April is on us, and if you’re not in Not School, you’re missing out on the big Spring Thing. Read here if you don’t know what this is.
We seem to have established several stable groups, many of which are starting new books, so there’s plenty of opportunity for new people to jump on board. Check out the March update to read about all the continuing groups.
One new group is in philosophy/media studies: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman. Join it!
The intro to philosophy group will continue on Platonic dialogues, e.g. the Crito; it would definitely work for more folks to jump into that for April.
After Lacan (OK, well, two episodes about Lacan, but that’s an announcement for later), the podcast finally be doing Deleuze, so get in on one of the two (three?) Deleuze groups before it’s too late. After that, we plan some aesthetics, and the aesthetics group is starting a new book, Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics. The ethics group will continue moving through Susan Nieman’s Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy
. Groups are I believe continuing on William James, Jaques Derrida, Karl Marx, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Antonio Damasio (phil. of mind), the philosophy of fiction group is thinking up their next conquest (maybe Cormac McCarthy?), and Adam M. will continue to teach his book “The Fates Unwind Infinity.”
It’s not too late to propose a new group or jump into any of the above. Don’t just listen to philosophy, read some! Don’t just read it, talk about it! You owe it to yourself.
P.S. Gmail has recently adjusted its spam parameters such that all Not School group emails, including your activation email if you go sign up, are being routed to your spam folder. If you go in there and mark some as “not spam,” then it’ll stop doing that.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Just to confirm that the William James group is continuing and we are visiting all sorts of interesting philosophical landscapes that I , for one, really hadn’t associated with Pragmatism. Do join us if you want to explore a real alternative to the philosophical ‘tradition’ that is as American as apple pie and jazz.