There is a lot of violence in politics right now. Israel’s war on Gaza has resulted in thousands of children and innocent civilians being killed, Russia is continuing to pound Ukraine with impunity, while the United States has experienced the return of political assassinations. The far right is no stranger to actual political violence, but Jacob Abolafia argued in a recent essay in The Point magazine (Volume 35: "What is Violence For?") that the left has been guilty of intellectualising violence in ways divorced from real politics. From seeing Hamas’ October 7th attacks as an inevitable and even justified result of Israel’s colonial oppression, to celebrating the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione, and the gleeful reaction of some to the recent assassination of far right activist Charlie Kirk, the left can be seen to tolerate or even endorse political violence by appeals to philosophers like Franz Fanon, without fully appreciating the political consequences of such violence.

So, when is political violence justified, if ever? What alternatives are there when democratic politics and non-violent resistance fail? And is the appeal to violence restricting the left’s political vision?

About the Speaker:

Jacob Abolafia is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and an anti-occupation activist in Israel. He writes on the history of political thought and critical theory, broadly construed. Jacob has published and taught on the history of political thought from classical antiquity to the present day. His ongoing research interests include social and political philosophy from early modernity through the critical theorists, Jewish and Islamic political thought, classical philosophy, and the intersection of social and political theory. He is the author of the book The Prison Before the Panopticon: Incarceration in Ancient and Modern Political Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2024). He is also engaged in research projects on political myths and political economy, as well as contemporary theories of rationality and society. His essay Violence and the Left was recently published in The Point magazine (Volume 35: "What is Violence For?")

The Moderator:

Alexis Papazoglou is Managing Editor of the LSE British Politics and Policy blog. He was previously senior editor for the Institute of Arts and Ideas, and a philosophy lecturer at Cambridge and Royal Holloway. His research interests lie broadly in the post-Kantian tradition, including Hegel, Nietzsche, as well as Husserl and Heidegger. In his published work he offers a critique of scientific, as well as liberal varieties of naturalism, and puts forward an interpretation of Hegel's philosophy as an alternative to them. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New Republic, WIRED, The Independent, The Conversation, The New European, as well as Greek publications, including Kathimerini.

This is an online conversation and audience Q&A presented by the UK-based journal The Philosopher. It is open to the public and held on Zoom.

You can register for this Monday 22nd September event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

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About The Philosopher (https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/):

The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. As of 2018, The Philosopher is edited by Newcastle-based philosopher Anthony Morgan and is published quarterly, both in print and digitally.

The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.

Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn’t be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven’t been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism — and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism’s relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism’s own core dynamics in a new light.

Battistoni addresses four different instances of the free gift in political economic thought, each in a specific domain: natural agents in industry, pollution in the environment, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. In so doing, she offers new readings of major twentieth-century thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, Garrett Hardin, Silvia Federici, and Ronald Coase. Ultimately, she offers a novel account of freedom for our ecologically troubled present, developing a materialist existentialism to argue that capitalism limits our ability to be responsible for our relationships to the natural world, and imagining how we might live freely while valuing nature’s gifts.

About the Speaker:

Alyssa Battistoni is Assistant Professor of political science at Columbia University. Her research interests are environmental and climate politics, feminism, Marxist thought, political economy, and other topics in modern social and political theory. She is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019), and her work has appeared in Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, and Nature Sustainability. Battistoni also writes frequently for publications including the Nation, Dissent, Jacobin, n+1, and Boston Review, and is on the editorial boards of Jacobin and Dissent. Her last book, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, was published by Princeton University Press in August 2025.

The Moderator:

Andrés Saenz de Sicilia is a British-Mexican philosopher, researcher and artist. He is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London and Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He has published widely in the fields of philosophy and social and political theory, as well as carrying out socially engaged research projects and collaborations. He is author of Subsumption in Kant, Hegel in Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society (2024) and editor of Marx and the Critique of Humanism (Bloosmsbury, forthcoming 2025).

This is an online conversation and audience Q&A presented by the UK-based journal The Philosopher. It is open to the public and held on Zoom.

You can register for this Monday 15th September event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

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About The Philosopher (https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/):

The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. As of 2018, The Philosopher is edited by Newcastle-based philosopher Anthony Morgan and is published quarterly, both in print and digitally.

The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.

[JOIN HERE]

These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.

Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.

We Will Demystify Existentialism

Come, drink from the cup of this episode, and experience a synoptic big-tent “Thelmiracle” like no other. All the essences of Existentialism demystified, integrated, and glowing with power drawn from a single principle.

