The Calgary Philosophy Meetup

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GROUP RULES
Everyone is welcome, but speaking priority will be given to people who have done the reading.

• Keep your comments concise and relevant to the text.
• Please limit each comment to a maximum of 2-3 minutes. You're welcome to speak as many times as you wish.
• I suggest 1-2 hours per week reading and preparing for the discussion.
• Virtual meeting courtesy: let's not interrupt each other and keep mics muted when not speaking.
• We'll focus the discussion with key passages and discussion questions. Be sure to bring your favorite passages, questions, comments, criticisms, etc.

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NOTES ON THE TEXT
In this text Henry introduces us to a duality that we have not seen in earlier readings—the distinction between the finite and the infinite. As we do know from past sessions, life is a pure, immanent subjectivity that distinguishes itself from all external representation, such the perception of an object. This living subjectivity is, moreover, fully embodied and material for Henry: not as an objective, externalized body, for the body in this sense has been rendered dead by the analytical gaze of scientific intentionality. Rather, we are alive as an immanent, interior embodiment that Henry calls flesh.

Now we find that within immanent life itself we can distinguish further between any discrete finite individual and the infinite, all-encompassing Life from which all living beings proceed. Henry calls this absolute life God, and it is here that his phenomenology takes a theological turn. The Divine is for him the eternal process in which life experiences and loves itself—the immanent generation of each finite living being from its infinite source. Henry hints at a Trinitarian conception when he speaks of Life itself as God and of its first ipseity as the Word. In Christian fashion, he goes on to describe perdition as clinging to one's finite self in idolatrous enjoyment. Flesh achieves salvation by returning to its infinite and eternal source to ground itself therein.

Henry appears to differ from traditional Christian understanding in conceiving of God as fully immanent. As Marion clarifies in the companion piece, God is invisible, to be sure, yet this invisibility does not make God transcendent in any sense for Henry. On the contrary, to a phenomenologist like him, it is the world that is transcendent, owing to the gap that inevitably separates it from the experiencing self. Absolute life never appears on the horizon of external perception and is thus never marked by such a gap. The Divine is so intimate to living flesh that it constitutes its very living process—that in which it lives and which lives in it, its Archi-Presence.

Some questions to consider:

• It's easy to suppose that Henry's account of 'Archi-Presence', with all its Christian and Cartesian layers, is a prime candidate for a deconstruction in the style of Derrida and, likely, Deleuze. How would such a deconstruction proceed in outline?
• Isn't there a fundamental instability in claiming that Life is both Divine and fully material (and, qua material, immanent to experience)? After all, isn't materiality, sensuality, affect precisely that which repels the spirit? Or should we revise this classical notion in light of Henry's philosophy?
• How is traditional Christianity likely to respond to Henry's theology? Would his view of God as immanent to our phenomenological experience be considered heretical?
• What might existentialist Christians, like Kierkegaard or Gabriel Marcel, have to say to Henry? Hasn't he gone against existentialism (theist or secular) by placing essence before existence?
• Can Henry's account be read in terms of Trinitarian theology? He has already distinguished two dimensions of immanence, namely Absolute Life and its ipseity as the Word. Can we discern a third aspect or person in his descriptions of immanence?

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All readings can be found in this Google folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VPRdvZYmUKBY3cSxD8xC8sTYtSEKBXDs

Art: Wassily Kandinsky — Composition IX, 1936

Welcome everyone to the next series (starting June 23) that Jen and Philip are presenting! This time around we are reading the book: Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason: Science and the History of Reason (1989) by Gary Gutting

The format will be similar to our usual "accelerated live read". What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 20-30 pages of text before each session. Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading.

NOTE: We'll be joined by numerous other participants from the Toronto Philosophy Meetup at these meetings –
https://www.meetup.com/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/events/calendar/

As always, this meetup will be 3 hours. During the first 2 hours we will talk in a very focused way on the chapter we have read. During this part of the meetup, only people who have done the reading will be allowed to influence the direction of the conversation. So please do the reading if you intend to speak during the first 2 hours of this meetup. You might think this does not apply to you, but it does! It applies to you.

During the last hour (which we call "The Free for All") people can talk about absolutely anything related to philosophy. People who have not done the reading will be allowed (and encouraged!) to direct the conversation during this third hour.

Foucault wrote on a wide range of topics. During the first 2 hours of the meetup, we will only talk about his views on Science and the History of Science. I realize this may not be the most popular part of his work, but it is the part we are talking about. During the "Free for All" we can talk about other aspects of his work including the popular parts.

