The Chicago Philosophy Meetup

Note: Meetings focus on developing a common language and friendship through studying Kant. The host will provide an interpretation of Kant; other interpretations will not be discussed until later in the meeting. Additional interpretations, topics, and questions can be addressed through the Jitsi chat feature.

This session will cover the Transcendental Dialectic Ideal of Pure Reason

Online meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/CPM-Kant-Wednesdays

(links to text at bottom)

(Tentative) Schedule for Critique of Pure Reason:

Week 1:
Preface (A and B editions)
pp Avii - xxii, Bvii - xliv
pp 99 - 124 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 5 - 40 (Pluhar)

Week 2:
Introduction (A and B editions)
pp A1 - 16, B1 - 30
pp 127 - 152 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 43 - 68 (Pluhar)

Week 3:
Transcendental Aesthetic (A and/or B editions)
pp A19 - 49, B33 - 73
pp 155 - 192 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 71 - 104 (Pluhar)

Week 4:
Transcendental Logic Introduction, Book I Chapter I
pp A50 - 83, B74 - 116
pp 193 - 218 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 105 - 140 (Pluhar)

Week 5:
Transcendental Logic Chapter II 'Deduction' (A edition)
pp A84 - 130
pp 219 - 244 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 141 - 174 (Pluhar)

Week 6:
Transcendental Logic Chapter II 'Deduction' (B Edition)
pp B116 - 169
pp 245 - 266 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 175 - 203 (Pluhar)

Week 7:
Transcendental Logic Book II Introduction and Chapter I on the Schematism
pp A130 - 147, B169 - 187
pp 267 - 277 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 204 - 219 (Pluhar)

Week 8:
Transcendental Logic Book II Chapter II
pp A148 - 176, B187 - 218
pp 278 - 295 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 220 - 247 (Pluhar)

Week 9:
Analogies of Experience up to Transcendental Logic Book II Chapter III 'Phenomena and Noumena'
pp A176 - 235, B218 - 294
pp 295 - 337 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 247 - 302 (Pluhar)

Week 10:
Transcendental Logic Book II Chapter III 'Phenomena and Noumena' (A and/or B editions)
pp A235 - 260, B294 - 315
pp 338 - 365 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 303 - 322 (Pluhar)

Week 11:
Transcendental Logic Appendix 'Amphiboly'
pp A260 - 292, B316 - 349
pp 366 - 383 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 323 - 345 (Pluhar)

Week 12:
Transcendental Dialectic Introduction, Book I
pp A293 - 340, B349 - 398
pp 384 - 410 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 346 - 381 (Pluhar)

Week 13:
Transcendental Dialectic Paralogisms (A and/or B editions)
pp A341 - 405, B399 - 332
pp 411 - 458 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 382 - 441 (Pluhar)

Week 14:
Transcendental Dialectic Antinomies Section I - IV
pp A405 - 484, B432 - 512
pp 459 - 507 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 442 - 501 (Pluhar)

Week 15:
Transcendental Dialectic Antinomies Section V - IX
pp A485 - 567, B513 - 595
pp 508 - 550 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 502 - 559 (Pluhar)

Week 16:
Transcendental Dialectic Ideal of Pure Reason
pp A567 - 642, B513 - 670
pp 551 - 589 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 560 - 616 (Pluhar)

Week 17:
Appendix to Transcendental Dialectic
pp A642 - 704, B670 - 732
pp 590 - 623 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 617 - 662 (Pluhar)

Week 18:
Doctrine of Method Introduction, Chapter I
pp A705 - 794, B733 - 822
pp 627 - 671 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 663 - 727 (Pluhar)

Week 19:
Doctrine of Method Chapter II
pp A795 - 830, B823 - 858
pp 672 - 690 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 728 - 755 (Pluhar)

Week 20:
Doctrine of Method Chapter III and IV
pp A832 - 856, B860 - 884
pp 691 - 704 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 755 - 774 (Pluhar)

Two different translations are recommended - both are good:
Preserves original sentence structure: Guyer/Wood
Updates for readability: Pluhar

