chooses to have a child under conditions that predictably result in a serious disadvantage. Later, the child asks: “Why did you choose this for me?”
The natural response is that the parent harmed the child.
But Parfit points out a problem. If the parent had made a different choice—perhaps waiting several months before conceiving—then a completely different child would have existed.
So the comparison is not:
this person with a worse life
versus
this same person with a better life.
It is:
this person exists
versus
this person never exists at all.
If that person’s life is still worth living, can we really say they were made worse off?
And if nobody was made worse off, what exactly makes the original decision wrong?
This puzzle becomes even more important when we think about future generations. Decisions about climate, technology, public policy, war, or economics can change the course of history so much that different people will eventually be born depending on which choices we make.
That creates a disturbing possibility:
A future generation may suffer because of our choices, yet the individuals in that generation may owe their very existence to those same choices.
So can they say that we harmed them?
Parfit’s problem challenges a basic idea in moral philosophy:

> Must something be worse for someone in order to be morally worse?

This seminar will explore Parfit’s Chapter 16, “The Non-Identity Problem,” from Reasons and Persons.
Some of the questions we will discuss:

• What does it actually mean to harm someone?
• Can a person be wronged by being brought into existence?
• Can an action be morally bad even if it makes no particular person worse off?
• Do future people have claims against us?
• Should morality evaluate what is best for individuals, or can one possible future simply be better than another?

The paper begins with a strange puzzle about reproduction, but quickly develops into a much larger question about how morality should deal with future people whose existence depends on the very decisions we are trying to judge.
No background in philosophy is required. The reading is short, but the problem is not.

(* 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.