u/PhilosophyTO

Welcome everyone to this online reading & discussion group about Kant! (hosted by Philip, James, Adam and others). The meetings will take place on Zoom.

Everyone who wants to get an understanding of Kant (and approaches him in a serious and dedicated way) wants a text-based approach to the study of Kant. But being "text based" can mean different things to different people. Let me tell you what it will mean in this meetup so that no one is disappointed if the emphasis we take here is different from what some people are used to.

Kant often takes standard philosophical words that lots of Philosophers use (like "Metaphysics", "Idealism" and many others). He then defines them in highly idiosyncratic ways. I wish he had not done this! I wish he had invented neologisms for his highly specialized and idiosyncratic philosophical notions. But, sadly, he did not. Instead he used standard words in highly nonstandard ways and serious Kant scholars must adapt to Kant's way of doing things. Some Kant scholars have a tendency to ignore Kant's idiosyncratic definitions and usages of words like "Metaphysics" and "Idealism" and revert to the meanings these words had in the early modern period or the meanings they typically have in a standard dictionary definition. But in this meetup we will be text based and take Kant at his word. We will use his philosophical lexicon in the way he tells us to use it (unless and until we encounter good text-based reasons for doing otherwise).

For example, very early on in the First Critique (roughly 5 pages in) Kant defines Metaphysics in the following way:

• "For it [Metaphysics] is nothing but the inventory of all we possess through pure reason". (see Axx, page 104 in the Guyer/Wood translation)

Really? Can Kant actually mean that? Can he really be defining Metaphysics as a kind of inventory and not as some grand Scholastic edifice far away beyond any straightforward method we may have of grasping it? Well, Kant said it and so we will take him at his word until and unless Kant himself tells us he has changed his mind.

This meetup will be dedicated to the following guiding principle: We will accept that Kant means what he says. We will accept his actual definitions of words as he states them in the text, and we will stick to these definitions until Kant himself gives us good textually based reasons for deciding that the meanings of his key terms may have shifted.

If we do this, I think you will be amazed at the wonderful Kant who emerges! Scholars who ignore Kant's (admittedly highly idiosyncratic and frustrating) definitions often present to us a Kant who sounds like a medieval or early modern philosopher evoking vast cathedrals of abstract metaphysics (in the sense of that word which we find in Scholasticism). This reading of Kant was highly influential and inspired Romantic thinkers like Schelling who himself gives us a philosophy somewhat reminiscent of grand medieval scholastic metaphysical edifices.

But if we accept that Kant means what he says and stay close to the actual definitions of terms Kant gives us in his works, a different sort of Kant emerges. There emerges a Kant who was a paradigmatic Enlightenment thinker focused on human freedom, the human ability to acquire real knowledge of the empirically real world, and all of the other characteristic Enlightenment concerns.

In case you think that the Kant who emerges from this text based approach is skewed too much in the direction of being "Analytic" or "Continental", or in case you think that the Kant who emerges from this approach is far from the mainstream, consider this. In the famous philosophical battle at Davos involving Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger (the event that inaugurated the rift between Analytic and Continental philosophy) all three of these great thinkers accepted Kant's own definitions of his key terms. All three advocated readings of Kant that are more or less in harmony with the reading of Kant that will emerge and be emphasized in this meetup.

So which books will we be reading in this meetup you ask?

There will be two main books. We will read the entirety of one of Kant's works:

• "The Metaphysics of Morals". We will use the Cambridge edition edited by Lara Denis and Translated by Mary Gregor. Be sure to get the revised edition from 2017

(Scroll down for the reading schedule and pdf copies of the readings 👇)

We will also read the entirety of this book about Kant:

• Kant's Conception of Freedom: A Developmental and Critical Analysis (2021, Cambridge University Press) by Henry Allison

Allison's book spearheaded a new and promising direction in the ongoing efforts to deal with the truly bewildering variety of ways there are of interpreting Kant. Allison's book will look at the all-important Kantian notion of Freedom and ask how Kant's views about this notion changed subtly over the course of Kant's career. Maybe if we get a better sense of these subtle shifts in Kant's thoughts throughout his career we will be able to build bridges between all of the wildly different ways there are of interpreting Kant. Or at least this is the hope of Allison and some of his students like Huaping Lu-Adler who have pioneered this approach to Kant scholarship.

Since Kant defined so many of his key terms in the First Critique, participants will be expected to have the Guyer/Wood translation of the First Critique (Cambridge University Press) on hand at all times so we can dip into it.