Links to the text:

PDF of Guyer/Wood translation:
https://libgen.li/edition.php?id=136607414

EPUB of Guyer/Wood translation:
https://libgen.li/edition.php?id=137975974

PDF of Pluhar translation:
https://libgen.li/edition.php?id=136394041

Buy the book on Amazon (or find it someplace else if you don't like Amazon):

Guyer/Wood:
https://www.amazon.com/Critique-Reason-Cambridge-Works-Immanuel/dp/0521657296/ref=sr_1_3

Pluhar (All three Critiques):
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Critiques-3-Set-Practical/dp/0872206297/ref=sr_1_3

Pluhar hardcovers recommended (if available): https://www.amazon.com/Three-Critiques-3-Set-Practical/dp/0872206300/ref=sr_1_2

Meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/CPM-Kant-Wednesdays

We'll start on page 53 with statement 22. (We are on our second trip through the statements.)

The immediate goal of these meetings is to work towards a philosophical interpretation of Leibniz with the interest of eventually bringing this reading into comparison with Kant. This will require a study of Leibniz. To first lead us into this study we will begin with a work of Heidegger's: "Metaphysics as History of Being" from the collection "The End of Philosophy". This essay will ultimately present a pivotal role that Leibniz' thought has in the history of metaphysics. It will first build a background for understanding Leibniz' role through a presentation of figures such as Aristotle and Descartes. At the end of the essay, a short work of Leibniz' is presented, his "twenty-four statements".

Book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/End-Philosophy-Martin-Heidegger/dp/0226323838

PDF: https://annas-archive.org/md5/b13b7532e83b37f4d3e1c8aa1521e9a3

Note: Kant FTΦ (Friends Through Philosophy) is a group of individuals who have connected over reading Kant (and other philosophers). New attendees are welcome, but please observe silently during the meeting. You may use the Jitsi chat feature to participate.

This meeting will focus on individual FTΦ participants' interests, with frequent references to Kant and other philosophers. Discussions may involve shared notions developed over time.

These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.

Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.

Hume Part IV; or, After the Storm, Animal Faith

If you’ve ever found yourself returning, again and again, to the refreshing astringent witch hazel of Hume’s work—not out of “hope” but in recognition of its unsparing clarity—welcome to the pleasure dome.

In the fourth and final episode of Thelma Lavine’s treatment of Hume, we meet the philosopher not only at the end of his system but at the end of his life: urbane, witty, and unflinching even in the face of death, cracking atheism jokes to horrified (because guilt-ridden) deists from his death bed.

It is from this Heideggerian vantage point that Lavine guides us through Hume’s final philosophical demolitions—of the self, of God, of miracles, and—most explosively—of reason itself as a guide in moral life.

We’ll follow Thelma through Hume’s Buddhist “bundle theory” of the self, which Hume claims (rightly) that any sane and serious-minded person ought to favor over the fantasy of a substantial self having continuous personal identity. The former passes his empiricist test; the latter can’t. Playing by the Copy Principle, we must conclude: since no impression of a constant self can be found, the idea collapses. There is not a single mote of evidence for a perduring “I” beneath the passing confetti of sense-consciousnesses, only a conditioned belief induced by the associative operations of memory.

Next, Thelma explores Hume’s surgical dismantling of theistic metaphysics. She does a fabulous job targeting (in order) Descartes’ causal proofs, Anselm’s ontological argument, or the deist design inference from Newtonian order. It’s really cleansing to run through all three flavors at once, and Hume’s empiricism nails them all. Where there is no impression, there is no idea; and where there is no idea, belief is fiction—in this case, a fiction born of fear, not reason. Religion is not knowledge—it’s anthropology.

Here, she shows us how Hume anticipates Nietzsche: the impulse toward religious belief is not the conclusion of rational demonstration but the symptom of psychological need—a projection rooted in fear, dependency, and the human refusal to face an indifferent universe without illusion.

From there, Thelma leads us into Hume’s infamous account of moral judgment: reason, he declares, is “and ought ever to be, the slave of the passions.” Don’t let your mom hear you saying that.