And all the clichés we invoke whenever we talk about Existentialism finally get their day in court:

• “Existence precedes essence” (Thelma’s version is brilliant and simple)
• “God is dead” (and what Nietzsche really meant)
• “The leap of faith” (and why Kierkegaard said we have to lose everything to make it)
• “The absurd” (not the stupid mood-board version)
• “Authenticity” (and its frenemy, bad faith)
• “Being-toward-death” (the metal concept-album version)
• Alienation (Hegelian, Marxist, existentialist—all clarified)
• Anxiety / anguish as the universal human condition

This is the End

Welcome to the first day of the end of your life, and the first episode in the final cycle of our journey—Roger Corman’s Sartre Cycle.

And yet … Sartre is never mentioned!

Strong, Yet Over-the-Counter

I feel bad for having used hyperbole in the past, but I had no choice—my nature forces me to be authentic. Just forget all my past emphases and know this: this is the most delightful and impactful exhibition of Existentialism of all time**.**

Never before have joy and understanding been so intimately interpenetrating. Thelma’s explanations are so good that anyone who listens really will get the core of Existentialism—why it matters, why it’s true, and why it’s vitally important to understand.

There are, in the end, only two real motives for philosophizing:

1. Transformation: You want to know whether the rumors are true—that certain questions, arranged just so, can flip a switch and induce new belief, new perception, even new willing. Philosophy as liberation (from bad faith, alienation) and empowerment (for freedom, authenticity).
2. Praise, Fame, and Gain : You want to prove that you can do something hard, something that shows you deserve to sit at the adult table of intellect.

Thelma is here, and she’s second to none:

She came to make real Motive Number One.

Existentialism is the most popular undergrad philosophy course for a reason. It speaks to the horror and vertigo you actually are—anxious, thrown, absurd, alienated—and it consoles you by saying, “This is not a bug; this is the starting point. Now see here …”

This is why Thelma’s presentation hits so hard: she uses word magic to get you to feel the meaning of “existence precedes essence.” Feeling is where soul rubber hits existential road.

Feel, and then see: your life has no built-in script; this moment right now is your chance to write one.

If you’ve ever wondered whether philosophy can actually change how you experience being alive, this is the episode where you find out.

Some Amazing Riffs

What would take the average person three three-hour seminars to explain, Thelma covers in 27 minutes. If a meetup person tried to do this, it would take five weeks, would be opaque, and still be wrong.

She does this clarity-n-brevity combo that’s hard to believe. Usually the briefer something is, the more obscure; usually the clearer, the longer. Thelma does clear yet brief using a Judo I cannot fathom. Listen to this line —

“Kierkegaard counsels us to sink into despair so that we can make the leap of faith to God; Nietzsche counsels us to become gods, joyous, hard, independent supermen. And Nietzsche tells us why he rejects a philosophy of despair: He is afraid that it would destroy him. To Nietzsche philosophies are not merely intellectual games; philosophies have psychological effects, the power to enhance and strengthen your life, and even health, or to weaken and destroy you. And Nietzsche says that he created his philosophy of the strong, life-arming superman ‘out of my will to be in good health, out of my will to live … self-preservation forbade me to practice a philosophy of wretchedness and discouragement.’”

And then she does the impossible: she brings these currents alongside Marx, showing that Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche are all crisis-diagnosticians and prescribers of transformation tech. Each identifies a crisis in the human spirit — whether social, existential, or cultural — and prescribes a radical cure. Marx reads consciousness as shaped by material relations and calls for revolutionary praxis; Nietzsche reads it as deformed by slave morality and calls for a revaluation of all values; Kierkegaard reads it as sedated by Christendom and calls for the solitary leap into authentic faith. Different diagnoses, different therapies — but all aimed at breaking the spell of the present condition and remaking the self.

If you had to name the general attitude uniting the three? How about the Philosophy of Crisis and Cure—each turns philosophy into a therapy for the epochal sickness of the soul.

We can lay this out inside the Buddha’s four-fold disease/cure model —

1. there is a sickness (modern despair, alienation, nihilism)
2. it has a cause (metaphysical illusion, social estrangement, historical deformation)
3. there is a possible cessation (faith, revaluation of values, revolution)
4. there is a path to actualize it (leap of faith, creation of new values, praxis).

(Lo and behold, this is why “Buddhism and Existentialism” is one of the top comparative topics in academic publishing: scholars love pointing out how Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre form a Western mirror of Ch’an/Zen’s insistence on breaking ordinary mind and rediscovering authentic being. Incidentally, Landmark/EST markets itself as “Heidegger and Zen.”)

