r/PhilosophyBookClub

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!

One philosophical question I keep returning to:

What if consciousness is not something the brain creates, but something the brain temporarily filters or expresses?

Modern neuroscience has become incredibly sophisticated at mapping neural activity, identifying correlations, and explaining cognition mechanistically. Yet the deepest problem still remains untouched:

Why is there subjective experience at all?

Why does electrical activity inside matter produce the feeling of being someone?

A thought that fascinates me is that perhaps consciousness is less like a product and more like a field, with biological systems acting as localized receivers of awareness rather than its absolute origin.

Not necessarily claiming this is true, but philosophically it seems difficult to fully reduce consciousness to chemistry alone when experience itself remains fundamentally irreducible.

Curious where others stand on this:

Do you believe consciousness is fully emergent from matter, or could awareness itself be more fundamental to reality than we currently assume?

This question became one of the major inspirations behind my recent work Stardust Mind: The Quantum Blueprint of Human Consciousness.

Liberty That Looks at Itself

The Simple Explanation

Imagine you're a robot programmed to walk straight ahead. The robot cannot choose anything else — it walks straight, full stop. Now imagine someone puts a screen in front of it showing exactly how it moves. Still no choice — but it sees. Now imagine the robot can also understand what it sees and can say: "Ah, I'm walking straight. But I don't want to walk straight." — and it stops.

That moment — when the system sees itself and decides differently — is free will.

It's not magic. It's not an escape from physics. It's simply that some systems are complex enough to observe themselves from the outside — and this act of observation creates a third option beyond "automatic forward motion" and "random motion."

The 3 Arguments

Argument 1 — Hunger and the Menu 🍽️

What is determined: You're hungry. Your body has burned energy, blood sugar has dropped, your stomach is sending signals. You didn't choose this — it happened purely mechanically, like a thermostat reading the temperature.

What would be random: You close your eyes and point randomly at a spot on the menu.

What you actually do: You look at the menu. But at the same time you look at yourself looking at the menu. You tell yourself: "I want pizza, but yesterday I ate something heavy and I feel bloated when I do that. I know I'm going to choose pizza — and that's exactly why I'm choosing the salad."

That sentence — "I know I'm going to choose X, and that's exactly why I'm choosing something else" — is impossible for a robot and impossible for a die. It's only possible for something that can observe itself in the act of choosing.

The choice isn't determined because you broke the trajectory your body had set in motion. It isn't random because you made it for a clear reason. It's the third option: deliberate.

Argument 2 — Anger and the 10 Seconds ⚡

What is determined: Someone insults you. Your brain automatically triggers adrenaline, tension rises, the impulse to respond aggressively appears immediately. This is pure determinism — stimulus, reaction.

What would be random: You say something completely out of place, unrelated to the situation.

What you actually do: You pause. Not because the impulse has disappeared — it's still there, you feel it. But a part of you looks at that anger and says: "I can see that I'm angry. I can see that I'm about to say something I'll regret. I know exactly how this ends." And you choose to stay silent or respond calmly.

The anger was determined. The calm was not random. It was the product of a system that saw itself mid-reaction and intervened. That's exactly why you feel bad when you don't do it — because you know you could have stopped. That knowledge of possibility is the proof of freedom.

Argument 3 — Habits and Identity 🔄

What is determined: You've been smoking for 10 years. Your brain has built solid neural circuits — after coffee, you automatically light a cigarette. It's almost as mechanical as a knee-jerk reflex.

What would be random: One day, out of nowhere, for no reason, you don't light the cigarette.

What you actually do — when you manage to quit: The craving doesn't disappear. The circuits are still there. But you do something physically strange: you look at yourself as if you were another person. You tell yourself: "The one who lights a cigarette after coffee — that's the usual me. But I can be someone else too." And you sit with the craving, observe it, and don't act on it.

This is not determinism — you broke a causal chain ten years in the making. It's not random — you did it with a purpose. It was only possible because you created a meta-self that looked at the everyday self and decided it didn't want to be that person.

