- Genealogy of modern philosophy: This week's reading TBALink visible for attendees
We're currently reading a book from French philosopher Michel Henry (1922-2002):
The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis (1985)
The sections for this week will be announced later, so check back here closer to the event. See below for a few notes on the text. You can find a PDF of the text by clicking on the Google folder link at the verry BOTTOM of this event description - scroll all the way down 👇
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A FEW NOTES ON MICHEL HENRY
Henry is a fascinating, if difficult, thinker. Part of the influential post-War generation of French philosophers, he deliberately kept his distance from Parisian fashions and chose to live and work in the south of France. He trained as a phenomenologist in the tradition of Husserl and Heidegger but from the get-go developed a powerful critique of this tradition - and, following Heidegger, of Western philosophy generally. In their striving for transcendence, Henry argues, philosophers have a tendency to conceal and evade the fundamental substance of affectivity, corporeality and life. According to him, this holds not just of classic idealism but of Husserl, Heidegger and their followers as well.Henry accepts the basic starting points of phenomenology: the emphasis on the structure of appearance, the phenomenological reduction of objectivity to reveal its phenomenal ground, Heidegger's emphasis on a fundamental ontology. He breaks new ground by locating the essence of phenomenality in the affectivity of the living body, or what elsewhere he calls flesh. The world manifests itself to us within the light of our vision only because the radical intimacy and receptivity of embodied life lies at the root of this manifestation. Flesh is thus the transcendental condition for the possibility of appearance, a position that Henry terms material phenomenology.
What distinguishes Michel Henry from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, another phenomenologist of embodiment, is his emphasis on the materiality of of the body as a site of immanence. The existentialist movement tends to see the body as our instrument of existence and our mode of being-in-the-world: only as embodied beings can we press into existential possibilities and thus transcend towards a world, from walking, riding and eating right up to perception, language and abstract thought. For Henry, by contrast, the affective body of life is altogether prior to any transcendence to a world. It is a radical immanence and self-intimacy, a pure self-affection not accessible to vision or appearance, since it is what first makes vision possible.
Henry's immanence critique of the tradition has fascinating affinities with Deleuze and Guattari - no in the least his positive references to Nietzsche in The Geneaology of Psychoanalysis. Like D&G, Henry privileges affirmative life and criticizes the philosophy of transcendence, negativity and death. His material phenomenology, much like Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, is focused on the body and affectivity as fundamental conditions of experience.
And yet, Henry's conception of immanence couldn't be more different than Deleuze's. He regards the Parisian philosophy of difference (Deleuze, also Derrida, Foucault, etc) as simply another instance of the evasion of life in favour of exteriority. Radical immanence for Henry is interiority, inwardness, self-intimacy - an abiding of life with itself that he calls ipseity. At the root of our existence there is a fundamental affective selfhood that remains identical to itself, beyond the externality of space, time and world. This ipseity was glimpsed by Descartes in his Meditations as the cogito but was soon lost in the analysis of perception and objective cognition. Heidegger too, in his concept of ek-stasis, passes over this immanence of corporeal life. It is the task of material phenomenology to uncover and affirm this fundamental self-affectivity as the essential condition of phenomenal experience.
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Join the Facebook group for more resources and discussion:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/755460079505498
If you have attended previous meetings, please fill out a brief survey at this link: https://forms.gle/tEMJ4tw2yVgnTsQD6All readings can be found in this Google folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VPRdvZYmUKBY3cSxD8xC8sTYtSEKBXDs
Art: Blue (1922) by Wassily Kandinsky
- Heidegger & the Measure of Truth: Themes From His Early PhilosophyLink visible for attendees
Welcome everyone to the next meetup series that Jen and Philip are presenting! This time around we are reading the book: Heidegger and the Measure of Truth: Themes From His Early Philosophy by Denis McManus.
Click here for the publishers' book description. Due to limited characters, I could not include here. Thank you for your understanding.
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CHAPTERS
Click here for a list of chapters.
The plan is to cover 1 chapter per meeting.***
MEETING DETAILS (2-WEEK ROTATION)
· Starting April 21
· Meetings run every 2 weeks (every other Sunday)
· Accelerated live read format, with live readings to be done on chosen paragraphs
· Read roughly 30-40 pages beforehand
· Pick a few paragraphs to discuss
· 1pm reserved for book topic
· 3pm reserved for free for allAll are welcome. However if you want to speak in the meetup, please be sure to do the assigned reading.
