NYC Philosophy and Psychology Readers Community

Enneads are collection of essays on various topics. They don't need to be read in order and therefore you can jump in at any point if the title seems interesting and you are familiar with Plato or Neoplatonism.

Plotinus isn't just a weak reverberation of Plato, but a very influential philosopher of the soul and its relationship to the divine. He is a deep thinker who lived in the transitional period (204/5 -270) of the human consciousness, moving from polytheistic thinking to monotheistic thinking. He is one of the last, free writers on god and the soul without the christian dogma.
Yet, still he deeply influenced many christian theologising like St. Augustine of Hippo and Pseudo-Dionysius and had direct influence on Islamic thinkers.
His original writings (written in greek) were lost to the West until renaissance.

We will read "The Enneads"
which is collection of his writings assembled by his student Porphyry of Tyre, in 12 sections approx. 40-50 pages every two weeks.

Are there any proper facts which belong to the subject of epistemology? Or are we simply learning the language and way of life which has been invented and passed down to us? In The Archaeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault we find a careful analysis of the hidden assumptions which form the bedrock on which we build the rest of our lives. By challenging these foundations Foucault invites us to discourse analysis and genealogy as a way of re-imagining what the future could look like. As is often the experience in philosophy, a tension between freedom and weightlessness is cultivated as we ask how we should live on a foundation we did not choose.

We tend to think of knowledge as something we can state, explain, or justify. Michael Polanyi begins The Tacit Dimension with a simple challenge to that picture: “We can know more than we can tell.”
We recognize a face without being able to describe exactly how. We use tools, navigate our surroundings, learn skills, and make judgments without consciously representing everything that goes into what we are doing. Polanyi argues that this kind of tacit knowing isn't just peripheral to knowledge, it is one of its basic conditions.
From there, the book opens onto much larger questions about perception, scientific discovery, objectivity, expertise, and the limits of formal explanation.

~New location again~

Deterritorialize with us at weekly discussions of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's 1972 first volume of their groundbreaking Capitalism and Schizophrenia. This critique of Freudian psychoanalysis and modern capitalism reframes unconscious desire as a machinic productive force, dynamic multiplicities of flows that can be directed against fascistic thinking toward creative and revolutionary action.

Required reading for this meeting: Ch. 4 "Introduction to Schizoanalysis" sections 1–2 (pg. 273–296)