Philadelphia Philosophy Meetup

May 4 - We will read Aristotle's explanation for why we human beings often lack self-control (despite our sincere intentions), which, in olden times, is called incontinence or weakness of will.
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Our bookmark is at NE VII.3, second half, 1147a24. Do read ahead 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.

(* 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.

(Note this is an in person event, an online one is posted here.) The Great American Philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, in a rhapsodic moment, spoke of his intention to construct a philosophy like that of Aristotle, “ that is to say, to outline a theory so comprehensive that, for a long time to come, the entire work of human reason, in philosophy of every school and kind, in mathematics, in psychology, in physical science, in history, in sociology and in whatever other department there may be, shall appear as the filling up of its details.”
Whether one agrees with Peirce’s assessment of Aristotle or not, one must admit that the influence of Aristotle on the intellectual culture of the West has been remarkably deep and deep seated. Indeed, Aristotle has shaped our idea of what it means to study and to reason, to theorize and to be a scholar, to be a scientist or a philosopher, as much as any other human being ever has. Our very identity as pursuers of knowledge has much of the anatomy it has because of his work. Aristotle’s influence on the entire structure of Medieval philosophy is legendary, but it is also true that every school of modern philosophy has had more Aristotle then it has sometimes cared to admit, and that all the great system builders, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hegel, Kant, hammered out their conceptions in his shadow. Moreover, Aristotle’s contributions to the foundations of multiple branches of physical science, biology, physics, and astronomy is undoubtable, and if much modern science emerged as a rebellion against an Aristotelian consensus, one will often be shocked to find how much Aristotle is contained in these rebellions.
At the same time, Aristotle, is what in popular parlance, is called something of a “tough hang”. His work is spread out over a dizzying number of treatises on every subject imaginable, from animals, plants, and the constitution of the physical world, to politics, ethics and poetry. His work is populated in a dense thicket of abstraction, for Aristotle is also one of the great fathers of the tendency toward neologisms and technical jargon.
This makes it somewhat hard to find the means to penetrate beneath the surface of Aristotle’s work and see what makes it tick. In this discussion, I want to provide just such an easy point of entry, by examining how Aristotle developed a structure of ideals about what it is to know something that, while they have undergone many innumerable transformations through the ages, still form the bones of much of our present day conception of theoretical knowledge.
To do so, we plan to make our way through various key moments in passages of Aristotle’s Great works (the metaphysics, the physics, the posterior analytics, the ethics and the categories) where this notion of knowledge is developed, celebrated, and worked out.
In doing so we wish to examine how it was that Aristotle developed a conception of what a theory is and what a theory does, that continues to provide much of the tracks on which our intellectual discourse moves and also, sometimes derails. Key to this conception is that to know something is to know the reasons or causes that brought it into being, and that the world consist in such a rational-causal-nexus of substances that undergo change and transformation according to certain orderly principles. The mind comprehends these principles ultimately, because it's rational structure is caused by and mirrors that of nature. In building out these conceptions, Aristotle developed a vision of nature and its functioning that was so intuitive, yet subtle and nuanced that it enchanted the human mind for many centuries and still forms the background and the shadow of much of our thoughts today.
In this meetup, we will explore this concept, its fundamental categories, and its relation to the ideals and aspirations of theoretical knowledge.

Readings are linked here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DPr-wdDGzZcTtp2494ZO1W_WpafHLwZjP-MirpPWcAg/edit?tab=t.0
(if anyone has trouble accessing, please reach out)