NOTE: We'll be joined by numerous other participants from the Toronto Philosophy Meetup at these meetings –
https://4142298.xyz/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/events/calendar/***
PURPOSE OF COVERING THIS BOOK
Please note that in this meetup we will be doing philosophy, not history of ideas. We will be trying to find flaws in Heidegger's reasoning and in his mode of presenting his ideas. We will also be trying to improve the ideas in question and perhaps proposing better alternatives. Historians of ideas are people who try to understand ideas from the past. Of course philosophers must try to do this too, but they then go on to critically assess the ideas in question. In this meetup, we will be philosophers and not historians of ideas!
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CLARIFICATION OF THIS MEETUP'S ATTITUDE TO HEIDEGGER'S RACISM
Philip writes: I feel that it is important to be clear up front about how the topic of Heidegger's racist politics will be dealt with in this meetup. Throughout his life (starting as a very young man) Heidegger was drawn to far right wing, nationalist, racist views which any reasonable person should find loathsome. Yet when it comes to thinking about the way the world is and what it means to be a human in that world, Heidegger is arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century. Some meetups rule out any discussion of Heidegger's politics, even though this is a core aspect of Heidegger's way of thinking. This meetup will not do that. In this meetup, we will make room for discussion of how Heidegger's politics may relate to his ideas on ontology and being human. Also, it will be possible in this meetup to consider whether Heidegger's ideas on ontology and being human shaped his politics. These questions will certainly not be the main focus of the meetup (far from it). But these questions will not be ignored either.
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OTHER PHILOSOPHERS IN THIS BOOK
Please note that Denis McManus's book refers to many other philosophers, both living and dead. No one should feel overwhelmed by the task of learning about these other philosophers since Philip will fill in the relevant background information on these philosophers as they come up.
The one possible exception is Kant. The Denis McManus book does mention Kant from time to time. Although Kant is the philosopher that Philip knows best, Kant's philosophy is so vast and intricate that it just does not lend itself to easy summarization. Philip will do his best to explicate Kant when Kant's name comes up – but it is a Herculean task!
There is an awful lot of nonsense written about Kant which is widely circulated (and widely believed) in the English speaking world. Anyone who wants to explore in any depth the parts of the McManus book which deal with Kant should consider reading one of the following excellent books about Kant:
- Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (second edition, 2004) by Henry E. Allison. This book gives a great overview of many of the various ways of interpreting Kant. It also gives an interpretation which Philip thinks is (in broad outline) basically on the right track. However, even if you do not accept Allison's interpretation, this book is invaluable in helping the reader overcome the interpretations.
- Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: An Introduction and Interpretation
by James O'Shea.
- Live-Reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics – American StyleLink visible for attendees
Let's try something new. For the next dozen weeks or so, starting 4/17/2022, we are going to live-read and discuss Aristotle's ~Nicomachean Ethics~. What is new and different about this project is that the translation, by Adam Beresford (2020), happens to be rendered in standard 'Murican English.
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From the translator's "Note" on the text:
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"This translation is conservative in interpretation and traditional in aim. It aims to translate the text as accurately as possible.
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"I translated every page from scratch, from a clean Greek text, rather than revising an existing translation. ... I wanted to avoid the scholars’ dialect that is traditionally used for translating Aristotle.
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"I reject the approach of Arthur Adkins, Elizabeth Anscombe, and others who followed Nietzsche in supposing that the main elements of modern thinking about right and wrong were unknown to the Greeks, or known to them only in some radically different form. My view of humanity and of our shared moral instincts is shaped by a newer paradigm. This is a post-Darwinian translation. (It is also more in line with the older, both Aristotelian and Christian view of human character.)
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"Having said that, I have no interest at all in modernizing Aristotle’s ideas. All the attitudes of this treatise remain fully Greek, very patriarchal, somewhat aristocratic, and firmly embedded in the fourth century BC. My choice of dialect (standard English) has no bearing on that whatsoever. (It is perfectly possible to express distinctively Greek and ancient attitudes in standard English.) ... I have also not simplified the text in any way. I have translated every iota, particle, preposition, noun, verb, adjective, phrase, clause, and sentence of the original. Every premise and every argument therefore remains – unfortunately – exactly as complex and annoyingly difficult as in any other version in whatever dialect.
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"Some scholars and students unwarily assume that the traditional dialect has a special connection with Greek and that using it brings readers closer to the original text; and that it makes the translation more accurate. In reality, it has no special tie to the Greek language, either in its main philosophical glossary or in its dozens of minor (and pointless) deviations from normal English. And in my view it certainly makes any translation much less accurate.
