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Delve Online Fall 2020: Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

What is the purpose of public life? Should we live as thinkers or doers? These are the questions that Hannah Arendt tackles in her 1958 work ​The Human Condition. Philosophers have long argued that the ideal state for the human condition is a life of contemplation and inward-focus. Arendt questions the value of the ​vita contemplativa​ and she proposes that a life of action, ​vita activa​, is central to the human condition. Hannah Arendt is one of the most influential thinkers and writers of the 20th century. She is typically associated with her work on totalitarianism and the philosophical roots of evil and judgment. ​The Human Condition​ offers a comprehensive view of what Arendt sees as the inherent value of living with others and collectively…

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$230

Delve Readers Seminar: Søren Kierkegaard: What is Our Situation?

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In the six meetings of our Delve seminar we will read selections from books by Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), a philosopher of the highest importance and influence in general philosophy, moral philosophy, and religious thought. In Western philosophy, he stands with Plato and Nietzsche alone as a literary stylist of the greatest genius. The most familiar characterization of Kierkegaard is that he is the founder of existentialism. In this seminar we will try as best we can to look at him with fresh eyes. Most of us have never met a person like him. We’ve known lots of rebels, and lots of amazingly human and loving persons, lots of intense cranks and some brilliant conversationalists, and probably a few geniuses. But a person who combines all…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Søren Kierkegaard: What is Our Situation?
$240

Livestream Reading: John Brehm

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Annie Bloom's welcomes Portland author John Brehm for a livestream reading form his new book, The Dharma of Poetry. Registere here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcqceqspj0vEtSNjgRf5vpVteKgDkvF7vUe About The Dharma of Poetry: Discover how to engage with poetry to support your spiritual practice, leading to more mindfulness, equanimity, and joy. In The Dharma of Poetry, John Brehm shows how poems can open up new ways of thinking, feeling, and being in the world. Brehm demonstrates the practice of mindfully entering a poem, with an alertness, curiosity, and open-hearted responsiveness very much like the attention we cultivate in meditation. Complete with poetry-related meditations and writing prompts, this collection of lively, elegantly written essays can be read as a standalone book, or as a companion to the author’s acclaimed anthology, The Poetry…

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Free

Lisa Wells in Conversation With Lydia Millet

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Like many of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by news of apocalyptic-scale climate change and a coming sixth extinction. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes. But what can be done? Wells embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking answers in dedicated communities — outcasts and visionaries — on the margins of society. Wells meets Finisia Medrano, an itinerant planter and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists to rewild the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing "watershed discipleship" in New Mexico; another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming — guns into plowshares. She watches the world’s greatest tracker teach how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land…

Continue readingLisa Wells in Conversation With Lydia Millet
Free

Premise Course: Do we shape our world or does it shape us? Arendt’s The Human Condition

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

(Learn about Premise classes here: https://www.premiseinstitute.com/premisefaq) What is the role of technology in shaping us? What is the purpose of public life? Should we live as thinkers or doers? These are the questions that Hannah Arendt tackles in her 1958 work The Human Condition. Philosophers have long argued that the ideal state for the human condition is a life of contemplation and inward focus. Arendt questions the value of the vita contemplativa and proposes that a life of action, vita activa, is central to the human condition. Hannah Arendt is one of the most influential thinkers and writers of the twentieth century. She is typically associated with her work on totalitarianism and the philosophical roots of evil and judgment. The Human Condition offers a comprehensive…

Continue readingPremise Course: Do we shape our world or does it shape us? Arendt’s The Human Condition
$150

Premise Course: Do we have the ability to make ourselves free? de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity & Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

(Learn about Premise classes here: https://www.premiseinstitute.com/premisefaq) In her book The Ethics of Ambiguity, the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir asks us to consider what it means to exercise individual freedom and to live in community with others. Where does our individual freedom begin and end? Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Ethics of Ambiguity in 1947, in the wake of Nazi atrocities and totalitarianism. She questions and seeks to define personal ethics and freedom and claims that such freedom can be manifest only when we “will others free.” How do we create a life where we protect our individual freedom and work toward the freedom of our neighbor? Can both forms of freedom truly exist? At first glance, Franz Kafka may seem an odd pairing with Simone…

Continue readingPremise Course: Do we have the ability to make ourselves free? de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity & Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
$150

Paul Levy in Conversation With Andrew Harvey

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In its Native American meaning, wetiko is an evil cannibalistic spirit that can take over people's minds, leading to selfishness, insatiable greed, and consumption as an end in itself, destructively turning our intrinsic creative genius against our own humanity. Revealing the presence of wetiko in our modern world behind every form of destruction our species is carrying out, both individual and collective, Paul Levy shows how this mind-virus is so embedded in our psyches that it is almost undetectable — and it is our blindness to it that gives wetiko its power. Yet, as Levy reveals in striking detail in his new book, Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World (Inner Traditions), by recognizing this highly contagious mind parasite, by seeing wetiko, we can…

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Free

Frank Wilderson on Afropessimism

PSU - Lincoln Hall 1620 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR, United States

PSU's Black Studies Department invites you to a discussion with Frank B. Wilderson III on his recent book Afropessimism. Wednesday April 13, 2022 | 6-8pm Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery―in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms―continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence such a predominant feature not only in the United States but around the world? These are just some of the compelling questions that animate Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III’s seminal work on the philosophy of Blackness. Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of lyrical prose, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit. It positions Wilderson as a paradigmatic thinker…

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Free

Delve Readers Seminar: Henri Bergson and the Revolution in Time

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

In 1889 Henri Bergson’s (1858-1941) bestseller Time and Free Will inaugurated a vast revolution of the understanding of time in world philosophy that was a keystone in the literature, art, and philosophy of the modern world. After an eclipse of his reputation for some decades, Bergson’s ideas have returned as one of the most powerful forces in the renewal of our attitudes toward nature and the cosmos today. We will read his startlingly elegant, clear, and persuasive expositions of these appealing concepts in Time and Free Will, Creative Evolution, and other works. We will also explore the thought of the scientists and philosophers who have continued to develop his seminal insights. In-Person Seminar Note: This seminar meets in-person at Literary Arts, 925 SW Washington. Access…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Henri Bergson and the Revolution in Time
$245

Curtis White

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

In Transcendent (Melville House), celebrated cultural critic Curtis White asks what Buddhism will look like in the future. Do we want a secular Buddhism that looks like corporations and neuroscience? Or do we want a Buddhism that still provides refuge from the debased world of money and things? Transcendence is not about magic realms where spirits fly about; the world is, as Shunryu Suzuki put it, its own magic. We only need to reclaim it and reclaim our humanity while we’re at it. The problem White suggests is a culture that recognizes only "things," capitalist things and science things, and aggressively denies the idea that the world of things has a beyond. We're told by science ideologues like the New Atheists that we live in…

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Free
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