Also, participants should have this book on hand since I may refer to passages in this book from time to time:

• The Revolutionary Kant: A Commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason (2006) by Graham Bird

This will be a 2 hour meetup. Some sessions will be dedicated entirely to the reading of "The Metaphysics of Morals". Other sessions will be dedicated entirely to the reading of the Henry Allison book. At any point I may refer to the Guyer/Wood translation of the First Critique or to the Graham Bird book, so please always keep those two books on hand.

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To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Monday August 24 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Meetings will be held every other week on Monday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

Here is the (tentative) reading schedule:

• For the 1st session (Aug 24), please read the Preface and pages 1-12 in Allison
• For the 2nd session (Sept 7), please read pages 3-17 in "The Metaphysics of Morals"
• For the 3rd session, please read pages 12-33 in Allison
• ..... (updates on the main group page)

Check the group calendar (link) for future updates. A pdf of reading materials will be provided to registrants.

DISCUSSION FORMAT:

The format will be our usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 15-20 pages from the book assigned for that day's session. Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading.

People who have not done the reading are welcome to attend this meetup. However if you want to TALK during the meetup it is essential that you do the reading. We mean it! It is essential that the direction of the conversation be influenced only by people who have actually done the reading. In other words, if you want to talk in this meetup, you have to read the assigned readings. You may think you are so brilliant and wonderful that you can come up with great points even if you do not read the books this meetup is based on. You probably are brilliant and wonderful – no argument there! But you still have to do the reading if you want to talk in this meetup. REALLY.

Please note that this is a "raise hands" meetup and has a highly structured format, not an anarchy-based one. This is mostly for philosophical reasons: We want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy.

Hello everyone and welcome to this online reading & discussion group on Heidegger, Aristotle and the Medievals (hosted by Philip, James, Adam and others). The meetings will take place on Zoom.

For the first few sessions we will be reading from this book:

• "The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken" by S.J. McGrath (A copy of assigned reading materials will be provided to registrants.)

Ideally we would have started with the following short booklet, but sadly it is not out yet. As soon as it is out in paper format we will temporarily switch from reading McGrath to reading:

• Heidegger and Aristotle (Cambridge Element) by Francisco J. Gonzalez

Along the way we will frequently read Heidegger himself. Usually we will read short essays by Heidegger mostly focused on his early views on Medieval philosophy. The one big exception is that we will read some of the early chapters of Heidegger's "Being and Time" in the new Yale translation by Cyril Welch.

This will be a 2 hour meetup. Some sessions will be dedicated entirely to the reading of the McGrath book. Other sessions will be dedicated entirely to the reading of works by Heidegger or Gonzalez. This is a little bit different from my usual format where we read from two books in each session.

The format will be our usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 15-20 pages from the book assigned for that day's session. Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want us to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading.

People who have not done the reading are welcome to attend this meetup. However if you want to TALK during the meetup it is essential that you do the reading. We mean it! It is essential that the direction of the conversation be influenced only by people who have actually done the reading. In other words, if you want to talk in this meetup, you have to read the assigned readings. You may think you are so brilliant and wonderful that you can come up with great points even if you do not read the books this meetup is based on. You probably are brilliant and wonderful – no argument there! But you still have to do the reading if you want to talk in this meetup. REALLY.

Please note that this is a "raise hands" meetup and has a highly structured format, not an anarchy-based one. This is mostly for philosophical reasons: We want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy.

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To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Monday August 17 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Meetings will be held every other week on Monday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

Here is the (tentative) reading schedule:

• For the 1st session (August 17), please read the Preface and also pages 1-6 in McGrath
• For the 2nd session (August 31), please read pages 6-24 in McGrath
• For the 3rd session (September 14), please read the Preface and also pages 25-40 in McGrath
• ..... (updates on the main group page)

Check the group calendar (link) for future updates. A pdf of reading materials will be provided to registrants.

This initial reading schedule makes it look like we will mostly be reading McGrath in this meetup. But this is misleading and not true. I want us to get a foothold in McGrath before we tackle Heidegger, but once we have that foothold we will be more or less alternating one session of McGrath with one session of Heidegger himself.

I have found that sometimes people assume that I pick books for these meetups because I agree with them. This is not true! I pick books because they are thought provoking and because I think they will work in a meetup context. But for the record, it just so happens that I do tend to agree strongly with Gonzalez. And it just so happens that I have some serious disagreements with McGrath even though I also have deep respect for his book and expect to learn a lot by engaging with it with all of you in the meetup. Some people like to know where I stand with regard to the books I have picked, so now you know.

