Recorded, Remembered, and Perhaps Continued

If you go to Phillips Hall at The George Washington University and you go to the fifth floor you'll find the philosophy department. It's a quiet, thin, and gray hallway without windows where cork boards line the walls. These boards are filled with posters informing students about lectures and conferences on consciousness or truth or literature, or announcements about upcoming meetings or fliers for graduate programs.

Halfway down the hallway, outside the third office to your right, there is a small cork board with a few old postings pinned to it. If you look at the top section of this cork board you will see a piece of paper, folded now at the corners, with the following title:

"PhiPos: A Summary Up Till Now."

This is a document that was produced after the first official meeting of what came to be called the Washington Circle. The Circle formed in 2006 around the tenets of what came to be called Positivism (shortened from Philosophical Positivism, or PhiPos) by its members. Among other statements of purpose written by members of the Circle, there were fruitful and energetic conversations had, letters written to well-known artists and thinkers, stickers designed, meetings held, and a book club proposed for the summer of 2006.

Since that time there has been no new activity from the Washington Circle, and thus work on the New Positivism has ceased. This blog seeks, at its most hopeful, to galvanize it. Here, you will find all the (traceable) documents and contributions that gave birth to and sustained this short-lived school of thought. We do this with the hope that the school's tenets, what it stands for, remain extant in some way. Maybe new contributions can be made with this documentation...maybe Positivism will be found retroactively to be moot or done-before or irrelevant. Whatever the case may be, the Washington Circle and its New Positivism existed, and it is our opinion that the work of the Washington Circle be recorded, remembered, and perhaps continued.