Philosophy as Jazz

Thinking as humans means to differentiate yourself from your surroundings.

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For this week or two around the holy day of Easter, let me interrupt our study of philosophical anthropology with a couple of excerpts from a paper I wrote for a conference earlier this year. It has to do with the questions asked of Mary the first Easter by the angels and by Jesus.

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Time for some twenty-first century improvising on the traditional, Aristotelian understanding of our distinctive human being. Take Aristotle's definition of the human being as a riff or refrain from the Western tradition. As I mentioned last time, we know from the first chapter of his Politics that the refrain goes like this: the human being is a specific kind of living animal, the one that has the capacity for logos. How can we, as thoughtful twenty-first century people, improvise on this theme?

For the complete document, please see the members area in philosophyasjazz.com site (registration required for the members area – but it is a FREE membership) for the continuation of this series.

Suppose that we take Aristotle’s definition of the human being as a riff or refrain from the Western tradition. We know from the first chapter of his Politics that the refrain goes like this: the human being is a specific kind of living animal, the one that has the capacity for logos. How can we, as thoughtful twenty-first century people, improvise on this theme?

For the complete document, please see the members area in philosophyasjazz.com site (registration required for the members area – but it is a FREE membership) for the continuation of this series.

Following last week’s recommendation, did you jot down some of your own practice sessions on the concept of nature from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online or from Prof. Marc Cohen’s class outlines? Good! Then we’re ready to catch more of the Western riff, the traditional Western understanding, regarding our nature as human beings.

For the complete document, please see the members area in philosophyasjazz.com site (registration required for the members area – but it is a FREE membership) for the continuation of this series.

Last week, I lamented how few college students seem committed to developing a philosophy of human nature. Let’s see if we can start to remedy this, one conversation at a time. I recommended that we start with the classical understanding of being human beings. I asked you to read Aristotle’s Politics, Book 1 (found online, for example, at http://www.constitution.org/ari/polit_01.htm.) Have you made your own list of the natural features of being human beings that the philosopher writes about, particularly in the first two sections? Good. Then we are in shape for the first note in the chord, namely, a discussion of the concept of nature, as in “human beings are what they are by nature.“

For the complete document, please see the members area in philosophyasjazz.com site (registration required for the members area – but it is a FREE membership) for the continuation of this series.