About us
See upcoming readings on our Notion, and chat with us on our Discord
Welcome to the San Francisco Philosophy Reading Group! We are a group of amateur, interested philosophers who get together to read and discuss classic works of philosophy.
Our group will focus on a different reading every 2 weeks, and then meet up in person to discuss the reading in a friendly and casual setting. We welcome readers of all levels and philosophical inclinations, as long as you are willing to engage with the reading and discussion in a friendly, open manner.
We also have a Discord where we discuss Kant and other philosophical topics—join us anytime!
Upcoming events
2
Habermas and the Instruments of Domination
The Fold, 3359 26th St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA, San Francisco, CA, USScience and technology are often celebrated as engines of human progress, promising greater freedom, prosperity, and control over our environment. But what if technological progress also serves to reinforce existing structures of power? What happens when political and moral questions are increasingly treated as technical problems to be solved by experts?
In his influential 1968 essay Technology and Science as "Ideology," Jürgen Habermas builds on the work of Max Weber and Herbert Marcuse to examine how scientific and technological rationality can become instruments of political and economic domination. He distinguishes between instrumental action, concerned with efficiency and control, and communicative interaction, through which people establish shared norms and determine how society ought to be organized. We'll discuss whether science and technology are inherently political, whether technological progress necessarily produces human progress, and whether Habermas's critique remains relevant in an age of artificial intelligence and algorithmic governance. Are we becoming more rational as a society, or simply more efficient at pursuing goals we've never collectively chosen?
The reading can be found here
30 attendees
Friendship and the Common World
The Fold, 3359 26th St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA, San Francisco, CA, USFor this session we’ll read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics VIII.1–6, VIII.9, IX.6, and IX.9, alongside Hannah Arendt’s 1959 Lessing Prize address, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing.” Both writers, writing millenia apart, tackle the question of how friendship relates to the shared world that friends inhabit, and whether it can survive that world coming apart
Aristotle divides friendship into three kinds — utility, pleasure, and character — and holds that only the third is friendship in the full sense. Two claims push this outward into politics. Friendship and justice have the same extent, so every friendship belongs to a community and takes its shape from that community’s end: sailors have the friendship of the voyage, citizens the friendship of the city. And IX.6 limits concord to practical matters that concern the parties themselves, not agreement about everything.
Arendt draws a line through this. She separates friendship from fraternity — the warmth that arises among the persecuted and among those who have withdrawn from an unbearable world. Fraternity produces real humanity, but at the cost of worldlessness, flourishing precisely where the world between people has dropped away. Friendship stays worldly, and consists in discourse about a common world among people who see it from different positions. Her Lessing prefers friendship to truth, a preference Aristotle may not be able to absorb.
You can find a free copy of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics here. Hannah Arendt's essay is here
36 attendees
Past events
46