Why It's Neither Determined Nor Random

Think of a river. The water flows downhill — determined, inevitable. Now you throw a stone randomly into the water — random, meaningless.

Free will is neither the water nor the stone. It's an engineer who observes the river, understands where it's going, and builds a dam — not to stop the water (physics remains physics), but to change the direction in which it flows.

The engineer hasn't stepped outside of nature. He has used nature. But he has used it by seeing it from above — and this bird's-eye view, this eye that turns back upon itself, is exactly what it means to be conscious. And exactly where freedom grows.

https://www.greghickeywrites.com/best-philosophical-novels

Based on curated lists from The Guardian, Flavorwire and more, suggestions from readers on Goodreads, Quora and Reddit, and picks from philosophical fiction authors like Khaled Hosseini, Irvin D. Yalom, Rebecca Goldstein and Daniel Quinn, here is a roundup of the 105 best philosophical novels ever written.

Check it out and let me know: How many of these titles have you read? Where do your favorites rank? And are there any books you think should have been included but weren’t?

I’ve been thinking a lot about something I can’t quite resolve on my own. I am autistic and as expected have trouble with relationships overall and I’ve noticed that this tends to either attract people with bad intentions or push good people away over time due to differences in how we see the world. I also pull away myself when my needs aren’t being met, which I think is healthy, but it leaves me in this recurring cycle of loss.

The part I can’t figure out philosophically is this: I don’t want to build a life around just accumulating things, degrees, money, stuff. That feels empty to me. But the alternative, centering life around human connection, feels just as unstable when connection keeps proving itself to be temporary or conditional.

So what’s left? Is there a framework for finding meaning that doesn’t depend on either of those things holding up?
I’m not looking for stoicism 101 or “just detach from outcomes” takes. I’m genuinely asking if anyone has read something that engages seriously with the tension between needing people and knowing that needing people might cost you yourself. Literature, essays, philosophy, anything goes.

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.

In an old parable, a man carried two water jars suspended from a pole across his shoulders. One jar was new and perfect; the other was old and cracked and leaked water along the path.

Every day, by the time the man reached his master’s house, the cracked jar was almost empty. The new jar boasted of its usefulness, while the cracked jar was ashamed of its flaws.

One day the cracked jar said to the man apologetically:

“I am defective. I lose most of the water through my cracks before you reach the house.”

The man replied:

“Yes, but when was the last time you looked at your side of the path? I know all about your cracks, so I scattered seeds there. Every day, when you thought you were merely leaking water, you were watering flowers. Look at this road now!”

The jar looked and was amazed. His side of the path was covered with the most beautiful flowers imaginable.

“Because of you, the master always has fresh flowers on his table. Your cracks have leaked so much beauty into the world that people come from far away just to walk along this path. The say it fills them with joy like nothing else.”

Old age is the perfect time to leak beauty into the world. We think our cracks make us useless; nothing could be further from the truth. The older we get, the more wounds, flaws, and imperfections we carry — but these are the very cracks through which the light pours out.

Little do we know that someone has sown seeds along our path. These seeds can sprout only if we water them through our wounds. Our wounds are sacred. They are conduits of living water — unique life experiences that can nourish the seeds of new life.

Whole jars carry ordinary water; broken jars carry living water.

“One of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side… bringing a sudden flow of blood and water.” — John 19:34

By that water, we have been healed. The mystery of healing is that it can come only through the Wound. The older we get, the more sacred our wounds become — and the more healing beauty we can spill.

For the world to flower, people must leak the beauty of their cracks. If we hide them or patch them up with tape, our beauty cannot flow out. When we hide our cracks, our path remains dry and barren. We become rigid and closed in on ourselves — crackpots rather than cracked pots.

When we open them, streams of living water gush forth, and everything begins to blossom.

We do not think much of old age. We think of it as diminishing. And it is diminishing — but in an enlarging way. As G. K. Chesterton put it:

“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.”
— Orthodoxy

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.