Philosophers & Gamblers

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

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!

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. Since this topic is about morality, it can often challenge your identity and your ability to be impartial. This would be doubly hard. If you are into that sort of thing, be my guest. We will start reviewing the paper, and start reading from page 13 of the PDF.

DETAILS
Nagel’s paper begins with a deep tension at the heart of ethics: we often say that people should only be judged for what is under their control, yet in real life our moral judgments are constantly shaped by luck. We blame, praise, admire, and condemn people not only for what they intended, but also for what happened, the circumstances they faced, and even the kind of person they turned out to be. Nagel’s paper brings that contradiction into sharp focus.
Because of that, this paper is an excellent entry point into several major issues in modern moral philosophy. It raises questions about the difference between judging actions and judging agents, the role of intention, character, circumstance, and outcome, and the tension between a partial and an impartial point of view. From the impartial point of view, morality seems to demand fairness, universality, and control. From the partial point of view, morality is lived from within a human life — from the standpoint of a person with attachments, risks, relationships, and limits. Nagel’s paper sits right at that fracture line.
In the paper, Nagel examines several ways luck enters moral life. There is luck in how our actions turn out, luck in the situations we happen to face, luck in the kind of character we happen to have, and luck in the larger chain of causes that shapes what we do. The disturbing conclusion is that once luck is taken seriously, it becomes very hard to preserve the comforting idea that moral judgment applies only to what the agent fully controls. Yet we do not stop making such judgments. Nagel’s argument does not simply solve this problem. Instead, it exposes a contradiction built into ordinary moral consciousness itself.
That is part of what makes the paper so important in the larger context of analytic ethics. It pressures all the major frameworks at once. It creates trouble for deontological views that tie responsibility closely to duty and rational control, for consequentialist views that place weight on outcomes, and even for virtue ethics, where character itself may be shaped by forces outside the agent’s choosing. In that sense, the paper marks a shift away from a neat “act-focused” picture of morality and toward a deeper concern with moral agency, moral psychology, and the lived standpoint of the person being judged.
It also helps explain why modern analytic ethics often moves back and forth between two poles: the impersonal demand for objective moral assessment and the personal reality of human life as actually lived. Nagel forces us to ask whether morality can ever be fully detached, clean, and universal, or whether it is always entangled with contingency, perspective, and the fragile conditions under which people act. That is why this paper remains such a powerful starting point for thinking about responsibility, blame, praise, and the possibility of fair moral judgment at all.

A little about our host:
Garrett is a programmer turned award-winning software inventor turned entrepreneur (PlateRate.com is his company). His hobby is writing and discussing practical philosophy, and he does life coaching on request to help people live happy, moral lives. He is also the executive director of The Free Thinker Institute (FreeThinkerInstitute.org), which aims to create a community that helps members increase happiness and decrease harm for themselves and those they can influence.

Format:
Lecture and discussion

Note:
Social time for our community 15 minutes before the presentation.
To get familiar with our past events, feel free to check out our YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmixGB9GdrptyEWovEj80zg
After registering via zoom, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

We publish our event recordings on our Youtube channel to offer our help to anyone who would like to but can’t attend the meeting, so we need to give this clause. If you don’t want to be recorded, just remain on mute and keep your video off.

Here’s our legal notice:
For valuable consideration received, by joining this event I hereby grant Free Thinker Institute and its legal representatives and assigns, the irrevocable and unrestricted right to use and publish any and all Zoom recordings for trade, advertising and any other commercial purpose, and to alter the same without any restriction. I hereby release Free Thinker Institute and its legal representatives and assigns from all claims and liability related to said video recordings.