A six-week seminar in close reading and clear argument — for the knowledge worker who suspects their thinking has gotten faster, but not better. Twenty-eight people. Twelve texts. One genuinely hard question.
Past cohorts have drawn founders, analysts & editors from Stripe, Linnea & Brightwave
Praxis is not a survey. It trains four specific habits of mind — and you practice each on a real text, in live discussion, with twenty-seven other people watching you reason.
Reading at one-tenth speed: annotation, what the sentence actually says versus what you assumed, and the discipline of staying with a paragraph.
The anatomy of a case — claim, ground, warrant — and how to tell a real argument from a confident assertion wearing its clothes.
Steelmanning: building the strongest version of the view you reject, and the intellectual charity that makes disagreement worth having.
Holding two true things at once, writing to think rather than to report, and arriving — finally — at a position that is genuinely yours.
Maya Levenson took her PhD in philosophy at Princeton, where she wrote on the ethics of persuasion, and then spent six years lecturing at Stanford to rooms she felt were too large to actually teach. A seminar, she'll tell you, has a hard upper bound — and it is well below a hundred.
In 2023 she left to found The Reading Room, a small publication for the unhurried essay, and to build Praxis: the course she had wanted to teach all along, at the size it actually requires. Twenty-eight people, because the twenty-ninth changes the room.
She reads every application herself. She reads every essay herself. This is not a brand promise; it is simply the only way she knows how to run it.
We begin by reading a single paragraph for an entire evening — and discovering how much was skimmed past the first time.
TEXTS Aristotle, Rhetoric Bk. I · Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
ESSAY 600 words on one paragraph of your choosing
Claim, ground, warrant. We take a published op-ed apart on the page until its hidden assumptions are visible — and then put it back together, better.
TEXTS Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument · a contemporary op-ed
ESSAY Diagram a working argument; defend the warrant
What counts as evidence — and to whom? We read an essayist and an empirical paper side by side, and find they are doing stranger things than they admit.
TEXTS Joan Didion, from The White Album · a contested research paper
ESSAY Where the two readings disagree about proof
You will argue, in writing and aloud, for a position you do not hold — and build it strong enough that its real defenders would recognise it.
TEXTS J.S. Mill, On Liberty ch. 2 · a live transcript debate
ESSAY Steelman the view you most want to dismiss
Some questions resolve; many do not. We read for the precision that comes from admitting uncertainty rather than papering over it.
TEXTS Annie Dillard, Total Eclipse · one short poem
ESSAY A contradiction you've stopped trying to resolve
The synthesis week. You write the longest piece of the course — not a summary of others, but a position the seminar has earned you the right to hold.
TEXTS Montaigne, Of Experience · a closing letter from Dr. Levenson
PAPER Final synthesis — 2,000 words, workshopped live
say Praxis changed how they read — surveyed three months after the final week.
cohorts run since the seminar began in 2023 — Cohort 15 enrolls now.
of applicants are offered a seat — admission is by written application only.
of alumni come back — applying again for a follow-on cohort or reading group.
"I came in able to argue and left able to think — which I had assumed were the same skill. They are not. I still read everything one-tenth slower, and it has not once been a waste of the time."
"Praxis ruined skim-reading for me, permanently and entirely for the better. The week on evidence quietly rewired how I read every research memo that now crosses my desk."
"I hold an MFA, and I learned more about argument in week two of Praxis than in two years of workshop. Dr. Levenson runs the seminar as though the texts genuinely matter — because, to her, they plainly do."
Praxis asks for two evenings a week and the reading between them. It is not heavy — it is dense. Plan to be present for it.
Admission is by written application. If you're offered a seat, you'll complete enrollment by Stripe checkout — at one of two rates.
A recorded course transfers information; Praxis is a seminar, and a seminar is an argument you participate in. There is no lecture to press play on. Every session is live, capped at twenty-eight people, and built around your reading and your writing being discussed in the room. You can watch a philosophy lecture for free this afternoon — what you can't do alone is be reasoned with, and pushed, by a philosopher and twenty-seven peers.
Three to four hours a week — and that is by design a low number. The texts are short; the point is to read them slowly, more than once, with a pen. A 600-word essay accompanies most weeks. If you can protect two evenings for the live sessions and a few unhurried hours for the reading, the load is entirely manageable alongside a full-time job. Most of the cohort has one.
A short written application: a few questions about why you want the seminar, and one prompt asking you to respond to a brief passage. It takes most people thirty to forty-five minutes, and it is not a test of credentials — Dr. Levenson reads for curiosity and care, not pedigree. About 28% of applicants are offered a seat, mostly to keep the room balanced rather than to be exclusive. You'll hear back within a week.
Largely, yes — the seminar is the live discussion, and it doesn't work as a recording. We ask you to commit to at least ten of the twelve sessions before you accept a seat. Life happens, so sessions are recorded for your own review if you miss one, but a cohort with empty squares is a worse cohort for everyone. If you already know two evenings a week is impossible this season, apply for the next one instead.
You'll receive a letter of completion from Dr. Levenson and The Reading Room — but, candidly, it is not the reason to come. Praxis is not accredited and grants no formal credit. What you leave with is the final synthesis paper, four essays you can reread, and a way of reading that alumni report still using years later. If you need a credential, this isn't it; if you need to think better, it very much is.
Applications for Cohort 15 close June 2. The written application takes about forty minutes — and is, itself, a small taste of the work.