NYC Philosophy and Psychology Readers Community

Hi everyone!

Please join us on June 18th to discuss Wayne Koestenbaum’s Humiliation in conjunction with excerpts from Judith Butler’s seminal work on subjection/subjectivity, The Psychic Life of Power.

We’ll be discussing some of the following questions:

• Can humiliation be self-defining? Or self-effacing?
• Is humiliation similar in nature to Butler’s discussion of subjection and the formation of the subject?
• Is humiliation a creative force, just as much as it might be a destructive one?

Humiliation will be a slight deviation from our usual Fiction Series pieces, as it is part memoir, part observation, and (ha) mostly non-fiction. Koestenbaum wonderfully explores the limits of humiliation in a variety of contexts, whether that be social, political, personal, or otherwise, in a succession of engaging and provocative vignettes.

For this meeting, we will be reading the following:

I'm posting this event again. Since the date on the previous one was wrong.

Plotinus isn't just a weak reverberation of Plato, but a very influential philosopher of the soul and its relationship to the divine. He is a deep thinker who lived in the transitional period (204/5 -270) of the human consciousness, moving from polytheistic thinking to monotheistic thinking. He is one of the last, free writers on god and the soul without the christian dogma.
Yet, still he deeply influenced many christian theologising like St. Augustine of Hippo and Pseudo-Dionysius and had direct influence on Islamic thinkers.
His original writings (written in greek) were lost to the West until renaissance.

We will read "The Enneads"
which is collection of his writings assembled by his student Porphyry of Tyre, in 12 sections approx. 40-50 pages every two weeks.

Continuing the theme of truth and politics, we turn to consider the related question of what we should expect from politicians when it comes to lying. Some see lying as a black and white issue, but honest reflection of the nuance of public discussion yields tension between the desire for complete honesty and the reality of uncertainty, various media platforms, and the raw speed of information. That being said, there are different degrees of lying in politics and one suspects that there is some critical threshold which a democracy can tolerate. Join us as we discuss the wisdom of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) who was a widely respected political philosopher of the twentieth century.

One of the great classics of European literature, Faust is Goethe's most complex and profound work. To tell the dramatic and tragic story of one man’s pact with Mephistopheles in exchange for knowledge and power, Goethe drew from an immense variety of cultural and historical material, and a wealth of poetic and theatrical traditions. What results is a tour de force illustrating Goethe’s own moral and artistic development, and a symbolic, cautionary tale of Western humanity striving restlessly and ruthlessly for progress.

Join us to discuss this classic book over the course of 6-weeks!
Week 1 Sat 6/20 12:30pm-2:30pm The Seahorse Room @ Pier 57
Week 2 Sat 6/27 12:30pm-2:30pm The Seahorse Room @ Pier 57
Week 3 Sat 7/4 12:30pm-2:30pm The Seahorse Room @ Pier 57
Week 4 Sat 7/11 12:30pm-2:30pm The Seahorse Room @ Pier 57
Week 5 Sat 7/18 12:30pm-2:30pm The Oyster Room @ Pier 57
Week 6 Sat 7/25 12:30pm-2:30pm The Seahorse Room @ Pier 57

Reading for Week 1
Read from beginning of Part 1 through the scene titled, "A Garden Pavilion." ie. Stop when you get to the scene, "Forest and Cave" (about 78 pages)
*this will be the longest week of reading*