Offerings, Plans, Reflections

Beauty and Being Alive; Intersectionality; Black Dignity; Philosophical Temperaments

Dear all,

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In this week’s reflection, Alexandra Brown considers the role that philosophical temperaments play in our understanding of what philosophy actually is.

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Offerings

Your Sunday Read!
“Intersectionality”: an essay by Reiland Rabaka.

Reiland Rabaka is a wonderful interdisciplinary scholar and the Founder and Director of the Center for African & African American Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. In this essay from our “New Basics” series, Rabaka situates intersectionality within a long history of Black feminist thought that finally hit the global scene with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s seminal 1989 paper, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”.

This week, we also uploaded “Philosophy, Memoir, and Revelation”, a conversation with Andy West, author of the bestselling The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy.

Events
Monday at (***LATER TIME OF***) 3pm EST/8pm EST:
Beauty and Being Alive: Philosophers Nick Riggle and C. Thi Nguyen will explore the beauty of being alive by investigating the things we say to inspire ourselves and each other: seize the day, treat yourself, you only live once. While these clichés are at best vague, at worst stupid, Riggle and Nguyen will help point us to what is valuable and enriching about them.

We uploaded the video recording of the recent conversation between Vincent Lloyd and Motsamai Molefe on “Black Dignity” here. For those of you who are short of time, we also uploaded two short clips from the event here and here.

Finally, you can now sign up for all the remaining events in the winter series (“The Good-Enough Life”; “Hannah Arendt and the Human Condition”; and “Wonder’s Politics”) here.

Plans

In the spring, we will be organizing some post-event gatherings in which a small number of people can join the speakers for a more intimate and informal conversation. Priority access will be given to our print subscribers and Patreon supporters.

We can also confirm that our wonderful contributing editor Jeremy Bendik-Keymer will be guest-editing this year’s autumn issue on the topic of “Good Relationships”. You can read many brilliant essays by Jeremy on this topic (and others) at the APA blog. In 2024, Brad Evans is currently assembling a kick-ass line-up for a special issue on technology and philosophy.

Reflections

This week, Alexandra Brown, a long-time reader and supporter of The Philosopher, considers the role that philosophical temperaments play in our understanding of what philosophy actually is:

Given the diverse temperaments of the great philosophers, many of them somewhat extreme to say the least, it seems unlikely that a single “philosophical” way of thinking can be identified. And yet it has been widely argued that since Socrates and Plato the Western philosophical tradition has been characterised by a faith in reason and logic as the key tools to guide us in the perennial philosophical task of exploring and understanding the nature of reality. Certainly we can understand the Socratic-Platonic legacy as a move away from myth, poetry, mysticism, instinct, irrationality, one that Friedrich Nietzsche ominously characterises as spreading “like a shadow that keeps growing in the evening sun”.

So we may think of philosophical thought as characterised by reason, logic, and argumentation, a kind of “conceptual engineering” (to use Simon Blackburn’s phrase). It is often said that philosophy begins with wonder – with the kind of awe and even shock captured in the question, “Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?” Yet philosophy may equally begin, like spiritual quests, with disappointment, confusion, and despair. Would the same kind of thinking be appropriate in each case? Perhaps one’s disappointment or despair emerges from the use of too much reason!?

The concern over what exactly we mean by philosophical thinking is further complicated by the question of what philosophy itself is. Once again, this is likely to be closely connected to the temperament of the individual philosopher. For every philosopher like Tom Hurka who thinks of philosophy in a rather dry way as “abstract thought guided by principles of logic and ideals of precision in thought and argumentation about the most general issues concerning human beings and the world and our place in the world”, there will be another like Keith Ward who considers philosophy to be “the pursuit of wisdom”, including “spiritual wisdom”, that involves “asking questions about the nature of the human self and the nature of reality, and how this will affect your life in practice”. Finally, a philosopher like Jeff McMahan may legitimately answer that he has “no idea what philosophy is”!

Nietzsche felt that in the end every great philosophy is a kind of confession and involuntary memoir (presumably the same is true of less great ones as well). For those who regard the goal of philosophy as uncovering timeless universal truths cleansed of any lingering taints of subjectivity, this conclusion may be unsettling; for others there may be something liberating in the idea that there are potentially as many philosophies, and thus ways of thinking philosophically, as there are philosophers.

Alexandra Brown is a retired school teacher living in Detroit. Her philosophical interests include aesthetics, ethics, feminist philosophy, and Buddhist philosophy.

Ending

Thanks for reading this. If you would like to write one of the reflections in future, please email something over to us at: thephilosopher1923@gmail.com. Ideally no more than 500 words.

Comments and feedback about any of this always welcome.

Wishing you all a great week ahead!

Anthony Morgan
Editor