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About the McGrath (from the publisher):

The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy is a major interpretive study of Heidegger's complex relationship to medieval philosophy. S. J. McGrath's contribution is historical and biographical as well as philosophical, examining how the enthusiastic defender of the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition became the great destroyer of metaphysical theology.

This book provides an informative and comprehensive examination of Heidegger's changing approach to medieval sources―from the seminary studies of Bonaventure to the famous phenomenological destructions of medieval ontology. McGrath argues that the mid-point of this development, and the high point of Heidegger's reading of medieval philosophy, is the widely neglected habilitation thesis on Scotus and speculative grammar. He shows that this neo-Kantian retrieval of phenomenological moments in the metaphysics of Scotus and Thomas of Erfurt marks the beginning of a turn from metaphysics to existential phenomenology. McGrath's careful hermeneutical reconstruction of this complex trajectory uncovers the roots of Heidegger's critique of ontotheology in a Luther-inspired defection from his largely Scholastic formation.

In the end McGrath argues that Heidegger fails to do justice to the spirit of medieval philosophy. The book sheds new light on a long-debated question of the early Heidegger's theological significance. Far from a neutral phenomenology, Heidegger's masterwork, Being and Time, is shown to be a philosophically questionable overturning of the medieval theological paradigm.

Plato's Statesman (Politikos) is a dialogue that asks what truly qualifies someone to rule. Rather than defining a statesman by power, law, or popular approval, Plato argues that the genuine statesman possesses a specialized form of knowledge: the art of governance. Through the famous "weaving" metaphor, the ideal ruler is portrayed as someone who skillfully weaves together citizens of different temperaments into a harmonious and unified political community. The dialogue also explores the limits of rigid laws, suggesting that while laws are necessary in practice, they are ultimately inferior to the judgment of a truly wise ruler who can adapt to changing circumstances. Statesman serves as a bridge between the idealism of Plato's Republic and the more practical constitutional analysis of his Laws.

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Over the last few years, we have done a live reading and discussion of Plato's Republic and the Laws. Now we turn to the Statesman. We will be starting from the beginning of the dialogue.

Sign up for the 1st session on Saturday August 1 here (link). The video conferencing link will be available to registrants.

Meetings will be held weekly on Saturday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

All are welcome!

The dramatic action is as follows: we pick up after the Eleatic Stranger has finished the discussion that takes place in the dialogue titled the Sophist (which we read several years ago). The discussion turns to the figure of the Statesman, and while the interlocutor in the Sophist was Theaetetus (who resembled Socrates), a youth named Socrates takes on the role of interlocutor (Socrates himself is present).

No particular edition is required, but we can discuss what we want to use during the meeting. Because of this, sharing some editions that are generally available digitally in the meetup comments may be helpful. I'll also try to keep the Greek text handy (probably through a Loeb edition, but anyone can look at Perseus as well).

If you want to familiarize yourself with the text in advance, here is an (excellent) free edition on Perseus translated by Fowler (HTML): https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=plat.+stat.+257a

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TIP: When reading Plato, pay attention to the details of the drama as much as the overtly philosophical discourse. Attentive readers of Plato know that he is often trying to convey important messages with both in concert.

For some background on Plato, see his entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/

#Philosophy #Ethics #PoliticalPhilosophy #AncientPhilosophy #Metaphysics #Plato

The Metaphysics of Morals is Kant's final major work in moral philosophy. In it, he presents the basic concepts and principles of right and virtue, and the system of duties of human beings as such.

The work comprises two parts: the "Doctrine of Right" concerns outer freedom and the rights of human beings against one another; the "Doctrine of Virtue" concerns inner freedom and the ethical duties of human beings to themselves and others.

Its focus is not rational beings in general but human beings in particular, and it presupposes and deepens Kant's earlier accounts of morality, freedom, and moral psychology.

This was one of the earliest works of practical philosophy that Kant envisioned, however, he put it off to write foundational works to support it, such as Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and even the Critique of Practical Reason.

If you find it more helpful to start ethics discussions closer to their practice, the Metaphysics of Morals may be a more useful starting point than the meta-ethical works we have covered up to now.

No prior experience with Kant is necessary.

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Sign up for the 1st meeting on Wednesday July 22 here (link). No prior experience with Kant is necessary. Meetings focus on developing a common language and friendship through studying Kant. The host will provide an interpretation of Kant at the start of the meeting; other interpretations will not be discussed until later in the meeting. Additional interpretations, topics, and questions can be addressed through the meeting chat feature.

Meetings are held weekly. Look for subsequent meetings through the group's calendar (link).

