“The philosophy treatise, whether written in prose or in verse, then appears as a kind of microcosm, whose genesis and structure reproduce those of the universe.”
— Pierre Hadot
Readers,
I’m trying something new.
Periodically, I’ll have news to share about events I’m participating in or that I think you will find interesting.
I also have other miscellanea to share, including reading recommendations, links to articles, talks, or podcasts, and more. To that end, in this newsletter you will find:
Recent posts
Upcoming events
Current reads
Collected links
I want to make this genre of post maximally worthwhile to you, the reader.
So, drop me a line at ae.robbert@gmail.com about other topics you are interested in (or are not interested in, for that matter), and I’ll thinking about including them.
And if you find The Base Camp enlivening and informative please do forward this email to your friends, colleagues, and networks (or just share the link with them).
I think we can grow something great and interesting here together.
I hope you all have a great week.
— Adam
Recent Posts
Upcoming Events
I’ll be speaking at The Alembic in Berkeley, CA on Friday, March 8, 7:00–9:00 pm (PST). You can purchase tickets at this Eventbrite page.
After my talk, I’ll be joined on stage by the inestimable Erik Davis for a short dialogue, after which we will open up to a discussion with the audience.
The title and description are below. I hope to see some of you there.
Askēsis as a Way of Life:
On Saints, Mystics, Monastics, and Philosophers
Philosophy today is often understood as the content of philosophical systems—as the set of concepts, propositions, or insights that make up a given philosophy. A less common, but still influential, view is to read philosophy as the maneuvers in thought and attention that give rise to those same concepts, propositions, or insights. This view of philosophy calls us back to the power of askēsis, or spiritual exercise, in the philosophical life, a concept that returns us not to any specific system of thought and world, but back to the moves that themselves enliven philosophical living. In this view, philosophy consists in the shaping of thought and perception through practice, a shaping that bears upon not just the intellectual content of our minds, but the formation of the aesthetic quality of our senses, the granularity of our feeling, and the skillfulness of our action. In this talk, Adam will discuss philosophy from the perspective of askēsis, focusing on how this view creates new opportunities for dialogue among the saints, mystics, monastics, and philosophers of history past and present. In the second half of the evening, Adam will be joined by Erik Davis for some conversation before opening up to a larger group discussion.
Current Reads
A few sources from the archive . . .
In the interest of sharing references, I’m including links below to the material I’ve been working through in the past week or so. I did the same with my Platonism post and the introduction to the manuscript I’m working on.
I want to do this so that interested folks can follow-up on the material I draw from in these posts. I’m also open to creating a forum of some sort—given time and interest—where I can make these sources available for reading and discussion.
This sequence covers Plato, Augustine, and Descartes (a long point of discussion in Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self).
Here’s the list:
Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity – Charles Taylor
Chapter 6: Plato’s Self-Mastery
Chapter 7: “In Interiore Homine”
Chapter 8: Descartes’s Disengaged Reason
Confessions – Saint Augustine
Book VII: A Neoplatonic Quest
Book VIII: The Birthpangs of Conversion
Book X: Memory
Book XI: Time and Eternity
The Trinity (De Trinitate) – Saint Augustine
Introduction: Edmund Hill
Book X: Psychological Mental Image (second draft)
Additional Essays – Saint Augustine
Against the Academicians
The Teacher
Image, Identity, and the Forming of the Augustinian Soul – Matthew Driver
2. Sound the Silence of the Deep: The Origin of the Person
5. Know Thyself! The Mind, Self-Knowledge, and the Image of God
Taylor picks Plato, Augustine, and Descartes because of how each figure signals a new approach to self, world, and divinity, marked by a shift in our understanding of inwardness and outwardness, willing and knowing, and found and constructed orders. The Delphic maxim “Know Thyself” also serves as an interesting marker here insofar as the meaning of this practice and its consequences shifts in these three philosophers, whilst still remaining a key element of philosophical life. As always, I am broadly interested in how traditions of practice (askēsis) transform over time, and this sequence of thinkers provides an excellent opportunity to observe just that.
Collected Links
Assorted worthwhile miscellanea from around the internet . . .
Beauty Is Real: And you must change your life – Samuel Kimbriel, Wisdom of Crowds. “I want to state this in the strongest terms I can as an intellectual—it is a major dereliction of philosophical duty, not to face the full, brute power of the experience of beauty.” More of this, please.
The Unbearable Whiteness of Neptune: Science’s fiery hunt for real colors – Erik Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective. Erik is building a compelling case for the primacy of consciousness in our scientific world picture in this essay and in his last one on the importance of consciousness in neuroscience research.
Determined: A Science of Life Without Freewill (Book review) – John Martin Fischer, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Robert Sapolsky’s new polemic against the notion of our having freewill comes in for a shellacking.
The War for Thoughtfulness: Notes from the Substack Underground – Zohar Atkins, What Is Called Thinking? Religious and contemplative practices 🤝 scholarly analytical humanism. Zohar is always worth reading. And listening to.
The Vesuvius Challenge: Resurrect an ancient library from the ashes of a volcano. New technologies are allowing us to read ancient and inscrutable manuscripts. The past is still unfolding inside the present.
Unlocking the World’s Potential | How Grants Are Taking Over As a Key Funding Model. InterIntellect hosts a conversation on patronage in the modern era, including folks from Emergent Ventures, Polaris, O’Shaughnessy Fellowships, and more.
Gen Z doesn’t want disco Cathedrals. Esmé Partridge argues that Gen Z has turned a corner away from their Gen X and elder Millenial counterparts, “moving beyond a boomerish cynicism and towards something like traditional religious beliefs.”
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!