PEL Citizens Justin Modra, Alexander Roth, and Brian Wise discuss free will as expressed by the question, “Could I have done otherwise?” The book selected is The Free Will Delusion: How We Settled for the Illusion of Morality (2015).
Not School Update: August 2016
As the heat of summer is causing me to spend as much time trying to stay cool as is humanly possible (and hopefully you as well, dear reader), we want to let you know about some of the upcoming Not School seminars that you can enjoy whilst pondering some of life’s more existential issues (such as: mojito or bud light lime).
B.K.S. Iyengar: A Model for Living Philosophically
Evan Roane, new leader of the Not School Intro Readings group, profiles the recently deceased philosopher who brought together theory and practice.
October Not School Group, Communicating with Habermas
[An update from Hillary on Not School Goings On] We’ve been handling a lot of hard science the past few months and I’d like to move in a different direction for October with Jürgen Habermas’ The Theory of Communicative Action. As Habermas is a strong proponent of argumentation I hope it will encourage all involved to chime in with thoughts, Continue Reading …
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus for Not School
Hello Hello! It’s the beginning of the new month already. This is Hillary, continuing leader for the Not School Intro Philosophy Readings group. For those of you who have been following the Tao Te Ching discussion, hold on to your hats, because we’re drifting a one eighty and dropping into Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. For those of you who haven’t, you missed Continue Reading …
Not School Fiction Talks about Blood Meridian
This June I met with Jordan Payne, Fiction-group regular, and Dylan Casey, of PEL-fame, to discuss Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian. We discussed the Judge, the kid, the landscape, the language, the title and touched on the same author’s No Country for Old Men, The Road and The Crossing in just under two great hours. Here’s the conversation. We cover a Continue Reading …
The Not School Discussion of Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism
Last week Being spoke through me in the saying of Martin Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism as part of a PEL Not School study group. Joining me were Marilynn, Daniel, Rian and Alyson. We worked through Heidegger’s idea that Humanism as a concept was inextricably tied to the history of western metaphysics that sees man as a animal rationale, language as Continue Reading …
Rick Roderick and The Self Under Siege
A complaint I often hear from people averse to the subject of philosophy is that, as interesting as it can often be, it’s really sort of irrelevant to our daily lives. In such conversations Rick Roderick is always the guy who comes to my mind. It’s a criticism he himself made of certain philosophers from time to time, but not Continue Reading …
Not-School Group on Emergence
There’s lots of cool things going on in the PEL Not School discussion groups. To entice those of you that are interested in emergence to come check things out, I’ve proposed reading and discussing a short, interesting essay by the physicist P. W. Anderson called “More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Hierarchical Nature of Science”. The essay itself is Continue Reading …