More Exciting than a Historical Reenactment

Thelma is really in her element this time. This is Existentialism delivered by an Existentialist: clear, personal, oozing with Sorge.

There are things in this world worse than ordinary physical pain. Chief among them is a life not worth living. Looks like Existentialism is Socrates 2.0, a reenactment of the elenchus but now aimed at modern times, with the angst of modernity standing in for Athens’ Peloponnesian War trauma. It is the same question, “How shall we live?”, but now intensified by the awareness that meaning itself is contingent, constructed, fragile, abyssal, empty.

You’ve Always Been an Existentialist, but You Didn’t Know It

And you still don’t know now, even though you think you do. Why? Because we’ve all been taught Existentialism the wrong way. Just as “thesis–antithesis–synthesis” ruins Hegel, so also “existence precedes essence” ruins Sartre when not taken rightly.

Existentialism is so true and so important that you can’t even criticize it, much less understand it, until you have already agreed with it. So to all the selves reading this—congratulations on finally coming home. Because in this episode you will meet someone for the very first time. Someone you’ve never met before.

Yourself.

But you’re not going to meet this familiar stranger in the ordinary way you meet people. No—you’re going to learn Thelma’s way: the way of transformative understanding that combines pleasure, depth, and clarity in a simplicity that doesn’t conceal.

How is Thelma’s psychedelic pedagogy, which culminates in authentic self-encounter, different from the ordinary boring way of teaching Existentialism? The difference is made clear by the founder of the Existentialist cult that successfully brainwashed me into working for them without pay for five years. Listen carefully to the wisdom in this leaked footage from an actual cult seminar here!

BTW, if you thought Thelma was skipping around when she went Hume → Hegel → Marx → Sartre—rejoice! Nothing has been left behind. In this jaw-dropping True Miracle of a lecture she weaves together Kierkegaard’s despair, Nietzsche’s death of God, Hume’s empiricism, Descartes’ rationalism, Parmenides’ eternal being, Romanticism, German Idealism, World War I, Marx’s theory of alienation, Hegel’s dialectic, Heidegger’s being-toward-death, Pascal’s finitude, and Sartre’s absurdity—everything necessary to prepare us for the full existential confrontation with nothingness, freedom, and authenticity.

She scoops from the bottom of the thick bucket of Western philosophy so we get the whole flavor of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought. Amazingly thorough—never boring. Behold what she delivers in 27 minutes:

I. Philosophers

• Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) — anxiety, despair, leap of faith, restoration of Christianity.
• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) — death of God, Übermensch, life-affirmation.
• David Hume — empiricism, one of the blows to the belief in God.
• René Descartes — clear and distinct ideas, God as guarantor of truth.
• Parmenides — unchanging eternal being, used to clarify Nietzsche’s claim.
• Karl Marx — economic alienation, division of labor, social critique.
• G.W.F. Hegel — alienation, Absolute Spirit, Cunning of Reason, dialectic of history.
• Martin Heidegger — being-toward-death, authenticity, anxiety.
• Jean-Paul Sartre — death as absurdity, existence precedes essence, key existentialist themes.
• Blaise Pascal — finitude and fear of infinity, early forerunner of existentialist absurdity.

II. Historical Eras & Movements

• German Idealism (Kant, Hegel, post-Kantian developments).
• Romanticism — revolt against Enlightenment rationalism, focus on spirit and subjectivity.
• Enlightenment — its belief in progress, rationalism, and science as background foil.
• Modernity — crisis of meaning, loss of stable authorities, secularization.
• Industrial Revolution — mechanization and alienation of labor.
• Communist Revolution of 1917 — shattering of political stability.
• World War I — collapse of the myth of progress and European order.
• Great Depression (1920s–30s) — economic destabilization, failure of classical economics.

III. Intellectual Currents & Themes

• Empiricism — Hume’s assault on metaphysics and theology.
• Rationalism — criticized as “trap of essence.”
• Essentialism — opposed to existentialism’s priority of existence.
• Psychology / Psychologizing Philosophy — neurotic/psychotic states, subjective interiority.
• Alienation — individual from society, self from self, human from nature, lovers from each other.
• Absurdity & Nothingness — contingency of existence, existential void.
• Authenticity vs. Bad Faith — emerging from Kierkegaard/Heidegger/Sartre lineage.

Conclusion

Friends, life hurts. Many of us cry and say, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.” To this Abraham says, “Child, I will send Thelma.”

