About us
Welcome to the Toronto Philosophy Meetup! This is a community (online and in-person) 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, poetry, 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 Facebook, Twitter or Bluesky and join our new Discord for extended discussion and to stay in touch with other members.
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.
Please note that no advertising of external events, products, businesses, or organizations is allowed on this site without permission from the main organizer.
* * * * *
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.
Featured event
Georges Canguilhem: Foucault's Great Teacher
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.
Ambitious, I know!
But for now, let's focus on this Canguilhem meetup.
- This will be a 3 hour meetup. 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.
See below for the reading schedule and pdf copies of the texts. 👇👇👇
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.
Here is the reading schedule:
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
After that, the readings will be posted.
A pdf copy of the Canguilhem text is here and a pdf of the Elden is here.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
About the text (from the publisher):
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.
Upcoming events
566
A Compressed Genealogy of Phenomenology — Part II
·OnlineOnlineA Compressed Genealogy of Phenomenology — Part II
From Aristotle to HusserlLast time, I got overwhelmed by the size of the thing I had accidentally opened. What started as a manageable history of phenomenology became Aristotle-to-the-present, plus a database, plus a mindmap, plus my attempt to explain why the map was not the map I actually wanted.
This session we will go cleanly and with a clear plan.
We will follow just one thread: Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Husserl.
Aristotle makes the appearing world the object of investigation: perception, form, imagination, and ways of intelligibility. Descartes wants existence that has been certainty-vetted, which makes the known retreat into the power of think-acting. The outer known is known by subjective proxies, and this is the crisis of representationalism. How do I know my thought actually [reaches? emulates? is?] the thing? Hume makes sense stuff our only acquaintance. If we limit our having to our actual getting, experience is originally and for-us really a passing plurality of impressions, ideas, associations, habits, and a few kinds of invented relation that provide certainty and necessity. Kant’s solution makes certain ways of unity—space, time, judgment, synthesis—necessary for being a functioning knower. Showing up as knowable means that lots of vetting has already occurred.
This time, we will see how Husserl inherits this history and what he does with it, which is describe, with amazing care, the acts and structures that make the object-experience a presence-experience for the subject—how an object becomes present as meant, known, doubted, remembered, imagined, or judged.
The goal this time is to make the sequence intelligible and usable.
METHOD
- TBA by this evening!
- As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)
ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK
Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.
View all of our coming episodes here.
9 attendees
Hegel's Science of Logic (Book 1: The Doctrine of Being)
·OnlineOnlineAt this meeting we'll begin reading at the B. The One and the Many section, on page 164 of the Miller translation. At the end of the meeting we will again be talking about whatever anyone wants to discuss in Robert Stern's Hegel, Kant, and the Structure of the Object.
A good essay which addresses the most important questions that arise in the first chapter of the Logic can be found here:
Another good essay, by Dieter Henrich, entitled Beginning and Method of (the) Logic, is available here (link).
During the meetings we'll be using the Miller translation. The pdf of the Miller can be found here (link).At the end of the meeting we'll be talking about Stephen Houlgate's On Being: Quality and the Birth of Quantity in Hegel's 'Science of Logic' , Vol. 1, but I don't know what part of we should look at. It is available here (link).
Also, a good essay which addresses the most important questions that arise in the first chapter of the Logic can be found here:
Another good essay, by Dieter Henrich, entitled Beginning and Method of (the) Logic, is available here.
During the meetings we'll be using the Miller translation. The pdf of the Miller can be found here (link).Hegel's Science of Logic (1812–1816) is a landmark in German idealism and a radical rethinking of logic as the living structure of reality itself. Rather than treating logic as a neutral tool or set of rules, Hegel presents it as the dynamic structure of reality and self-consciousness. He develops a system of dialectical reasoning in which concepts evolve through contradictions and their resolutions. In contrast to his early collaborator and philosophical rival Friedrich Schelling, who emphasized the role of intuition and nature in the Absolute, Hegel insists that pure thought — developed immanently from itself — is the true foundation of metaphysics. The work is divided into three major parts: Being, Essence, and Concept (or Notion), each tracing the development of increasingly complex categories of thought. For Hegel, logic is not abstract or static; it is the unfolding of the Absolute, the rational core of existence.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a discussion group for Hegel's Science of Logic. We have read several of Friedrich Schelling's works, including Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809), Ages of the World (c. 1815), and the Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology (1845), Anyone with an interest in philosophy is free to join in the meetings.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
8 attendees
Past events
7742
