About us
See upcoming readings on our Notion, and chat with us on our Discord
Welcome to the San Francisco Philosophy Reading Group! We are a group of amateur, interested philosophers who get together to read and discuss classic works of philosophy.
Our group will focus on a different reading every 2 weeks, and then meet up in person to discuss the reading in a friendly and casual setting. We welcome readers of all levels and philosophical inclinations, as long as you are willing to engage with the reading and discussion in a friendly, open manner.
We also have a Discord where we discuss Kant and other philosophical topics—join us anytime!
Upcoming events
2
Friendship and the Common World
The Fold, 3359 26th St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA, San Francisco, CA, USFor this session we’ll read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics VIII.1–6, VIII.9, IX.6, and IX.9, alongside Hannah Arendt’s 1959 Lessing Prize address, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing.” Both writers, writing millenia apart, tackle the question of how friendship relates to the shared world that friends inhabit, and whether it can survive that world coming apart
Aristotle divides friendship into three kinds — utility, pleasure, and character — and holds that only the third is friendship in the full sense. Two claims push this outward into politics. Friendship and justice have the same extent, so every friendship belongs to a community and takes its shape from that community’s end: sailors have the friendship of the voyage, citizens the friendship of the city. And IX.6 limits concord to practical matters that concern the parties themselves, not agreement about everything.
Arendt draws a line through this. She separates friendship from fraternity — the warmth that arises among the persecuted and among those who have withdrawn from an unbearable world. Fraternity produces real humanity, but at the cost of worldlessness, flourishing precisely where the world between people has dropped away. Friendship stays worldly, and consists in discourse about a common world among people who see it from different positions. Her Lessing prefers friendship to truth, a preference Aristotle may not be able to absorb.
You can find a free copy of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics here. Hannah Arendt's essay is here
79 attendees
Chuang Tzu on Knowledge, Skill, and Letting Go
The Fold, 3359 26th St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA, San Francisco, CA, USFor this session we’ll read chapters 2, 3, 6, 18, and 19 of Burton Watson’s translation of The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (also known as the Zhuangzi). Together, they ask what it means to live well when our judgments about what is right, useful, or worth pursuing may be less secure than we think.
Chapter 2 questions whether any one perspective can settle a disagreement and ends with Chuang Tzu’s famous butterfly dream. In chapter 3, Cook Ting’s effortless way of cutting up an ox offers a surprising picture of skill: he succeeds by working with what is there rather than forcing his way through it. Chapters 6 and 18 take that attitude into harder territory—illness, grief, death, and the search for happiness. Chapter 19 returns to skill and asks what it might mean to “master” life without trying to control everything in it.
Is Chuang Tzu asking us to give up on truth, or to hold our convictions more lightly? Can we accept change without becoming passive? And is the good life something we achieve, or something we stop getting in the way of?
The reading can be found here
16 attendees
Past events
47
