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
John Vervaeke - How Minds Find What Matters
The Fold, 3359 26th St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA, San Francisco, CA, USFor this session, we'll be reading John Vervaeke, Timothy Lillicrap, and Blake Richards’ paper “Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science.”
Up to this point, many of our discussions have focused on consciousness, experience, and the mind’s relation to the world. This paper shifts the focus to a deeper problem underlying cognition itself: how do minds figure out what matters? Vervaeke and his co-authors argue that many classic problems in cognitive science — problem solving, categorization, rationality, action, communication, and the frame problem — all depend on the same hidden capacity: relevance realization. Cognitive agents must somehow zero in on the relevant features of a situation while ignoring an indefinite background of possible alternatives.
The paper argues that we should not look for a theory of “relevance” as if relevance were a fixed property things have. Instead, we need a theory of the mechanisms by which relevance is realized dynamically, context-sensitively, and non-circularly. On their view, cognition is not best understood as rule-governed symbol manipulation alone, but as a self-organizing process that balances competing pressures: generality and specificity, exploration and exploitation, efficiency and resilience.
The reading can be found in the discord in the sf-philosophy-reading-group channel
40 attendees
Free Will, Determinism, and Responsibility
The Fold, 3359 26th St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA, San Francisco, CA, USFor this session, we'll be reading and debating two papers on Determinism: P.F Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment", and Robert Sapolsky's "Life without Free Will"
Most of us operate with a "folk" concept of free will: the sense that when we choose, we could genuinely have done otherwise, and that we — not the prior causes acting on us — originate our actions, which earns us deserved praise and blame. Determinism threatens this by holding that prior causes (genes, upbringing, brain states) that predate our birth produce every choice, leaving no room for that kind of ultimate authorship. Indeterminism doesn't obviously rescue it either, since randomness fails to give us control.
In "Freedom and Resentment" (1962), Strawson argues that the debate rests on a mistaken framing. Instead of asking whether determinism holds, he points to our "reactive attitudes" — resentment, gratitude, indignation, forgiveness — that we direct at one another in ordinary life. These attitudes constitute how we treat each other as persons; they don't function as conclusions drawn from a metaphysical theory, so discovering that determinism holds cannot rationally dismantle them. Responsibility lives in this web of attitudes, not in any libertarian metaphysics — and stepping out of it entirely remains no real option for us.
Sapolsky's "Life Without Free Will" (a précis of Determined) takes the opposite path: he accepts determinism fully and concludes that the folk concept simply fails. Everything we do traces to biology and environment we never chose, so no one ever truly deserves blame or credit. The upshot, for him: we should dismantle retributive blame and punishment and rebuild our moral and legal systems around prevention and a public-health model — much as we stopped blaming people for epilepsy.
11 attendees
Past events
36
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