Far from being governed by rational principles, moral conduct emerges from sentiment and sympathy—those contingent, animal impulses which cannot be logically justified, only felt and described. The rationalist’s dream of deducing ethics from first principles is revealed to be, like belief in substance or God, another pious illusion.

Is Hume, then, a nihilist?

No! In a dazzling dialectical reversal, Hume appeals to something beneath reason: instinct. Though philosophy cannot justify our belief in an external world or a continuous self, we nonetheless continue to walk around objects and expect the sun to rise. It is nature, not reason, that governs belief. What remains after reason’s auto-deconstruction is what Hume calls animal faith—a nonrational, unavoidable trust in the givenness of experience.

Once again, Thelma shows us Hume’s link to the contemporary. In this, he anticipates the later “critical philosophy” of Wittgenstein and Hubert Dreyfus—one that exposes the limits of representationalist reason and turns back to pre-reflective, embodied coping as the true foundation of our relation to the world. Our engagement with outer existence is not inferential but animal, instinctive, and unarticulated: not unconscious in the Freudian sense of hidden psychic mechanisms, but background in the Wittgensteinian-Heideggerian sense—a form of life that shows itself in action rather than in propositional form.

Finally, we get to the hard problem of Hume: What survives Hume’s philosophical purge? What becomes of science, of religion, of ethics, after he has taken the torch to all unjustified metaphysical claims? And is Hume’s own mitigated skepticism coherent, or merely a performative contradiction? As Jack Torrence said to Wendy through the pantry door—Go check it out!

This episode forms the hinge on which the entire modern theory of knowledge will turn. If Descartes sought indubitable foundations, Hume dissolves them. What Kant will famously call his own “Copernican revolution” begins here, in the rubble.

Join us as we examine the most devastating—and strangely liberating—chapter of Hume’s thought. It is from here that Thelma will next launch us … into Hegel!

METHOD

Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:

• Thelma Lavine: From Socrates to Sartre

Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:

• THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE

Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.

She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.

View all of our coming episodes here.

Online meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/Kierkegaard-Friday-CPM

We'll start reading from page 253 (Danish IX 242).

Works of Love; Some Christian Deliberations in the Form of Discourses is a collection of reflections and discourses that reflect on love from various perspectives and with respect to various occasions. The theme of love is a frequent topic in Kierkegaard's work, so this should provide us an occasion to reflect on much of Kierkegaard's earlier works.
Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/Works-Love-Kierkegaards-Writings-Vol/dp/0691059160/
PDF: https://annas-archive.org/md5/93afa222d5c3cd524e68739aef47d444

On the Friday Meetings:
The Friday meetings started on January 1st, 2016 with an initial goal of reading through the first half of Kierkegaard's works. Due to continued interest, we have decided to return to previous works for review, study more background texts, and continue beyond the first half of Kierkegaard's writing.
Works read so far in the series:

• The Concept of Irony, With Continual Reference to Socrates (Kierkegaard)
• Notes of Schelling's Berlin Lectures (Kierkegaard)
• Either/Or (Victor Eremita, et al.)
• Two Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
• Fear and Trembling (Johannes de Silentio)
• Repetition (Constantin Constantius)
• Three Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
• Four Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
• Two Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
• Three Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
• Philosophical Fragments (Johannes Climacus)
• Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est (Johannes Climacus)
• Concept of Anxiety (Vigilius Haufniensis)
• Prefaces (Nicolaus Notabene)
• Writing Sampler (A.B.C.D.E.F. Godthaab)
• Four Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
• Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (Kierkegaard)
• Stages on Life's Way (Hilarious Bookbinder)
• Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (Johannes Climacus)
• The Sickness Unto Death (Anti-Climacus)

Works read for background:

• The First Love (Scribe)
• The Berlin Lectures (Schelling)
• Clavigo (Goethe)
• Faust Part I (Goethe)
• Antigone (Sophocles)
• Axioms (Lessing)
• The Little Mermaid (Anderson)

Works read inspired (at least in part) by Kierkegaard

• The Escape from God (Tillich)
• You Are Accepted (Tillich)