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Reading Schedule (pages are from Cambridge's Practical Philosophy collection):

THE DOCTRINE OF RIGHT

Week 1:
Preface, Introduction, Introduction to the Doctrine of Right (365 - 397; 32 pages)

Week 2:
Private Right, Chapter I and II (401 - 443; 42 pages)

Week 3:
Chapter III, Public Right Section I (443 - 481; 38 pages)

Week 4:
Public Right Section II, III, and Appendix (482 - 506; 24 pages)

THE DOCTRINE OF VIRTUE

Week 5:
Preface and Introduction (509-540; 31 pages)

Week 6:
Part 1 Introduction and Book 1 on Perfect Duties (543-564; 21 pages)

Week 7:
Book 2 on Imperfect Duties (565-588; 23 pages)

Week 8:
Method of Ethics (591-603; 12 pages)

There are numerous editions (and free translations available online), but this collection contains all of Kant's Practical Philosophy in translation:

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Philosophy-Cambridge-Works-Immanuel/dp/0521654084/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1445894099&sr=8-1

Someone posted a free pdf copy here:

https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/kant-practical-philosophy.pdf

In Plato's Hippias Minor, Socrates appears to defend the trickster Odysseus, and in the course of doing so he argues for outrageous claims: the honest person and the liar are no different, and the good person is one who does wrong voluntarily. Socrates’ questionable behavior may be no coincidence in a dialogue about deception and he may be examining what counts as deception and how it reflects one’s character. More broadly, the dialogue is about the relationship between the speaker and what is said, between agent and action. Thus, the dialogue marks an important contribution not only to Socrates’ thinking about virtue and voluntary action but also to Plato’s portrait of Socrates. The dialogue further defines the sometimes thin line between Socrates and his contemporaries, the sophists.

This modern translation brings fresh clarity to Plato's subtle reasoning and dark humor. What appears at first to be a playful literary debate soon becomes an unsettling philosophical inquiry into truth, virtue, and the nature of agency. Socrates' relentless questioning destabilizes easy answers and encourages readers to consider whether moral goodness requires not just right action — but understanding and control over one's intentions.

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This is a live reading and discussion group for Plato's Hippias Minor (or "Lesser Hippias") hosted by Constantine. Reference will be made to contemporary and older scholarship. Historical context will be brought up whenever necessary to illuminate the dialogue. This Plato group meets on Saturdays and has previously read the Phaedo, the Apology, the Symposium, Philebus, Gorgias, Critias, Laches, Timaeus, Euthyphro, Crito, Protagoras, and other works, including ancient commentaries and texts for contextualisation such as Gorgias’ Praise of Helen. It is our aspiration to read the Platonic corpus over a long period of time.

All are welcome! No previous knowledge of the Platonic corpus is required.

Sign up for the 1st session on Saturday July 18 here (link). The video conferencing link will be available to registrants.

Meetings will be held weekly on Saturday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

The host is Constantine Lerounis, a distinguished Greek philologist and poet, author of Four Access Points to Shakespeare’s Works (in Greek) and Former Advisor to the President of the Hellenic Republic. 

A pdf copy of the text we're using is available to registrants.

TIP: When reading Plato, pay attention to the details of the drama as much as the overtly philosophical discourse. Attentive readers of Plato know that he is often trying to convey important messages with both in concert.

For some background on Plato, see his entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/

#Philosophy #Ethics #Metaphysics #PoliticalPhilosophy #AncientPhilosophy #Plato

Welcome to Philosophy for Artists! A light and relaxing way to spend summer Sunday afternoons.

This is a reading-and-practice group exploring philosophy in relation to artistic work. Each session begins with a close reading of a short philosophical text drawn from aesthetics, phenomenology, and existential thought, followed by time to work in whatever medium you choose—drawing, writing, sound, movement, or other studio practice. That is, we will actually spend part of our time working creatively, in “parallel play”.

The aim is not to treat philosophy as commentary on art, but as something that can actively inform how we perceive, make, and situate ourselves as artists. At the same time, the sessions take seriously the reverse claim: that artistic practice can clarify, resist, or extend philosophical ideas in ways that argument alone cannot capture.

Sessions are structured as 2.5 hours: approximately one hour of shared reading and discussion, an hour and fifteen minutes of making, and a final fifteen-minute group check-out. The emphasis throughout is on sustained attention, material engagement, and the relationship between thinking and doing, rather than interpretation alone. All participants are invited to bring materials and work during the practice portion; no prior artistic training is assumed, only a willingness to make.

I would like this group to be as inclusive as possible. Yes, some folks may be professional artists but others may just be “creative-curious”. As an expressive artist myself, I’m a big believer that everyone is inherently creative and that art as a form of expression is not something that needs to be gate-kept. If you are curious about exploring your creativity, we can pop into a breakout room during session and I can give some prompts. Or you can DM me (Cece) ahead of time.

