About us
Philosophers and Gamblers is a philosophy reading group for people who want to engage seriously with academic philosophy.
Our main weekly event is a Monday reading seminar where we work through philosophical papers slowly and carefully. We often spend multiple weeks on a single paper, reading passage by passage, reconstructing arguments, clarifying concepts, and debating what the author is actually claiming. The point is not to rush through material or collect impressive titles. The point is to understand the argument deeply enough that we can explain it, challenge it, and think with it.
Topics may include ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, social philosophy, philosophy of science, and other areas where serious arguments are being made. We keep a shared archive of past readings, so the group has continuity rather than just floating from topic to topic. You can see our past readings here: https://app.notion.com/p/Philosophy-Meetings-2332a602b2fc804f9be6e50c13d7d3a8?source=copy_link
This is not a casual opinion circle or a motivational discussion group. It is a place for people who enjoy reading difficult texts, asking precise questions, and staying with an argument until it finally starts to give up its secrets.
Some events in the group may be hosted by other organizers and may follow different formats, including online discussions. The Monday seminar is the core reading event: slow, focused, text-based, and argument-driven.
Upcoming events
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ORLANDO STOICS - VARIOUS TOPICS
·OnlineOnlinePLEASE JOIN ORLANDO STOICS VIA LINK BELOW FOR FULL WEEKLY EVENT SCHEDULE
https://www.meetup.com/orlando-stoics/
Welcome to Orlando Stoics! We are a very active group, with over 3,800 members and five meetings a week. Some meetings are held online, while others are in-person. All classes are free.
What is Stoicism? It's an ancient Greek school of philosophy founded in Athens about 300 BC. The first teacher was Zeno of Citium. The school taught that virtue (the highest good) is based on knowledge, and that wise people live in harmony with nature. The school also taught tolerance and self-control. Famous Stoics were Seneca the Younger, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. We also study modern Stoics.
Why Stoicism? In our world of instant gratification, constant stimulation, and endless distractions, Stoicism offers a novel perspective on life. Interested in developing an unconquerable mind? Stoicism has the answers. We also link ideas to Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Existentialism, Minimalism, and other "lived philosophy" systems. We love in-depth discussions!
If you join our group, feel free to adjust the email and notification settings to suit your preferences. Since we have new meetings every week, those emails might be too much for your inbox. Feel free to turn them off (go to our meetup page, click "You're a Member", and then click group notifications). You can still check our meetup page for upcoming events whenever you want.
The goals of our group:
1. We read the ancient books, plus the modern books on Stoicism.
2. We discuss Stoicism in the media, pop culture, and arts & literature.
3. We compare recurring themes in Stoicism to history, religion, and psychology.There have always been people attracted to Stoicism. It was a significant influence on Shakespeare, JD Salinger, Tom Wolfe, and Nelson Mandela. It has also attracted political and military leaders, such as Frederick the Great, President Bill Clinton, and Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who stated that he has read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations over 100 times.
We hope you will join us. The group is open to the public and has no subscription fee. Stoicism can help you cope with life's stresses, while retaining your ethics & character.
We hope to see you soon!
1 attendee
Christian, Peter: Non-Reductive Physicalism and Exclusion Principle (Part 3)
·OnlineOnlineA 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 is very abstract, and deals with the bread and butter of Philosophy: Metaphysics, and causality. We have to look into modal logic, possible worlds, formal, and model-theoretic approach to philosophy. This is more akin to math, and formal logic. We will start off at page 7.
DETAIL
Modern science tells us that everything we do depends on the physical brain. Your intentions, beliefs, desires, decisions, and actions all seem to have neural machinery underneath them. Fair enough.
But here is the philosophical trap: if the physical brain already does all the causal work, is there anything left for the mind to do?
If a neural state causes your arm to move, did your intention cause it too? Or is “I decided to reach for the cup” just a higher-level story we tell ourselves after the neurons have already done the job?
This is the classic exclusion problem in philosophy of mind. Jaegwon Kim famously argued that non-reductive physicalism faces a serious dilemma: either mental properties reduce to physical properties, or they become causally useless shadows. The mind becomes a decorative hood ornament on the engine of the brain.
The paper we’ll discuss, “Non-Reductive Physicalism and the Limits of the Exclusion Principle” by Christian List and Peter Menzies, pushes back against this argument. Their central move is simple but powerful: causation should not be understood merely as physical sufficiency. Instead, causation should be understood as difference-making. A cause is not just something that is enough for an effect. A cause is something such that, if it had been different, the effect would have been different too.
The paper uses vivid examples to make this point. Suppose a pigeon has been trained to peck at red objects. It pecks at a crimson target. What caused the pecking? Was it the target’s being crimson, or its being red?
Crimson is physically enough. But it is too specific. The pigeon would also have pecked at scarlet, burgundy, or any other red shade. So the real explanatory cause is not “crimson”; it is “red.” The correct cause is the one at the right level of generality.
That matters for the mind-brain problem. A very specific neural pattern might realize an intention, but that does not mean the neural pattern is automatically the best cause of the action. If the same intention could have been realized by a different neural pattern and still produced the same action, then the intention may be the better difference-maker. The neural detail may be like “crimson”: true, physical, sufficient, but not the best causal explanation.
So the paper’s deeper argument is this: higher-level properties — mental states, intentions, social roles, biological functions, economic categories — may be causally real when they capture the right difference-making pattern. They are not fake just because they depend on lower-level physical stuff.
This gives us a more subtle view of causation across levels. Sometimes the lower-level physical detail is the real cause. Sometimes the higher-level pattern is the real cause. And sometimes the relationship depends on the structure of the system itself. There is no one-size-fits-all knockout punch. The exclusion principle is not an eternal law of metaphysics. It is conditional, contextual, and weaker than its defenders often assume.11 attendees
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