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  1. Soon I will be reading the entirety of the Organon, or more generally all the books within this one about reasoning and demonstration. I say reading group because my intent is to focus on Aristotle's writing without bringing much outside interpretation. I have enough background on Aristotle and Oism to guide reading discussions in a productive way. Not simply to understand what Aristotle said, but to integrate it all with furthering my study of other fields which for me are mostly psychology and neuroscience. If you have a different academic interest, like history or economics, that's even better, because we could apply the ideas to more contexts. So, post here or send me a private message if you would like to join in. Weekly meetings would go well, we can work out how many chapters to read each time. Probably one hour meetings. I don't expect us all to have the same translation. Sometimes, different translations can be useful. Secondly, does anyone have suggestions for which translations to use?
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  2. Boydstun

    Analytic-Synthetic

    Thanks, Greg. “Let no one unversed in geometry enter here” is said to have been inscribed over the entryway of Plato’s Academy. Excepting the value-philosophy areas, I think that Euclidean geometry should be a requirement, along with elementary logic, for any beginning philosophy student. I mean anyone beginning to study epistemology and metaphysics. Otherwise, one is missing necessary acquaintance with subject matter and tools of theoretical philosophy. The synthetic and the analytic of the synthetic-analytic distinction in philosophy, from Leibniz, Hume, Kant, logical positivists, and linguistic analysts, are not the synthetic (e.g. Euclid) and the analytic (e.g. Descartes) of geometry. On the synthetic-analytic distinction in philosophy, the notions and distinction argued against in Peikoff 1967, there are the recent works Truth in Virtue of Meaning (2008) by Gillian Russell and Analyticity (2010) by Cory Juhl and Eric Loomis. This distinction has continued to be a controversy among philosophers, though most weigh in against soundness of the distinction. Books on my shelf pertaining to the quite different distinction between synthetic and analytic geometry (all these books still awaiting my full assimilation) are History of Analytic Geometry (1956) by Carl Boyer, The Development of the Foundations of Mathematical Analysis from Euler to Riemann (1970) by Ivor Gratton-Guiness, and Analysis and Synthesis in Mathematics (1997) edited by Michael Otte and Marco Panza. Greg mentioned that the two distinctions of synthetic-analytic—in philosophy v. in geometry—are not equivalent distinctions. Though the concept of the analytic in geometry is not the same as the analytic in epistemology and although the synthetic in geometry is not the same as the synthetic in epistemology, the distinction from geometry can be of great import for contemporary metaphysics and epistemology. At least this looks so in my present large and main project.*
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