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"I will occasionally refer to the scholars’ dialect (‘Gringlish’) and its traditional glossary in the Notes."
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Here is our plan:
1. Read Intro excerpts or a summary to gain the big picture.
2. Read a segment of the translated text.
3. Discuss it analytically and interpretively.
4. Repeat again at #2 for several more times.
5. Discuss the segments evaluatively.
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Zoom is the project's current meeting platform, but that can change. The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows. - Designing The Perfect Society – 1on1 philosophical & political discussion (COH)Link visible for attendees
IMPORTANT NOTICE:
To be the speaking participant you must RSVP via Calendly.
The link to my Calendly calendar is available in my Egora profile:
Egora-ILP.org/philosopher/Cezary_JurewiczAll others are welcome to join to listen, use the chat, use the breakout rooms, and comment at the end.
About Citizen Office Hours:
If the Citizen is to be the highest authority in democracy, should we not have office hours to make ourselves available and accountable to our fellow citizens? The answer is YES – yes, we should.Also, in a democracy, there is no power without responsibility. If the citizens do not accept the responsibility of being citizens, then we do not really have any power – the power we might think we have is illusory. Therefore, all responsible citizens should make themselves available at their own "Citizen Office Hours".
This event is a publication of my Citizen Office Hours. I am making myself available to discuss any of my or your ideas published in Egora. Please be already registered for Egora before our meeting and at least somewhat familiar with my Ideological Profile so we can have a proper and thorough discussion. If you share your Ideological Profile in the comments in advance, i will take some time to study it before our meeting (ideally, the audience will do so too).
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “Ghosts” (2004) — Short Story DiscussionLink visible for attendees
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 15 September 1977) is a Nigerian author regarded as a leading voice in contemporary African and postcolonial literature. Her works explore the complexities of the Nigerian and African experience, including dimensions of religion, culture, race, class, and gender, often interwoven with historical and political contexts. Her breakthrough second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), gained international acclaim for its depiction of the devastation caused by the Nigerian Civil War.
Adichie writes in English and Igbo, mixing both languages in her works, which have been translated into over thirty other languages. Citing Chinua Achebe and Buchi Emecheta as inspirations, her style juxtaposes Western and African influences, particularly the Igbo culture. Adichie has received numerous awards and accolades for her writing, including the Orange Prize for Fiction, the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
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This is a series of occasional meetups (hosted by the Toronto Philosophy Meetup) to discuss short stories by various authors. We started in the fall of 2023 and currently meet on Sunday evenings.
This time we will discuss "Ghosts" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a story about a retired professor looking back on his life and the aftermath of the Nigerian civil war. It's the fourth story in her 2009 collection The Thing Around Your Neck and originally published in the Zoetrope in 2004.
Please read the story in advance (20 pages) and bring your thoughts, queries, and favourite passages to share with us at the meeting. A pdf of an English translation is available on the main event page.
Stories by Adichie we've previously discussed in this group:
🔥 BONUS: Adichie's 2009 TED talk “The danger of a single story” is the 14th most viewed TED Talk of all time with more than 50 million views. 🔥
Note: We'll be joined by many other participants from the Toronto Philosophy Meetup at this meeting – https://4142298.xyz/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/events/304151207/
- FTI: On why conservatives are so successful globallyLink visible for attendees
Strong-belief conservatives have been surging across the world. Let’s talk about the techniques that conservatives have been using globally to create such a surge in success all around the world. While of course the strategies are not the same anywhere, I believe there are some common themes from the places I’ve made observations and done fact checking where conservative popularity has swelled, even when the conservative narrative falls off the rails of truth. Hear me out with an open mind, then tell me where you agree and disagree in the conversation portion of the evening.
Format: Lecture and discussion
Note: social time for our community 15 minutes before the presentation.
To get familiar with our organization, feel free to learn more here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E16-qv-OZZoKh4HSyHCtQ_eZA-ko_n3Kd3SwxfLpk84/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.qsvmnmkadvaqAfter registering via zoom, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
We publish our event recordings on our Youtube channel to offer our help to anyone who would like to but can’t attend the meeting, so we need to give this clause. If you don’t want to be recorded, just remain on mute and keep your video off.
Here’s our legal notice: For valuable consideration received, by joining this event I hereby grant Free Thinker Institute and its legal representatives and assigns, the irrevocable and unrestricted right to use and publish any and all Zoom recordings for trade, advertising and any other commercial purpose, and to alter the same without any restriction. I hereby release Free Thinker Institute and its legal representatives and assigns from all claims and liability related to said video recordings.