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To join the 1st meeting taking place on Sunday June 28 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Meetings take place weekly on Sundays. Look for future sessions in this series on our calendar (link).

All are welcome!

The reading for each session will be posted a week a head of time.

We will start with Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”, please read pp. 15-25 (Letters 1-3) for the 1st meeting on June 28.

Summer is fully upon us – the time when many of us are on the move, enjoying different locales, being outside, spending quality time with others.

Edward Casey is a contemporary phenomenologist best known for his work on the phenomenology of place, and he has written numerous books and articles on this subject, taken from different angles. In Thinking in Transit, Casey invites us to reconsider thinking not as something that happens from a fixed standpoint, but as an activity shaped by movement, passage, and being on the way. Our reflection emerges from journeys, crossings, detours, and the lived experience of transition itself.

In this time-limited group, we will explore Casey's phenomenology of movement and place, asking how thought is transformed when we attend to what occurs between points of arrival. What do we learn about ourselves in motion, in transit, in different lands? Casey's work - and phenomenology generally - invites us to inquire what happens to us when we travel or relocate, even temporarily. Often we might travel to different places and treating those places as objects to gaze upon to entertain us. But what happens when we explore those places from a more phenomenological standpoint? What can we learn about the subjectivity of a place - what is it to know a place on its own terms? Can we experience a sense of intersubjectivity with a place? What are the existential feelings of a place? I am currently working on a book and, as part of doing field research for that book, I have been 'on the move' approximately every 6 weeks for the past year. I can definitely attest from first-person experience that my thinking has been radically shifted by different experiences in a variety of different lands.

Casey is writing in the lineage of Merleau-Ponty, whose phenomenology is distinctive for its focus on embodiment and particularly motor intentionality. As such, this group will be of interest to anyone who attended my prior groups on Merleau-Ponty, but certainly anyone interested in phenomenology is welcome. Anyone interested in environmental phenomenology will probably find this of interest as well, as well as people with interest in land/nature-based or Indigenous epistemologies.

It will follow my usual format: doing a short reading ahead of time, watching a short video together, and then discussing the video and the reading. Casey's book will be the core text, but I may pepper in supplemental readings as well to augment our discussion. The readings will be confirmed a week ahead of time so you have time to read. This is a hands-raised meetup where we will endeavor to stay close to the source material, and comments will be prioritized from those who have done the reading.

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This is an online discussion group hosted by Cece to discuss the phenomenology of travel.

To join the 1st meetup taking place on Sunday June 21 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Look for other sessions in this series on our calendar (link).

All are welcome!

Readings for Week 1 (a pdf will be provided to registrants)

To situate our discussion of the topic, we have three quite short readings:

• The Preface to Casey's Fate of Place

• The Preface to Casey's Thinking in Transit

• The Introduction to Cataldi & Hamrick's Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy (read pp. 1-5 only if short on time; otherwise read the whole chapter)

Weeks 2 onward - to be confirmed each week, primarily focused on Thinking in Transit, with supplemental readings TBD.

What is th​e place of hope in existentialism? When ​we look at the world today, it is easy to see fragmentation. Climate crises, geopolitical instability, and a pervasive sense of alienation can make it feel as though the very structures of our shared reality are fracturing.

It was precisely this condition that French philosopher and Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel diagnosed when coining the phrase "the broken world" (le monde cassé). Marcel observed a world characterized by functionalization, where individuals are reduced to their social or economic roles. In this critique, Marcel’s concerns regarding "technical efficiency" deeply echo those of Martin Heidegger; both thinkers warned that a purely technological mindset treats the world and its inhabitants merely as resources to be mastered, calculated, and manipulated.

In popular culture, existentialism is often equated with the darkness that this broken world produces - a philosophy of angst, absurdity, and the cold isolation popularized by thinkers like Sartre. But Marcel, as an existential-phenomenologist, radically contradicts this assumption. He demonstrates that existentialism does not have to end in despair. Instead, it can provide the precise tools needed to navigate a broken world with profound, defiant hope.

In this session, we will explore Marcel’s unique philosophy through his phenomenology - his method of looking at concrete, lived human experiences rather than detached, abstract theories. We will focus on his crucial distinction between a problem (something external that we can solve with technical efficiency) and a mystery (something we are personally entangled in, which transcends mere logic). For Marcel, true hope is not a naive, passive wish that things will simply "work out." It is an active and engaged existential response to a world that tries to reduce human existence to a series of technical problems. It is an act of communion and presence, rooted in what he calls the ontological mystery. That is, a deep, experiential realization that being itself cannot be fully captured by a broken world.

