The monthly essay reading groups around 10 years ago were quite successful. I’d like to see if the tradition can be revived. But the world has changed in the last 10 years. Are our brains now so fried by social media that we’ve forgotten how to read? Are our attention spans so stunted that we cannot get through an essay?
At least on TPF, I suspect we’ll manage. So the idea is that each month we vote for a philosophical essay/paper, and then discuss it.
Here are the options for the first reading. I’ve tried to make the list inter-disciplinary, but everything here has philosophical implications.
WARNING: Contains spoilers.
“An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” by Immanuel Kant
Essential in understanding the modern world. Kant’s answer to the question is that enlightenment is the emergence from immaturity—the courage to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. It sounds simple, but what counts as genuine autonomous thought, and who decides this? The essay is a useful entry point into Kantian themes without requiring any prior acquaintance with Kant’s big books.
“The Will to Believe” by William James
James argues that in certain genuine dilemmas, where evidence alone cannot decide the question, it is sometimes rational to let your will, your temperament, and your needs determine your belief. W.K. Clifford’s opposing view, that it is always wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence, is James’s explicit target, and the debate between their positions is still going.
“On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt
Frankfurt makes a precise distinction between lying and bullshitting: the liar knows the truth and intentionally contradicts it, while the bullshitter is indifferent to truth altogether. That indifference, Frankfurt argues, makes bullshit a more corrosive threat to discourse than lying.
“Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” by Clifford Geertz
Geertz argues that culture is not a phenomenon to be observed and measured but a web of meaning to be interpreted, more like a text than a mechanism. One of the most cited essays in the social sciences, serving a kind of foundational methodological role with far-reaching implications for the philosophy of social science. Important for the debate about whether the social sciences can or should model themselves on natural science.
“The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes
Short and very influential. Barthes argues that once a text is written, the author’s intentions become irrelevant; meaning is produced by the reader, not reconstructed from a biographical investigation. The essay is partly a critique of literary criticism’s cult of the author (a bit like the cult of the auteur in cinema), and partly a philosophical claim about language itself: that writing is a space where the subject dissolves. Significant in debates about meaning, intention, and understanding.
“Eliminative Materialism” by Paul Churchland (a chapter in his book, Matter and Consciousness)
Churchland argues that beliefs, desires, and intentions don’t exist—that the everyday mental vocabulary through which we explain human behaviour refers to nothing real, and will eventually be replaced by neuroscience the way phlogiston was replaced by chemistry. Optionally, participants could look at the earlier and more technical paper from 1981, “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes”.
If you feel like discussing any of these, vote below. You can choose two.
- “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” by Immanuel Kant
- “The Will to Believe” by William James
- “On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt
- “Thick Description” by Clifford Geertz
- “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes
- “Eliminative Materialism” by Paul Churchland
Thanks to @Amity for goading me into doing this.
You made it happen! I love your options with their descriptions. I immediately eliminated a few. Always intrigued by writers and lying…
