We have meetings every Wednesday at 230 in PAHB 229. We are gonna talk about something spooky this week. Lieutenant Dan will provide further details later in the week.

Sincerely Yours

Phil

Thomas

Our good friend, Vanessa Capuano, has reserved Philosophers Anonymous a meeting space in PAHB 229 on Wednesdays at 2:30 because she is rad. Also, If any fellow students want to join the discord this is a link. The first meeting will be on August 31st.

Thanks again Vanessa

Tom

Hello friends

At the first meeting we'll be discussing what we want the future of PhilAnon to be.

We will be sharing our current philosophical and broader intellectual interests. 

We'll be brainstorming potential events and topics of discussion. 

We'll be discussing how to publicize the group and broaden the group's presence on campus.

Hello 

We will be looking at a short interview with Milton Friedman about libertarianism, followed by a brief history of Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship, and then watching a short lecture by Werner Bonefeld about the German ordoliberal economists of the 1920's and 1930's, Adam Smith and the relationship between the state and the free economy. This should take about an hour and then we have another hour to discuss what we've looked at until we fight or fall asleep.

Thomas 

Thanks to everyone for attending Wednesday's meeting to discuss our individual plans for the future. This upcoming Wednesday, Claire, our resident Gender and Women's Studies major, will be guiding us through a presentation on gender and its relation to ones personal identity and self-understanding. I am super grateful to Claire for volunteering her expertise on this topic in the midst of the apocalypse of finals week. Don't panic everyone. We shall all emerge from this nightmare no matter how mutilated and numb we will be on the other side. 

Horns be with you

Thomas

I want to thank everybody that helped in some way with Daniel's event, Matthew, Lucero, Cameron and Daniel himself. It was super rad for Daniel to take the initiative to share ideas he was stoked on with the rest of the group. We should all be like that. Also I want to thank everyone for attending and opening their mind to some challenging ideas despite the nasty god-forsaken rain. I appreciate it and I am sure Daniel does as well.

This Wednesday the discussion will be about our future plans as individuals. What goals are worth pursuing? How would we like to live the rest of our lives? We will be discussing why we think philosophy is worth studying and what impact it has made on our lives and how we will engage with philosophy in the future. 

I enjoy discussing things in the negative as well because it feels more open ended. What future plans do we not have? What goals or not worth pursuing? How do we not want to live? 

 

It will be a discussion heavy meeting so be thinking of the type of questions you would like to ask your classmates and the questions you would like to be asked. Think of what answers you might provide if asked about what you want in your future.

Tom

Several members have expressed a desire to take a break from PhilAnon this week. Therefore I feel completely comfortable exploiting our usual meeting time to feature a 20 minute documentary about the life and politics of socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, one of the most important figures of 20th century Europe murdered by the proto-Nazi Freikorps in 1919. We will then watch an interview with the editor of Luxemburg's multi-volume collected works, Peter Hudis, that explores her thought in greater depth. Important for discussion will be the ways Luxemburg's politics contrast with those of Leninism and Social Democracy, the relationship between capitalism, socialism and democracy, as well as what it means to live passionately and bravely in the service of human emancipation. 

Nobody has to be a deranged soap box street preacher like myself. Nobody has to think like I think. This is a free discussion for all minds. Lets boogie. 

Your Lord and Savior

Thomas Christ

Thank you so much for engaging in such a rewarding conversation about the Communist Manifesto last week. Special shout out to the more quiet and reserved among us for bringing their voices to the discussion even if they didn't particularly feel super comfortable doing so. PhilAnon is for everybody. 

We have been talking about how social systems and the thoughts that emerge from them are historical in nature. For example, last week we discussed how for Marx capitalism had a beginning and will have an end. It is by no means the eternal form of humanity's relationship with themselves in their social appropriation of nature. Because it is something social and historical, and not transcendent, ontological or natural, capitalism and its self-understanding are open to question both practically and theoretically.  This is the basis of the materialist conception of history, that modes of producing goods and services, are historical and not natural regardless of how asocial, ahistorical and thing-like those modes may appear to the actors that constitute them. 

This week we are going to explore a very different historically minded philosopher. Friedrich Nietzsche. For Nietzsche we can trace a historical genesis of our moral systems and criticize them wholesale. Moral values we hold dear and feel to be rather self-evident like kindness, humbleness and mercy are something we in fact inherit from the culture we are contingently born into and are not eternal natural or god given principles that regulate social life in an asocial ahistorical manner. They have a history, a "genealogy" a beginning and therefore a possible ending or overcoming. By tracing the history of morals we can open them up to scrutiny. We can reappraise, reevaluate and transvaluate them. 

Mr. Tom 

This week we are talking about the Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1948. Nobody is expected to have read this important document or be familiar with its contents or the thought of Marx and Engels. All this will be explained at the meeting, although in a necessarily superficial manner. 

Nobody is expected to agree or disagree with the content under discussion but everyone is encouraged to discuss the content in an open-minded and critical fashion. After all that is what makes PhilAnon meetings fun and interesting, everybody putting their thoughts on display for everyone to behold. 

Mr. Durst