Reading Schedule

1. June 23, read to p. 14
2. July 7, read to p 32
3. … p 54
4. … p 87
5. … p 110
6. … p 138
7. … p 156
8. … p 179
9. … p 198
10. … p 226
11. … p 261
12. … p 288

Please note that in this meetup we will be actually doing philosophy and not merely absorbing Foucault's ideas in a passive way. What this means is that we will be trying to find flaws in Foucault's reasoning and in his mode of presenting his ideas. We will also be trying to improve the ideas in question and perhaps proposing better alternatives. That is what philosophers do after all!

About the Book:

This is an important introduction to and critical interpretation of the work of the major French thinker, Michel Foucault. Through comprehensive and detailed analyses of such important texts as The History of Madness in the Age of Reason, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge, the author provides a lucid exposition of Foucault's "archaeological" approach to the history of thought, a method for uncovering the "unconscious" structures that set boundaries on the thinking of a given epoch.

The book casts Foucault in a new light, relating his work to Gaston Bachelard's philosophy of science and Georges Canguilhem's history of science. This perspective yields a new and valuable understanding of Foucault as a historian and philosopher of science, balancing and complementing the more common view of him as primarily a social critic and theorist.

Suggestions for Extra Reading

This other book on Foucault is absolutely excellent. I almost picked this book instead of the Gutting. But in the end I decided that the Gutting book would work better in a meetup context since the Béatrice Han book is quite a bit more difficult and requires that the reader know a lot more about Kant. Challenge yourself and read it on your own.

• Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical (2002) by Béatrice Han

Any study of Foucault will benefit from a study of Kant however. This book is excellent and gives the reader a good sense of all the ways there are of interpreting Kant:

• Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: An Introduction and Interpretation by James O'Shea

I had the great good fortune to study Foucault with the late great Canadian Philosopher of Science Ian Hacking whose own work was heavily influenced by Foucault. This book is a study of the history of probability done in a similar way to how Foucault does his histories:

• The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (1975) by Ian Hacking

This is a book by Hacking which is inspired by Foucault's approach to the history of madness

• Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses (1988)

Let's try something new. For the next dozen weeks or so, starting 4/17/2022, we are going to live-read and discuss Aristotle's ~Nicomachean Ethics~. What is new and different about this project is that the translation, by Adam Beresford (2020), happens to be rendered in standard 'Murican English.
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From the translator's "Note" on the text:
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"This translation is conservative in interpretation and traditional in aim. It aims to translate the text as accurately as possible.
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"I translated every page from scratch, from a clean Greek text, rather than revising an existing translation. ... I wanted to avoid the scholars’ dialect that is traditionally used for translating Aristotle.
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"I reject the approach of Arthur Adkins, Elizabeth Anscombe, and others who followed Nietzsche in supposing that the main elements of modern thinking about right and wrong were unknown to the Greeks, or known to them only in some radically different form. My view of humanity and of our shared moral instincts is shaped by a newer paradigm. This is a post-Darwinian translation. (It is also more in line with the older, both Aristotelian and Christian view of human character.)
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"Having said that, I have no interest at all in modernizing Aristotle’s ideas. All the attitudes of this treatise remain fully Greek, very patriarchal, somewhat aristocratic, and firmly embedded in the fourth century BC. My choice of dialect (standard English) has no bearing on that whatsoever. (It is perfectly possible to express distinctively Greek and ancient attitudes in standard English.) ... I have also not simplified the text in any way. I have translated every iota, particle, preposition, noun, verb, adjective, phrase, clause, and sentence of the original. Every premise and every argument therefore remains – unfortunately – exactly as complex and annoyingly difficult as in any other version in whatever dialect.
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"Some scholars and students unwarily assume that the traditional dialect has a special connection with Greek and that using it brings readers closer to the original text; and that it makes the translation more accurate. In reality, it has no special tie to the Greek language, either in its main philosophical glossary or in its dozens of minor (and pointless) deviations from normal English. And in my view it certainly makes any translation much less accurate.
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"I will occasionally refer to the scholars’ dialect (‘Gringlish’) and its traditional glossary in the Notes."
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Here is our plan:
1. Read Intro excerpts or a summary to gain the big picture.
2. Read a segment of the translated text.
3. Discuss it analytically and interpretively.
4. Repeat again at #2 for several more times.
5. Discuss the segments evaluatively.
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Zoom is the project's current meeting platform, but that can change. The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows.