What we’re about
Welcome to the Toronto Philosophy Meetup! This is a community for anyone interested in philosophy, including newcomers to the subject. We host discussions, talks, reading groups, pub nights, debates, and other events on an inclusive range of topics and perspectives in philosophy, drawing from an array of materials (e.g. philosophical writings, for the most part, but also movies, literature, history, science, art, podcasts, current events, ethnographies, and whatever else seems good.)
Anyone is welcomed to host philosophy-related events here. We also welcome speakers and collaborations with other groups.
Join us at an event soon for friendship, cooperative discourse, and mental exercise!
You can also follow us on Twitter and join our Discord.
Feel free to propose meetup topics (you can do this on the Message Boards), and please contact us if you would like to be a speaker or host an event.
(NOTE: Most of our events are currently online because of the pandemic.)
"Philosophy is not a theory but an activity."
— from "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", Wittgenstein
"Discourse cheers us to companionable
reflection. Such reflection neither
parades polemical opinions nor does it
tolerate complaisant agreement. The sail
of thinking keeps trimmed hard to the
wind of the matter."
— from "On the Experience of Thinking", Heidegger
See here for an extensive list of podcasts and resources on the internet about philosophy.
See here for the standards of conduct that our members are expected to abide by. Members should also familiarize themselves with Meetup's Terms of Service Agreement, especially the section on Usage and Content Policies.
See here for a list of other philosophy-related groups to check out in the Toronto area: https://www.meetup.com/The-Toronto-Philosophy-Meetup/pages/30522966/Other_Philosophy_Groups_in_the_Toronto_Area/
Please note that no advertising of external events, products, businesses, or organizations is allowed on this site without permission from the main Organizer.
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Make a Donation
Since 2016, the Toronto Philosophy Meetup has been holding regular events that are free, open to the public, and help to foster community and a culture of philosophy in Toronto and beyond. To help us continue to do so into the future, please consider supporting us with a donation! Any amount is most welcome.
You can make a donation here.
See here for more information and to meet our donors.
Supporters will be listed on our donors page unless they wish to remain anonymous. We thank them for their generosity!
If you would like to help out or support us in other ways (such as with any skills or expertise you may have), please contact us.
Note: You can also use the donation link to tip individual hosts. Let us know who you want to tip in the notes section. You can also contact hosts directly for ways to tip them.
It’s irrational to be cynical, so why is it becoming more prevalent?
There’s a certain glamor to cynicism. As a culture, we’ve turned cynicism into a symbol of hard-earned wisdom, assuming that those who are cynical are the only ones with the courage to tell us the truth and prepare us for an uncertain future. Psychologist Jamil Zaki challenges that assumption.
Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University, director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, and the author of a new book called Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness (2024). Zaki explores the consequences of cynicism, both for cynical individuals and cynical societies, and he also punctures the conventional wisdom that says cynicism is a reasonable response to the world.
Sean Illing asks Jamil Zaki about why cynicism is everywhere, especially if it makes no sense to be this way — and what we, as individuals, can do to challenge our own cynical tendencies.
“If you think hope is naïve and cynicism is wise, get ready to think again. Jamil Zaki is at the forefront of the science of beliefs, and he shows that refusing to see possibility makes it impossible to solve problems. This book is a ray of light for dark days.” — Adam Grant
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We will discuss the episode "Why Cynicism Is Bad For You" from The Gray Area podcast at this meetup. Please listen to the episode in advance (58 minutes) and bring your thoughts, reactions, and queries to share with us at the conversation.
Listen here: Spotify | Apple | The article on Vox
About the podcast:
The Gray Area with Sean Illing takes a philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas. Each week, we invite a guest to explore a question or topic that matters. From the state of democracy, to the struggle with depression and anxiety, to the nature of identity in the digital age, each episode looks for nuance and honesty in the most important conversations of our time.
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Future topics for this series:
If you'd like to suggest a podcast episode for us to discuss at a future event, please send me a message or leave a comment below.
This link here is my own (regularly updated) list of episode recommendations and potential fodder for future discussions — by default it's sorted from oldest to newest but you can change it with the "sort by" button.
Upcoming events (4+)
See all- Derrida’s Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry (Sections 3 & 4)Link visible for attendees
For this session, we will be reading sections 3 and 4 (pp. 51-66) of Derrida's Introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry.
A copy of the text can be found in the google folder here. As far as I know, this edition is the only available English translation, and it is unfortunately riddled with infelicities and outright mistranslations. We should always be grateful to our translators, but this translation makes it difficult at times to follow Derrida’s arguments. If you are able to read French, I highly recommend reading this text in the original. Otherwise, I will try my best to point out translation errors as we go along. (I would also not recommend Leavey’s preface, as it will not be particularly helpful for our purposes.)
Please note: this text will have almost nothing to do with actual geometry. In his original essay, Husserl is providing a phenomenological analysis of the foundations of geometry, in particular, the way in which something like geometry can arise from “pre-geometrical” experience. Derrida, in turn, is trying to radicalize some of the arguments found in Husserl’s essay in order to pose some fundamental problems to the project of phenomenology. Therefore, despite the title, our discussion will be centered around Husserlian phenomenology rather than geometry. Familiarity with Husserl’s phenomenology will be extremely helpful, and almost a prerequisite, to understand Derrida’s essay. I will do my best to summarize some of Husserl’s key arguments as they come up for those less acquainted with his work.
Tentative reading schedule
- Apr. 13: section 2 (pp. 34-51)
- Apr. 27: sections 3 and 4 (pp. 51-66)
- May 11: section 5 (pp. 66-76)
- May 25: section 6 (pp. 76-86)
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General remarks
In the Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry (1962), one could argue that Derrida has arrived at the doorstep to what will later be called deconstruction. Still operating “within” phenomenology, he is nevertheless pushing at its limits. The crucial limit for this early work will be the question of history (which anticipates Derrida’s later thinking of the “trace”.) While Husserlian phenomenology explicitly treats history as a regional ontology (a subset of beings with its own peculiar characteristics), Derrida will radicalize several cues in Husserl’s later work in order to generalize history beyond any rigid delimitation. With history unbound in this way, phenomenology’s project and method will be deformed at its very core, and yet it will only be through phenomenology that this new thought will arise. As Derrida writes in Of Grammatology (1967), “a thought of the trace can no more break with a transcendental phenomenology than be reduced to it” (p. 62). We will follow the complicated relationship between phenomenology and its limit through an examination of this problem of history as it relates to the interrelated themes of ideality, science, intersubjectivity, and language.
This text, which adheres to the conventions of standard academic writing and lacks what will later become his characteristic style, shows Derrida at his most prosaic and most “philosophical.” It will be of interest to: 1) those who wish to approach Derrida from a more philosophical (rather than “literary”) perspective; and 2) those wanting to investigate the “origin of deconstruction” prior to Derrida’s breakout year of 1967.
- Phenomenology: A Contemporary Introduction by Walter HoppLink visible for attendees
The central task of phenomenology is to investigate the nature of consciousness and its relations to objects of various types. The present book introduces students and other readers to several foundational topics of phenomenological inquiry, and illustrates phenomenology’s contemporary relevance. The main topics include consciousness, intentionality, perception, meaning, and knowledge. The book also contains critical assessments of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method. It argues that knowledge is the most fundamental mode of consciousness, and that the central theses constitutive of Husserl’s "transcendental idealism" are compatible with metaphysical realism regarding the objects of thought, perception, and knowledge.
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Welcome everyone to the next series that Jen and Philip are presenting! This time around we are reading the book:
Phenomenology: A Contemporary Introduction (2020) by Walter Hopp
The format will be our usual "accelerated live read". What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 15-20 pages of text 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.
As always, this meetup will be 3 hours. During the first 2 hours we will talk in a very focused way on the chapter we have read. During this part of the meetup only people who have done the reading will be allowed to influence the direction of the conversation. So please do the reading if you intend to speak during the first 2 hours of this meetup. You might think this does not apply to you, but it does! It applies to you.
During the last hour (which we call "The Free For All") people can talk about absolutely anything related to philosophy. People who have not done the reading will be allowed (and encouraged!) to direct the conversation during this 3rd hour. People who have not found the time to do the reading are welcome in the meetup and the Free For All is their time to talk — and everyone else's time to talk too!
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During the many meetups Philip and Jen have co-hosted on Heidegger, people have often asked about Heidegger's views on consciousness. Philip's answer has always been that consciousness is not that big a deal for Heidegger. It is not something Heidegger is very focused on. Walter Hopp is drawing upon the more Husserlian strand of Phenomenology and in the Husserlian strand consciousness definitely is a big deal. So this will be a chance for people who have wanted to talk about consciousness in relation to Phenomenology to have their chance to talk about that topic.
Likewise, when it comes to knowledge, Heidegger's approach is to address questions of knowledge in such a way that all the traditional problems of knowledge simply do not arise. Some people find this very insightful and some people do not. The approach to phenomenology that Hopp and Husserl adopt allow the traditional problems of knowledge to arise in more or less their traditional versions. Many people will find this approach to phenomenology more satisfying than Heidegger's approach. Philip is definitely "team Heidegger" on both consciousness and knowledge, but it will be interesting and instructive to see how Hopp and Husserl manage these issues.
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READING SCHEDULE
Please note that the amount of reading we are assigning per session is not that much. Walter Hopp's book is not especially difficult, but it is very specific and detailed. It is crucial to do the reading if you want to follow the meetup. Even someone who knows a lot about Phenomenology in general will have a hard time following the specifics of Hopp's argument if they have not done the reading.
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For the 1st meeting, please read the Preface
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.....
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For April 13, read Chapter 9: Knowledge
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For April 27, read Chapter 10...
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etc.
Please note that in this meetup we will be actually DOING philosophy and not merely absorbing Walter Hopp's ideas in a passive way. What this means is that we will be trying to find flaws in Hopp's (and Husserl's) reasoning and in his mode of presenting his ideas. We will also be trying to improve the ideas in question and perhaps proposing better alternatives. That is what philosophers do after all!
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In this meetup, all technology-related issues are handled by Jen. So if you cannot get into the meetup or are having other technology-related issues, there is no point contacting Philip. Philip is still trying to master the art of building a phone out of two tin cans and a string. :(
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Suggestions for Extra Reading (link)
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- Live-Reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics – North American StyleLink visible for attendees
Let's try something new. For the next dozen weeks or so, starting 4/17/2022, we are going to live-read and discuss Aristotle's ~Nicomachean Ethics~. What is new and different about this project is that the translation, by Adam Beresford (2020), happens to be rendered in standard 'Murican English.
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From the translator's "Note" on the text:
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"This translation is conservative in interpretation and traditional in aim. It aims to translate the text as accurately as possible.
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"I translated every page from scratch, from a clean Greek text, rather than revising an existing translation. ... I wanted to avoid the scholars’ dialect that is traditionally used for translating Aristotle.
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"I reject the approach of Arthur Adkins, Elizabeth Anscombe, and others who followed Nietzsche in supposing that the main elements of modern thinking about right and wrong were unknown to the Greeks, or known to them only in some radically different form. My view of humanity and of our shared moral instincts is shaped by a newer paradigm. This is a post-Darwinian translation. (It is also more in line with the older, both Aristotelian and Christian view of human character.)
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"Having said that, I have no interest at all in modernizing Aristotle’s ideas. All the attitudes of this treatise remain fully Greek, very patriarchal, somewhat aristocratic, and firmly embedded in the fourth century BC. My choice of dialect (standard English) has no bearing on that whatsoever. (It is perfectly possible to express distinctively Greek and ancient attitudes in standard English.) ... I have also not simplified the text in any way. I have translated every iota, particle, preposition, noun, verb, adjective, phrase, clause, and sentence of the original. Every premise and every argument therefore remains – unfortunately – exactly as complex and annoyingly difficult as in any other version in whatever dialect.
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"Some scholars and students unwarily assume that the traditional dialect has a special connection with Greek and that using it brings readers closer to the original text; and that it makes the translation more accurate. In reality, it has no special tie to the Greek language, either in its main philosophical glossary or in its dozens of minor (and pointless) deviations from normal English. And in my view it certainly makes any translation much less accurate.
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"I will occasionally refer to the scholars’ dialect (‘Gringlish’) and its traditional glossary in the Notes."
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Here is our plan:
1. Read Intro excerpts or a summary to gain the big picture.
2. Read a segment of the translated text.
3. Discuss it analytically and interpretively.
4. Repeat again at #2 for several more times.
5. Discuss the segments evaluatively.
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Zoom is the project's current meeting platform, but that can change. The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows.
