Philadelphia Philosophy Meetup

(Note this is an in person event: an online one is posted here) An important trend of the last two hundred years of western intellectual culture is our growing sense of the past, of the way the past shapes the present, and how much societies and ages have differed from our own.
In germany in particular, where many of the methods of modern historical practice were developed, the philosophical ramifications of this historical imagination led to radically new modes of thinking, which together with romanticism and post kantian idealism have substantially reshaped the self-image of Westerners. Foundational to this reshaping has been the realization that social historical situations represent radically different opportunities and values. That, for instance, the Greeks not only lived but thought and felt differently than we do, that much of what we value in ourselves and our activities and take for unquestioned truth is the product of a long line of development and and that such lines of development continue to go on in various and unpredictable directions.
What is perhaps most remarkable about these reshapings is that they have opened up a new conception of human nature as something not static and isolated but evolving over long periods of time through a social-historical process, and this dynamic conception of human nature and human values has often been combined with a skepticism of reductionist, often natural science-inspired approaches to mind, society, and the study of humanity.
Profound as these transformations of our imagination have been, many of the seminal attempts to grapple with the implications of this heightened historical consciousness have happened outside the context of English language philosophy. Indeed, in English analytic philosophy, it is not uncommon to suggest that the history of philosophy is irrelevant to practice of philosophy, that one should read a work by say Aristotle as if it came out in an issue of a scholarly magazine last week.
Perhaps the most important and influential attempt by an english philosopher to grapple with this historical consciousness and to stake out an anti-reductionist conception of the study of humanity is found in the works of R. G. Collingwood.
Born in 1889, and coming to intellectual maturity in the first series of battles for the soul of modern English philosophy in the early 1900s, Collingwood was profoundly struck by the a-historical and socially disengaged approach of the early progenitors of what came to be known as the analytic philosophy. In their harsh criticism of late 19th-century Victorian idealists, these new analytic philosophers, in Collingwood’s eyes, seemed obsessed with catching their opponents in logical contradictions but profoundly disinterested in close and historically informed readings of their opponents’ actual positions and points of view. This struck Collingwood as intellectually dishonest and drove him to be increasingly focused on the accurate and close, historically informed reading of philosophical texts.
In the process of developing this practice, Collingwood became increasingly obsessed with the significance of historical method, both for philosophy and for intellectual culture more broadly. He became convinced that philosophy is intricately bound up with history, and that the development of modern historical method in the 19th century, a method based on the critical, reconstructive study of texts and monuments, was a revolution in modern western intellectual culture as profound as the scientific revolution of the 17th century. This 17th century revolution had introduced a new spirit into 18th century philosophy, and Collingwood felt that the historical revolution should also usher in a new spirit into 20th century philosophy. Developing the implications of this new spirit became the guiding passion of his intellectual life, and in order to be properly informed about it Collingwood embarked on a career as an accomplished archaeologist and a leading authority on roman britain, so as to better familiarize himself with the intricate problems of historical methodology.
The result of Collingwood’s studies was a remarkable conviction that history, rather then psychology, is the proper discipline for the study of reason and mind, that the critical interpretative method of history is independent and autonomous from that of natural science, that all history is the history of thought, and that the only capacity we have to make sense of historical texts and products is our own capacity to reenact or work our way into the thought process that gave rise to these products.
In this meetup we wish to explore these convictions about history, through Collingwood’s famous exposition of it in his posthumously published book, The Idea of History. Readings are linked here.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HQeAIvPx0qt3vNpyIvxx4KQFVvEnx8JV/view?usp=sharing

June 22 - This will be our Q&A session to understand fully Aristotle's scenario for troubleshooting what we human beings call lacking self-control (despite our sincere intentions), which, in olden times, is called incontinence or weakness of will.
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The two-part scenario and the key findings are at NE VII.3 1147a24–b5. My summary is on the cloud drive. Bring your own questions about the text if you are interested in joining this Sunday's meeting.
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When you are on a diet, and you feel hungry, it matters, according to Aristotle, whether you "see" this piece of cake either as fattening or as sweet. How are you supposed to "see" that? How should you "see" that?
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We are live-reading and discussing Aristotle's ~Nicomachean Ethics~, book VII, which is about troubleshooting the virtues.
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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 it? (E.g. [Aristotle’s], ambition, bravery, gentlemanliness, ambition, …)
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. From a third-person perspective, how is the virtuous person (of a specific virtue) to be characterized?
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The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows.

C: Selfless Love and The Encompassing https://kennethsmithphilosophy.com/end07.php

(* 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 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.