Hey Everybody

This week, I think it would be ultra-cool to take a look at the concept of emergence. This is an enormous concept that I would argue that you are OBLIGATED as a thinking person to have opinions on. 

When speaking of complex entities such as the capitalist world system, or the human mind or language the question is always going to come up: what is the relationship of the whole to its parts and what is the relationship of the parts to the whole. 

Is the complexity of the human mind fundamentally understandable by reducing its phenomenon to neurological events in the brain? Or does the human mind have qualities or properties that you cannot immediately trace back to physical events in the brain?

Was Margaret Thatcher in her efforts to gut the British Welfare State and break the power of trade unions correct in saying that "there's no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women and their families?" Is society just a mass aggregation of individuals? is society just its individuals? Or was Karl Marx correct to see capitalists and workers as mere personifications of MACRO economic categories, their behavior being shaped capitalism's "laws of motion"? 

Is gender reducible to the body or is it in fact the social construct more and more people say that it is? Is "race" reducible to bodily difference of people, or is it determined by historically situated hierarchies that are open to abolition? 

I am by no means a specialist in any natural science but emergence is also an important concept for understanding the relation of biological entities to non-biological components. What is the relationship of any micro entity to any macro entity. What are the relationships of the "special sciences" to physics?

What is the relationship of your major to other majors?

What ever your academic goals the relationship of parts to wholes is a problem you cannot escape. Lets face it head on! Avanti!

Thomas

We will be meeting once again this Friday October 1 in room 229 in the Performing Arts and Humanities building to watch and discuss a 1950's interview with Jewish Marxist Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. The interview is from the Mike Wallace show in the height of the cold war and discusses what Fromm takes to be the highly destructive relationship capitalism has with human psychological well-being. If you hate or love capitalism, if you hate or love socialism, if you think psychological suffering is strictly personal in character or highly social in character., you will not want to miss this meeting. 

Secondly, we will be discussing democratically what topics to discuss in the following weeks in an effort to foster an enthusiastic, inclusive, participatory atmosphere and practice among the members of Philosophers Anonymous. 

Super stoked to hear everyone's thoughts on these important issues. Let's philosophize baby!

Thomas