In preparation for the group, please read the following chapter "Hope and Existentialism": https://academic.oup.com/book/61728/chapter/541574012

>Although existentialist thought is often associated with a negative diagnosis of the human condition in such thinkers as Camus and Sartre, there is a more positive strand focusing on uplifting aspects of experience, directly challenging the alienation, loss of meaning, and invitation to despair that has come to be associated with the movement. This vision of the human condition is to be found especially in the work of French philosopher Gabriel Marcel. This chapter considers Marcel’s phenomenological analysis of what is called ontological hope, distinguishing it from ordinary cases of hoping, as well as from optimism and desire. It examines the choice between hope and despair and introduces related themes of communion, intersubjectivity, and the search for the transcendent. The chapter argues that Marcel’s thought illustrates the reserves within the human personality and community that help individuals respond in a positive way to the existential challenges of modernity.

We will also watch a short video on the topic to support our discussion. Let's pursue the question: how might a phenomenological approach to hope alter how we live, act, and connect when the horizon looks dark?

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This is an online discussion group hosted by Cece to discuss Gabriel Marcel's ideas and the place of hope in existentialism.

To join this meetup taking place on Friday May 22 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Look for other sessions in this series on our calendar (link).

All are welcome!

Modern philosophy finds it difficult to give a satisfactory picture of the place of minds in the world. In Mind and World, based on the 1991 John Locke Lectures, one of the most distinguished philosophers writing today offers his diagnosis of this difficulty and points to a cure. In doing so, he delivers the most complete and ambitious statement to date of his own views, a statement that no one concerned with the future of philosophy can afford to ignore.

John McDowell amply illustrates a major problem of modern philosophy—the insidious persistence of dualism—in his discussion of empirical thought. Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and McDowell exposes these traps by exploiting the work of contemporary philosophers from Wilfrid Sellars to Donald Davidson. These difficulties, he contends, reflect an understandable—but surmountable—failure to see how we might integrate what Sellars calls the “logical space of reasons” into the natural world. What underlies this impasse is a conception of nature that has certain attractions for the modern age, a conception that McDowell proposes to put aside, thus circumventing these philosophical difficulties. By returning to a pre-modern conception of nature but retaining the intellectual advance of modernity that has mistakenly been viewed as dislodging it, he makes room for a fully satisfying conception of experience as a rational openness to independent reality. This approach also overcomes other obstacles that impede a generally satisfying understanding of how we are placed in the world.

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Hi everyone, welcome to the next reading group presented by Philip. John McDowell is widely considered to be the most important living philosopher; and "Mind and World" is widely considered to be the most important philosophy book published in the last 40 years. Strong claims! I am not sure I agree with either of these statements; and I am also not sure that it is even a good idea to ask a question like "who is the most important living philosopher". But nevertheless, the fact remains that this is an important book by a very important philosopher.

• In this meetup we will be reading "Mind and World" but we will also be reading a book about McDowell called: "John McDowell" (second edition) by Tim Thornton
• And I will also ask everyone to read Paul Abela's "Kant's Empirical Realism", a wonderful book about Kant which emphasizes those aspects of Kant which are most relevant for an understanding of McDowell.

To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Friday May 22 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Meetings will be held every other week on Friday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

Here is the reading schedule for the first few sessions:

For the first session (May 22):

• In M+W please read from page vii to page xxiv (in other words, read the Preface and Introduction).
• In "John McDowell (second edition)" by Tim Thornton please read up to page 21.
• In Paul Abela's "Kant's Empirical Realism" please read up to page 14

For the second session:

• In M+W please read from page 3 to page 13.
• In Thornton please read from page 22 to page 36.
• In Abela please read up to page 23.

For the third session:

• In M+W please read from page 13 to page 23.
• In Thornton please read from page 36 to page 53.
• In Abela please read up to page 32.

Check the group calendar (link) for future updates. A pdf of reading materials will be provided to registrants.

I would encourage people who are new to philosophy to give this meetup a try. I will do the best I can to make "Mind and World" (hereafter M+W) accessible and interesting. I honestly believe that the best way to "introduce" yourself to philosophy is to start with the most challenging stuff and struggle with it. As Peter Strawson once said: "In philosophy, there is no shallow end of the pool".

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MORE ABOUT THIS DISCUSSION GROUP

McDowell's philosophy can be compared to several other better known philosophies, and each of these better known philosophies can be used as an entry or gateway into McDowell. It can be helpful to compare McDowell to Wittgenstein. The Thornton book emphasizes this connection between McDowell and Wittgenstein.

