What we’re about
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.
(Note this is an in person event. An online event on the same theme will be posted by the weekend) What is philosophy? No doubt many answers have been given to this question, but the answer that still in many ways determines its style and practice in many English-speaking academic departments is that philosophy is a disciplined pursuit of truth and knowledge, that uses “reason” and “argument” to get to the truth. In other words, philosophy is a science, or at least a science-adjacent discipline.
The majority of what we think of as the analytic philosophy is largely determined by this image of philosophy and even practitioners who might doubt some elements of it are still often unconsciously committed to the general image that it has suggested, for it determines their practice.
But where does this image come from? No doubt important elements are there in Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle, and no doubt the mainstream of enlightenment thinking, Kant, and empiricism provided further elements. The progress and prestige of physics has also played a role. But in its modern form, this conception of philosophy probably reaches its most brilliant explicit expression in the late 19th century, in the work the most remarkable and ambitious of American philosophers, Charles Sanders Peirce.
Born in 1839, the precocious child of a distinguished Harvard mathematician, Peirce was given a rigorous education in both mathematics and science, and his childhood home was a meeting place of many distinguished scientists of the period. Educated with the expectation that he would become a great scientific investigator, Peirce studied chemistry and long worked for the geodetic coastal survey, but his true passion was for philosophy. Having been raised by mathematicians and scientists, Peirce naturally thought of his passion for philosophy as an extension of his passion for theoretical science. Inspired by the successes of science he was acutely ashamed of the inability of philosophers to collaborate together on theories, their inability to establish any generally agreed upon results and their seeming lack of objectivity. He dreamed that one day, philosophy would become like physics or chemistry and argued that pursuit of universal agreement among competent researchers is the ideal towards which philosophy should strive.
It was in terms of such an ideal that Peirce developed a unique conception of truth, of logic and of science itself. In this conception, truth is nothing but that set of opinions that honest empirical inquiry forces all minds to slowly but ineluctably accept, and science is nothing but the process of carrying out this empirical inquiry with the hope of bringing about this fated agreement of all minds.
Philosophy is nothing but the science that deals with what truth can be gained by observing the most general features of the experiences that pour in on us every day of our lives, and it can achieve greater rigor by developing, the minute, analytical, and mathematical techniques present in the other sciences. Once it does this, it may plausibly hope to become a productive discipline, with established results and hopes for future research achievements and collaborative efforts. To further this end, Peirce became a remarkable and early innovator in the mathematical logic that would inspire so much of twentieth century analytic philosophy.
It may be said that Peirce’s sanguine hopes for Philosophy are rarely shared to this degree by modern analytic philosophy, but his visionary conception of a scientific philosophy is still paid homage to in the academic style, and if we wish to understand this -style it’s limitations and it’s virtues- we would do well to understand this most visionary expression of its assumptions.
The result is that in this meetup we want to examine Pierce’s conception of truth, science, and the science of philosophy. We will do so using his famous article “The Fixation of Belief” along with a number of excerpts from his notes and other essays on the nature and practice of scientific philosophy.
readings are linked here https://wordpress.com/post/bumpsoftheunderstanding.wordpress.com/1744
Upcoming events (4+)
See all- Live-Reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics--American StyleLink visible for attendees
Let's try something new. We are going to live-read and discuss Aristotle's ~Nicomachean Ethics~. What is new and different about this project is that the translation, by Adam Beresford (2020), happens to be in standard 'Murican English.
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From the translator's "Note" on the text:
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"This translation is conservative in interpretation and traditional in aim. It aims to translate the text as accurately as possible.
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"I translated every page from scratch, from a clean Greek text, rather than revising an existing translation. ... I wanted to avoid the scholars’ dialect that is traditionally used for translating Aristotle.
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"I reject the approach of Arthur Adkins, Elizabeth Anscombe, and others who followed Nietzsche in supposing that the main elements of modern thinking about right and wrong were unknown to the Greeks, or known to them only in some radically different form. My view of humanity and of our shared moral instincts is shaped by a newer paradigm. This is a post-Darwinian translation. (It is also more in line with the older, both Aristotelian and Christian view of human character.)
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"Having said that, I have no interest at all in modernizing Aristotle’s ideas. All the attitudes of this treatise remain fully Greek, very patriarchal, somewhat aristocratic, and firmly embedded in the fourth century BC. My choice of dialect (standard English) has no bearing on that whatsoever. (It is perfectly possible to express distinctively Greek and ancient attitudes in standard English.) ... I have also not simplified the text in any way. I have translated every iota, particle, preposition, noun, verb, adjective, phrase, clause, and sentence of the original. Every premise and every argument therefore remains – unfortunately – exactly as complex and annoyingly difficult as in any other version in whatever dialect.
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"Some scholars and students unwarily assume that the traditional dialect has a special connection with Greek and that using it brings readers closer to the original text; and that it makes the translation more accurate. In reality, it has no special tie to the Greek language, either in its main philosophical glossary or in its dozens of minor (and pointless) deviations from normal English. And in my view it certainly makes any translation much less accurate.
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"I will occasionally refer to the scholars’ dialect (‘Gringlish’) and its traditional glossary in the Notes."
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Here is our plan:
1. Review the readings from the prior session.
2. Read a segment of the translated text.
3. Discuss it analytically and interpretively.
4. Repeat again from #2 for a few more times.
5. Discuss the segments evaluatively.
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The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows. - Aristotle's On Interpretation - Live-Reading--European StyleLink visible for attendees
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
|-- Prior Analytics
|-- Posterior Analytics
|-- Topics
|-- On Sophistical Refutations
|-- Rhetoric*(* 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.