7p to 8:30p ◣
Agora, from the Greek – an Assembly of the People, used not only for debating, trials, and other public purposes, but also as a marketplace – a shop? A place where people gather to talk about ideas together.
A philosophy reading group, gathered for the sake of puzzling through the specific peculiarities, insights, and pleasures of the text, and for the sake of talking together about what the world is and who we are.
Monthly, or so. Essays, short texts, ideally readable in a long quiet afternoon. Texts drawn from no particular tradition or time period.
Facilitated by KATIE KELLEY (PhD, Philosophy, NSSR), self-described lapsed academic and longtime friend, sometimes employee of the the shop.
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This month we will read Plato's Meno, an early Socratic dialogue. Pdf available here.
It is perhaps fitting to begin the year by going back to the early days of philosophical inquiry, and to a dialogue that begins with the question "What is virtue?" While the dialogue offers many answers to that question, none really stick, and what we encounter instead of answers is an expanded set of questions: is it possible to desire what we know to be bad, or do we all seek the good? what is it to know what something is? how do we come to learn anything at all?
A small taste:
Meno: How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know?
As ever, please come with a sense of passages you find provocative or puzzling, or a definition of virtue if you feel so bold.
Last month we read an excerpt from Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space (available HERE.)
Last month we read Cora Diamond's "Eating Meat and Eating People" (available HERE).
Before that we read Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (available HERE).
Before that we read a selection of Blaise Pascal's Pensées (available HERE).
Before that we read Herbert Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" (available HERE).
Before that we read Stanley Cavell's "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy" (available HERE).
Before that we read Nietzsche's On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (procure HERE).
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We can't wait to see you! Email information@archestrat.us with questions.