NYC Philosophy and Psychology Readers Community

Kore Kosmou is the largest fragment from Stobaean Hermetica. Johannes Stobaeus was a 5th century Macedonean scholar who compiled a huge amounts of ancient writings chiefly for his son's education but his efforts help us read many hermetic fragments including Kore Kosmou today.

In 2018 David Litwa published translation of hermetic fragments that were not part of Corpus Hermeticum, these include Stobaean fragments, Viennese fragments and writing of other scholars referring to Hermetic writings.

Kore Kosmou has a definite Egyptian theme to it. It is written as dialogue between the goddess Isis and her son Horus. In succinct little chapters it gives an explanation of creation of the universe, human place in the universe, humanity’s fall and possible return to grace and even a background story on Hermes himself. Some scholars place the origin of this fragment to the time of 5th or 6th century BCE.

It is an honor to be able to study this material after thousands of years of mythological and spiritual cleansing and destruction.

This Meetup is for those who are deeply interested in mythology, teleology, Hermetica, esoterica, and hellenistic writings.

Expectations are that you will do the reading assigned for that session and participate respectfully.

Heather Douglas is a philosophy professor at Michigan State University who specializes in philosophy of science. In these series of lectures, she explores the importance of discussing philosophy of science in the same conversation as political philosophy and the diversity of different values that make up a pluralistic society. During the Covid-19 pandemic, we all bore witness to the chaos that can ensue when science and politics clash in real time. It seems clear that we cannot keep science completely separate from values in a healthy democracy and so the question becomes, what is the right place for science and values in a democracy? Join us as we follow Professor Heather Douglass as a guide to discussing this prescient topic.

We will be discussing 2 short stories by Leo Tolstoy— "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" and "What Men Live By".
In these stories Tolstoy contrasts a life driven by endless acquisition with a life grounded in love, arguing that humans live not by what they accumulate, but by how they relate to one another.

Required Reading
"How Much Land Does a Man Need?" (Roughly 20 pages)
"What Men Live By" (Roughly 30 pages)

Join us for weekly discussions of Jacques Derrida's 1967 deconstruction of the speech/writing binary in western philosophy, Of Grammatology.

Required reading for this meeting: Part Two, Ch. 3, subheading "The Turn of Writing" (pg. 235) through the end of Ch. 4 "From/Of the Supplement to the Source" (pg. 344)