Closereads: Philosophy with Mark and Wes

On "The Intelligence, The Ideas, and Being," starting on section 6. What is "The Intelligence" anyway? How does its storehouse of Forms get into the material world?

Read along with us, starting on p. 51.

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On "The Intelligence, The Ideas, and Being" from the Enneads (270 C.E.), about the various elements of Neo-Platonist cosmology: You've got The One, which is so awesome that it has literally no properties (so you can't even say it's awesome), then The Intelligence, which is the repository of the Forms (these first two together serve the same function as Aristotle's Unmoved Mover), then The Soul (the World Soul) that actually exists in time and creates things, then lots of little souls, individual Forms that are transmitted around via "the seminal reasons," and the grubby material world that nonetheless may have received enough Form to make us look up the chain of Being toward its divine elements.

Read along with us, starting on p. 46 (PDF p. 48).

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We begin a long series on Maurice Merleau Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception" (1945), focusing on Part I, "The Body": "Experience and Objective Thought." M-P talks first about what seeing an object (like a house) in the world involves. It pre-supposes a relation to us as perceivers, which involves our situatedness in a body. Yet when we make our own body into an objective object in space and time (like the house), we've shifted it from this primordial center of perception into something described like perception. What is involved in this shift?

 Read along with us, starting on p. 77 (PDF p. 102).

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Continuing on "Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge," with the "Experience and Meeting" section, whereby we try to make sense of the theory that the self is metaphysically a relation to other people. How does a model of philosophy based on the cogito (first person perception) necessarily objectify other people? How does speaking "to" someone provide a break from this intentional (objectifying) speaking "of" others? Does this relation to others actually require language? Is bringing in animals off-limits in talking about the phenomenology of consciousness?

Read along with us, starting on p. 63.

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We read the first pages of Emmanuel Levinas' 1958 article, "Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge."

In these initial sections, subtitled "The Problem of Truth" and "From the Object to Being," he's recounting how Heideggerian phenomenology argued that being (including our unarticulated awareness of being) is more fundamental than knowledge (a verbalized, objectifying attitude toward the world attributed to a tradition initiated by Descartes).

Read along with us, starting on p. 60 (PDF p. 66).

For more about Levinas, you can listen to PEL eps. 145 and 146, plus ep. 71 on Buber.

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We discuss the fact-value distinction, both with regard to ethics but also epistemology, i.e. how the search for facts depends on what we're looking for.

Read along with us, starting on p. 6.

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We're reading a 1984 essay by Mark's U. of Michigan undergrad advisor, included among the most cited philosophy papers in some list that Wes found. Railton's goal is to give a naturalistic account of ethics (i.e. ethics within a framework of natural science) that both connects tightly to observed empirical facts and also makes moral facts real parts of our world, not merely reducible to non-moral facts about pleasure, social norms, or the like.

In this first part, Railton lays out what naturalism in ethics amounts to and begins to explain why past empiricists like Hume don't provide an account of morality that is adequately normative: Merely describing what people tend to shoot for doesn't explain why such a norm is binding on us.

Read along with us.

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Continuing on this text about the mechanics of how mind and body work together. Is this schematically useful or hopelessly archaic? You decide!

Read along with us, starting at article 22.

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We're reading the final text by René Descartes, published in 1649, about how mind and body relate to each other.

Read along with us.

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Continuing on "Two Concepts of Liberty" (1969), we finish up the negative conception ("freedom from") and give Berlin's strange account of positive freedom ("freedom to"), which involves an identification of some part of you (e.g. for Plato, your rationality), the obeying of which makes you free, even if what you "want" goes against this.

Read along with us, starting on p. 20.

To get parts 3 and 4, subscribe at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy.

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