What we’re about
Join us if you're interested in philosophy, literature, film, and socializing. This group will be for people who want to talk about books and movies that explore life's big questions. We won't presuppose any definite answers. It's more about the journey than the destination.
We will have regular meetups with different formats. Once a month we will meet to discuss a book or selection from a book. Readings will vary widely, ranging from ancient philosophy and literature to contemporary fiction and nonfiction. Each month, we will also have social gatherings, film outings, and open discussion meetups.
We've selected an initial list of readings from the core curriculum reading list at Columbia University. Once we get close to the end of this initial list, we will meet as a group to decide future readings.
Initial Reading List:
-Aristophanes: The Clouds
-Plato: Apology, Crito, Phaedo
-William Shakespeare: King Lear
-Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein
-Karl Marx: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
-Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals
-Sigmund Freud: Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis
-W.E.B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk
-Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
-Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
Upcoming events (4)
See all- Philosophy and RelativismAmélie's French Bakery & Café | Park Road, Charlotte, NC
For this meeting we will be discussing the article on relativism from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (link below). A PDF will be posted in the Narrative Reflections Discord Server.
Relativism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
What is relativism? Relativism, according to the article, "is the view that truth and falsity, right and wrong, standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification are products of differing conventions and frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving rise to them. More precisely, “relativism” covers views which maintain that—at a high level of abstraction—at least some class of things have the properties they have (e.g., beautiful, morally good, epistemically justified) not simpliciter, but only relative to a given framework of assessment (e.g., local cultural norms, individual standards), and correspondingly, that the truth of claims attributing these properties holds only once the relevant framework of assessment is specified or supplied. Relativists characteristically insist, furthermore, that if something is only relatively so, then there can be no framework-independent vantage point from which the matter of whether the thing in question is so can be established."
The article provides a useful survey of a variety of relativistic philosophies from ancient times to contemporary philosophy. It describes different types of relativism. The goal for this discussion is to explore the topic and increase understanding without expecting a rigid consensus either in favor of or against any particular form of relativism.
If you're interested in exploring this topic, please join us at Amelies on Park Road on October 27th.
