When the four of us got together and started PEA Soup a couple of years ago, we all lived in Southern California and met regularly as part of a reading group. It seems fitting, then, to celebrate PEA Soup’s second birthday (coming up this June 15) by having a virtual reading group here at PEA Soup. We’ll be reading Derek Parfit’s Climbing the Mountain, a book that is currently “in press” with Oxford University Press. We’ll read a chapter a week, and, each week, one of us four will start things off by posting a brief précis on that week’s chapter. Those participating in the reading group can then use the comment section of that post to discuss the chapter. (If the discussion seems to get too long or divergent, then any “PEA Brain” may of course choose to start a new thread on some specific issue.)
We’ll begin with a post on Chapter 1, Thursday morning, June 1st, followed by a new post each Thursday morning for the next eleven weeks, corresponding to the book’s eleven chapters. Those interested in participating should download the manuscript from this web site. Please be sure that you’re working with the latest version of the manuscript, the one that’s available from the aforementioned web site, so that we can consistently refer to pages and passages in the manuscript.
We hope that you’ll join us in this reading group and in wishing PEA Soup a happy second birthday. And a big “thanks” goes out to everyone who has helped make it a great place to discuss ethics. –The Editors
Although there wasn't space for it above, I wanted to acknowledge that there's already been some great discussion of Parfit's Climbing the Mountain on PEA Soup. See Michael Cholbi's post here.
Posted by: Doug Portmore | May 20, 2006 at 12:37 PM
Happy Birthday Pea Soup!
Good choice for text as well. I think there are reading groups currently on the book at least in Reading, Oxford, and Chapel Hill. Hopefully you can get some of the participants in these groups to contribute to the discussions as well.
Posted by: Jussi Suikkanen | May 20, 2006 at 01:10 PM
Happy Birthday Soupers! Great idea to Climb the Mountain! Ambitious work and it looks very interesting!
Posted by: Mike Almeida | May 22, 2006 at 08:51 PM
An initial ethical question:
Is the manuscript made available online for all to access with permission from Parfit?
Posted by: Martin | June 01, 2006 at 04:03 AM
Martin,
The manuscript has been publicly available from Professor Inna Kupreeva's home page for a long time, and is listed on Parfit's wikipedia entry. I thus assumed it was OK to add it to the website.
Pablo
Posted by: Pablo Stafforini | June 02, 2006 at 07:50 PM