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 marks our last meeting in the marketplace that has hosted us for so many months, ARCHESTRATUS. If you've meant to come to previous sessions and didn't get on the mailing list, or otherwise want to keep tabs on the second sailing this little endeavor may have, please RSVP to make sure you get future emails!
This month we will read Michel de Montaigne's "Of Experience," a big messy capacious essay to match big messy capacious Archestratus. Pdf available here (from the Douglas Frame translation).
A taste: " It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. There is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump."
As ever, please come with a sense of passages you find provocative or puzzling, or just one you think might be worth thinking over together.
Last month we read Susan Sontag's "In Plato's Cave" (available HERE).
Before that we read Plato's Meno (available HERE).
Before that we read an excerpt from Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space (available HERE).
Before that 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.