What is a philosophical community? According to philosopher Jeremy David Bendik-Keymer, “a real philosophical community, like love, is known by its fruits…”
By a “real philosophical” community, I mean a community in which the people involved care for each other and each other’s “searching” through their “sense of life” (two expressions I take from the introduction to Love’s Knowledge by Martha Nussbaum). “Searching” is more prosaic than “philosophizing,” but it seeks insight. “Sense of life” is more capacious than “reason,” although it involves making sense. A real philosophical community, like love, is known by its fruits: we come to search better through our sense of life, or we develop a fuller, finer sense of life. Real philosophical communities leave us as we age with memories of having actually gone somewhere in our sense of life, of having grown up, or of having come to appreciate how to live well in a more insightful way. They mark our time in real philosophical time. — Jeremy David Bendik-Keymer
This American Philosophical Association blog by Jeremy David Bendik-Keymer (inspired in large part by an interview with artist Misty Morrison on her exhibit “Oblivion” — you can listen to this wonderful interview below!) offers some deeply reflective and inspiring insights about the importance of COMMUNITY, reflection, and dialogue (in the various ways in which those manifest) to philosophical communities and our relationships with ourselves and the world. Read the article here!