It can also be helpful to compare McDowell to Hegel. After all, his philosophy is sometimes identified as a part of "Pittsburgh Hegelianism". There are several good books and articles emphasizing the complex relations between McDowell and Hegel. I will recommend some as the meetup progresses.

It can also be helpful to compare McDowell to Aristotle. I myself tend to emphasize this particular gateway into an understanding of McDowell.

However in this meetup I will ask everyone to read "Kant's Empirical Realism" by Paul Abela (even though we will probably not talk about this book as much as it deserves). There are many excellent Kant meetups at the Toronto Philosophy Meetup and so we can reasonably expect that many participants in this McDowell meetup will be well versed in Kant. By reading the Paul Abela book, we will be in a good position to use our collective knowledge of Kant as an entry into McDowell.

The format will be our usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 10-12 pages from each book before each session. Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading.

People who have not done the reading are welcome to attend this meetup. However if you want to TALK during the meetup it is essential that you do the reading. We mean it! It is essential that the direction of the conversation be influenced only by people who have actually done the reading (and this includes the Paul Abela book). In other words, if you want to talk in this meetup, you have to read "Mind and World" by McDowell as well as the Tim Thornton book and the Paul Abela book. It seems to me that we should either do McDowell properly or not do him at all; I just do not think there is any point in doing McDowell in a half-hearted way. You may think you are so brilliant and wonderful that you can come up with great points even if you do not read all three of the books this meetup is based on. You probably are brilliant and wonderful — no argument there! But you still have to do the reading in all three books if you want to talk in this meetup. REALLY.

Please note that this is a "raise hands" meetup and has a highly structured format, not an anarchy-based one. This is mostly for philosophical reasons: I want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy.

This is a 3 hour meetup. For the first two hours we will discuss "Mind and World". For the last hour we will discuss Tim Thornton's book about McDowell. Every once in a while we will devote a session to discussing Abela's "Kant's Empirical Realism". As a rough approximation maybe every second month we will devote a session to reading and discussing passages from Abela and using them to illuminate our understanding of McDowell. An unusual way to proceed I know, but I think it will work out well.

The Normal and the Pathological is one of the crucial contributions to the history of science in the last half century. It takes as its starting point the sudden appearance of biology as a science in the nineteenth century and examines the conditions determining its particular makeup.

Canguilhem analyzes the radically new way in which health and disease were defined in the early nineteenth century, showing that the emerging categories of the normal and the pathological were far from objective scientific concepts. He demonstrates how the epistemological foundations of modern biology and medicine were intertwined with political, economic, and technological imperatives.

Canguilhem was an important influence on the thought of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, among others, in particular for the way in which he poses the problem of how new domains of knowledge come into being and how they are part of a discontinuous history of human thought.

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Hi everyone, welcome to the next series presented by Philip. This will be a 3 hour event meeting every 2 weeks. For the first 2 hours we will be reading from Canguilhem's book "The Normal and the Pathological." We will be using the Zone Books translation. During the last hour we will discuss this book: Canguilhem (Key Contemporary Thinkers) by Stuart Elden.

To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Friday May 15 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Meetings will be held every other week on Friday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

Here is the reading schedule for the first few sessions:

First Session (Friday May 15)

• In Canguilhem: Please read up to page 24 (Foucault's Introduction)
• In Elden: Please read up to page 13

Second Session (Friday May 29)

• In Canguilhem: Please read up to page 46
• In Elden: Please read up to page 20

Third Session

• In Canguilhem: Please read up to page 64
• In Elden: Please read up to page 27

Check the group calendar for updates. A pdf of reading materials will be provided to registrants.

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MORE ABOUT THIS DISCUSSION GROUP

This meetup on Canguilhem will be followed by a meetup on Foucault's book "The Archaeology of Knowledge". The "Archaeology of Knowledge" meetup may in turn be followed by further meetups on Philosophy of Science in the French tradition, perhaps centred around Foucault as well as Foucault's great successor, the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking.

This Canguilhem meetup can be enjoyed for its own sake, even if you have no intention of attending the companion meetup on Foucault's "The Archaeology of Knowledge".

However, if you do plan to attend the "The Archaeology of Knowledge" meetup, I strongly recommend that you attend this Canguilhem meetup first. Foucault's thought is of interest to people in a very wide range of disciplines. But the side of Foucault's thought that we encounter in "The Archaeology of Knowledge" is really only studied in any depth by philosophers. It is very far removed from the side of Foucault's thought that has become popular. This Canguilhem meetup will serve as an introduction to Philosophy of Science in the French tradition, and some familiarity with this tradition will serve you well when you encounter "The Archaeology of Knowledge".

