About us
This is a group for people who create and consume philosophy. Members will have the opportunity to read and discuss each others' work, as well as texts from pre-established philosophers. Each meeting will be partially structured, with chosen topics/texts from a rotating member; and partially un-structured, with free-form discussion.
Featured event
Kierkegaard on the Ethics of Nonconformity
We live in an age of distrust, unrest, conflict of values, and, to a significant degree, atomization. In such a time, everyone is a critic. It is extremely common to inveigh against corrupt elites, Incompetent institutions, and bad leaders. Nor is such criticism necessarily uncommonly justified.
And yet in our everyday lives, we must submit to the authority of a large number of institutional settings, and unless we are to become completely cynical in our dealings with the world, this situation of unrest, of disharmony between personal judgment and public obligation, is likely to produce a peculiar type of cognitive dissonance.
Reconciling this dissonance in a way that preserves our integrity may be a quite difficult matter. Indeed, we are up against the problem of conformity and nonconformity, and of the extraordinary person, of what responsibility lies on the person who believes they have a radical and just critique of some institutional setting that is pervasive in their society.
Because such a situation is peculiarly typical of our civilization, we may justly hope to turn to modern Philosophy for help in understanding this problem. And perhaps no modern philosopher thought more about the conflict between the individual and institutional settings than that most Protestant of the great philosophers, Soren Kierkegaard.
A critic both of the fashionable liberal Hegelianism of his time, the state church of Denmark, and of the bourgeois press, sensitive to a feeling that his age was spiritually decrepit and lacked appropriate seriousness and capacities for commitment, Kierkegaard was particularly sensitive to the question of what it means to rebel against corrupt societal norms in a truly authentic way.
After having been made into laughing stock by the Danish press, after the famed corsair affair (which we studied a few months ago), this responsibility of the single individual was particularly sharpened for Kierkegaard. And it came home to him, with the greatest force, when he became acquainted with the works of a pastor, Adolph Peter Adler, who, repulsed by the Hegelianism and rationalism of current theological sentiment, and under the influence of a religious experience, declared he had received a revelation from God concerning the limitations of rational thought and the need for passionate commitment to the revelation present in scriptures. In the course of a few years, Adler was suspended from his post in the church of Denmark and recanted his claim that he had received a revelation, instead suggesting that his work was a mere expression of genius.
There was no doubt that Kierkegaard saw something of himself in Adler, but also realized in Adler a fundamental moral failure that made his desire to fight against modern social corruption, vitiated with the same spiritual confusions of the time.
As a result, Kierkegaard was peculiarly stimulated by these incidents and began, carefully meditating on the limitations and confusions inherent in Adler’s claims on one hand, and more generally, the peculiar moral responsibility of the radical critic within society on the other..
The conclusion he characteristically came to, is that the critic's primary responsibility is not to influence society directly but to maintain the authenticity and truthfulness of their critique. What corrupted Adler and many a social critic, and what Kierkegaard wished to avoid at all cost, was becoming a critic who, in their desire for social acclaim and social reward, contradicted their message in the format in which it is expressed.
In a way, strikingly analogous to his early analysis of the religious life, Kierkegaard argues that the critic must operate with fear and trembling, with no external social supports, but only with the internal confidence that is maintained in its purity by their sacrifice of status and prestige. Such integrity is the true measure of the power of their point of view, and in working out the rigorous requirements of such a cultivation of integrity, Kierkegaard made a permanent contribution to the study of the ethics of non-conformity. In this meetup, we wish to explore this contribution by examining an important chapter from Kierkegaard's unpublished book on Adler. Reading is linked here.
Upcoming events
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Aristotle’s Dialectic — Topics I — Live-Reading
·OnlineOnlineMay 26 - We are reading chapter 12 of Topics, Book I, at Bekker lines 105a10–105a19. In this chapter we will find Aristotle's concept of induction--that is, what is this reasoning process and how is the articulation or argument to be involved in this process. We will also review On interpretation, § 7, on Aristotle's theory of propositions.
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We are using the translation by Robin Smith: Topics Books I & VIII (Oxford University Press, 1997). We will read half of page 11.
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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
|-- 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.
1 attendee
Friendship and Love — Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
·OnlineOnlineWe are live-reading and discussing Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, book VIII–IX, which is about friendship, social relations, and love.
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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 a virtue of character {ēthikē aretē}?
2. How does one come to acquire any of it? (E.g. pride, ambition, bravery, gentlemanliness, generosity, candor, fairness, …)
3. From a first-person perspective in being virtuous, how does one feel and what does one see (differently, discursively) in a given situation of everyday living?
4. How does one formulate right desires?
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The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows.2 attendeesAristotle’s Dialectic — Topics I — Live-Reading
·OnlineOnlineOrganon 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
|-- 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.
1 attendee
Past events
880
Group links
Members
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