Philosophers and Gamblers: Papers, Arguments, and Wagers

September 13 - We are reading NE X.9 (1179a33–1181b23), at least the first third. 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

A live, text-driven seminar on major works in philosophy (mostly analytic). We read the paper together, slowly—stopping to clarify terms, reconstruct arguments, and stress-test claims. You can find the next week's reading here

WARNING

Browse the current and upcoming papers along with past Readings and meetings. 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. This paper can be quite dense, and technical. It is also very counterintuitive. As such, we are going to do extra slow reading. Our regular format will be updated slightly to give more focus on what is being said, extra focus on intuition, and examples. We will do more reconstruction of arguments. We will start on page 5.

HELPFUL

Audio Brief: https://notebook.google.com/notebook/a4e58487-cecd-47dd-9928-e549aad536a2/artifact/2be4507b-4890-4641-9e97-2b140390b890?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_
Video Brief: https://notebook.google.com/notebook/a4e58487-cecd-47dd-9928-e549aad536a2/artifact/5940f3b7-bb10-429c-97ac-44186a2139a3?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_

DETAIL

Can we really separate facts from values as sharply as modern philosophy often assumes?
We are frequently told that factual statements describe how the world is, while value judgments express how we think the world ought to be. On this picture, facts are objective and publicly verifiable, whereas values are subjective additions—feelings, preferences, or moral recommendations projected onto an otherwise neutral reality.
Hilary Putnam challenges this entire picture in “The Entanglement of Fact and Value.” His central argument concerns what philosophers call thick ethical concepts: concepts such as cruel, brave, selfish, honest, and exploitative. These words do not merely evaluate. They also describe people, actions, and institutions. Yet their descriptive and evaluative dimensions may be impossible to pull apart.
Consider the statement:
> “The teacher was cruel to the student.”
Does cruel simply mean that the teacher performed some neutrally describable action, followed by the speaker adding, “and I disapprove”? Or does recognizing the action as cruel already require understanding humiliation, suffering, intention, vulnerability, and the absence of justification? Could someone fully understand what cruelty is while remaining entirely outside its evaluative perspective?
Putnam extends the argument beyond morality. Scientific inquiry itself depends upon judgments about coherence, simplicity, plausibility, relevance, and explanatory power. These are values—but they are not therefore arbitrary preferences. If rational investigation necessarily employs epistemic values, then the familiar equation of “value” with “merely subjective” begins to fall apart.
Putnam does not claim that every fact automatically produces a moral obligation. His more subtle challenge is that the supposedly clean boundary between fact and value may never have existed. Our values influence which features of reality we notice, how we classify them, and what counts as an adequate description; meanwhile, factual investigation can correct and transform our evaluations.
In this seminar, we will examine whether thick concepts genuinely undermine the fact–value dichotomy or merely conceal evaluative assumptions inside apparently descriptive language. Can description and evaluation be disentangled? Can value judgments be objective? And if facts and values are already entangled, what remains of the famous gap between “is” and “ought”?

(* 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.