The format will be my usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 10-15 pages from each book before each session. Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading.

People who have not done the reading are welcome to attend this meetup. However if you want to TALK during the meetup it is essential that you do the reading. We mean it! It is essential that the direction of the conversation be influenced only by people who have actually done the reading. You may think you are so brilliant and wonderful that you can come up with great points even if you do not do the reading. You probably are brilliant and wonderful — no argument there. But you still have to do the reading if you want to talk in this meetup. REALLY.

Please note that this is a "raise hands" meetup and has a highly structured format, not an anarchy-based one. This is partly for philosophical reasons: I want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy. But our highly structured format is also for disability related reasons that I (Philip) can explain if required.

Intersubjectivity is a key theme in phenomenology. For Merleau-Ponty, this does not happen in the mental realm, but in the realm of embodiment, or intercorporeality. In his later work, The Visible and the Invisible, he takes this further with his notion of "the flesh of the world" (la chair du monde). In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram explains Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “flesh” (chair) as “the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its spontaneous activity,” and he identifies this elemental matrix with the interdependent web of earthly life. In the sociological realm, echoes of this are heard in Emile Durkheim's notion of collective effervescence, the experience of energy, joy, and emotional synchronization people feel when gathering for a common purpose such as ritual or ceremony. The transcendent moment where "I" becomes "we".

In this 3-hour meetup, we will explore rave culture, and conscious/ecstatic dance through the lens of intercorporeality, the flesh, and collective effervescence. Rave culture is often associated with the mantra "PLUR" - peace, love, unity, and respect, and promises fertile ground for some of Merleau-Ponty's (and Durkheim's) ideas.

In the meetup, we will first watch the documentary Electronic Awakening. Because this is all about "lived experience", and many people have not participated in rave culture, I will then DJ a short music set that people can listen to, and dance to as they wish (your camera is off - dance like no-one is watching!). Then we will discuss the film and your own experience with regards to the articles and Merleau-Ponty's ideas. Absolutely no background in this is needed - just come with an open mind/body, it'll be a judgment-free zone.

This is a subject extremely near and dear to my heart. I'm an OG raver from back in the 90s and still continue to attend house and EDM festivals and events. I'm also a conscious dance DJ and facilitator - if you don't know what that is, just think "meditation through dance" or "a rave with no drugs". If there's one place where every "body" is welcome, it's at raves.

There are two readings for this week - one based on Merleau-Ponty's ideas, and one on collective effervescence:

The Flesh of Raving: Merleau-Ponty and the 'Experience' of Ecstasy

• just read the relevant chapter (Chapter 5), not the entire book

A very brief overview of collective effervescence
https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/the-sage-encyclopedia-of-sociology-of-religion/chpt/collective-effervescence#_

Here is a short audio I recorded explaining conscious dance and how you might prepare for our group: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/831y3ni4f71ga7ezg07z4/What-is-Conscious-Dance-TPM.m4a?rlkey=lun09cvyunsj4u0psukxnnvkt&st=fr83zt88&dl=0

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This is an online discussion hosted by Cece to discuss the theme of "Raving, The Flesh, and The Divine" through phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty.

To join this meetup taking place on Sunday April 26 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Look for other sessions in this series on our calendar (link). The next session will be on Picasso and a

All are welcome!

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About the Series:

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a key figure in phenomenology, and is considered one of the most influential philosophers of perception, embodiment, and lived experience.

In The World of Perception, Merleau-Ponty expounds upon at least two core premises. First, while not denying the utility of the scientific method, he posits that there is more to understand and appreciate about life that is not easily pinned down by science. Second, he draws contrasts between what he refers to as "the classical world", which for him communicates a perfect and final view of things, and "the modern world", which is messy, unfinished, and disquieting, yet ultimately more consistent with the ambiguity of life as it is. One of his vehicles for illustrating these two core premises is the arts. In fact, he admonishes us that we might "rehabilitate our perception" through considering the differences between classical art and contemporary art.

In this meetup series, we will take up Merleau-Ponty's invitation to understand perception - and life as it is lived - through contemporary arts. Each session has an assigned reading, and then we will watch a film related to the arts and then discuss the film - and the art medium - with respect to the article and Merleau-Ponty's ideas (and related phenomenologists).

If you are new to Merleau-Ponty, you can find The World of Perception here. It is a very accessible series of public lectures transcribed into a book. You may find this useful background reading for this series.