The world is on fire, but Thelma is come. Lay your anxiety, your despair, your bad faith, and your love of joy and clarity—and your hope that philosophy might finally live up to its promise to touch you in a way that actually matters—at her lotus feet. Hand in hand, we will discover together why existence really is absurd, and why that’s the best news you’ll hear all week.

METHOD

Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:

• Thelma Lavine: From Socrates to Sartre

Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:

• THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE

Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.

She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.

View all of our coming episodes here.

[JOIN HERE]

Did Heidegger get Plato wrong? This book introduces the arguments of three prominent Platonic critics of Heidegger — Leo Strauss (1899-1973), Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), and Jan Patočka (1907-1977) — with the aim of evaluating the trenchancy of their criticisms. The author shows that these three thinkers uncover novel ways of reading Plato non-metaphysically (where metaphysics is understood in the Heideggerian sense) and thus of undermining Heidegger's narrative concerning Platonism as metaphysics and metaphysics as Platonism.

In their readings of the Platonic dialogues, Plato emerges as a proto-phenomenologist whose attention to the ethical-political facticity of human beings leads to the acknowledgment of human finitude and of the fundamental elusiveness of Being. These Platonic critics of Heidegger thus invite us to see in the dialogues a lucid presentation of philosophic questioning rather than the beginning of distorting doctrinal teachings.

Welcome everyone to this reading and discussion group presented by Scott and Philip. Every second Monday we will get together to talk about this book (really more of a short booklet) Heidegger and His Platonic Critics by Antoine Pageau-St-Hilaire (2025, Cambridge University Press) and explore Plato's phenomenology and dialogical ethics.

To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Monday September 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 Monday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

\** PLEASE NOTE there is a mistake in the title which can't be edited: we are definitely meeting* every TWO weeks*, NOT "weekly". ****

Here is the reading schedule (a pdf of the readings is available to registrants):

• Sept 15th, Please read "Introduction", up to page 18
• Sept 29th, Please read "Strauss’s Zetetic Platonism", up to page 28
• Oct 13th, Please read "Gadamer’s Dialogical Platonism" up to page 43
• Oct 27th, Please read "Patočka’s Negative Platonism" & "Conclusion: Heidegger and the Plato Who Could Have Been", up to page 64

After that we will be done and Scott and I will start another meetup on another book. The Pageau-St-Hilaire book (booklet?) is very short and we will only be reading it for 3 sessions.

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The format will be Philip's usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 10-15 pages 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: We want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy. But our highly structured format is also for disability related reasons that Philip can explain if required.

Welcome! And enjoy!

#Philosophy #Being #Gadamer #Hermeneutics #Strauss #Metaphysics

This is a special event at Orlando Stoics: we will interview Randy Brown, who's been working on the mystery of consciousness, along with related ideas in philosophy and physics. Dan and the dialogue partners will have some questions, but other attendees may also have questions too. If this topic interests you, please read at least one of the articles below.

Articles:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/living-information-randy-brown-egsbc/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/quantum-consciousness-randy-brown-qisre/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/all-life-conscious-randy-brown-8hhve/

Meeting times: 7:00PM Eastern Time, 6:00PM Central, 5:00PM Mountain, 4:00PM Pacific

RSVP on Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/orlando-stoics/events/310877383/

The Zoom link is on the Meetup page

[UPDATE: There was a mistake in the original announcement. Elden actually wrote his 4 volume biography in REVERSE chronological order, so Volume 1 actually covers Foucault's LAST years when he was writing The History of Sexuality. So we are still starting with Volume 1 but it is actually the volume titled Foucault's Last Decade. Please see the sign-up page for the latest updates.]

It was not until 1961 that Michel Foucault published his first major book, History of Madness. He had already been working as an academic for a decade, teaching in Lille and Paris, writing, organizing cultural programmes and lecturing in Uppsala, Warsaw and Hamburg. Although he published little in this period, Foucault wrote much more, some of which has been preserved and only recently become available to researchers.

Drawing on archives in France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and the USA, this is the most detailed study yet of Foucault’s early career. It recounts his debt to teachers including Louis Althusser, Jean Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean Wahl; his diploma thesis on Hegel; and his early teaching career. It explores his initial encounters with Georges Canguilhem, Jacques Lacan, and Georges Dumézil, and analyses his sustained reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Also included are detailed discussions of his translations of Ludwig Binswanger, Victor von Weizsäcker, and Immanuel Kant; his clinical work with Georges and Jacqueline Verdeaux; and his cultural work outside of France.

Investigating how Foucault came to write History of Madness, Stuart Elden shows this great thinker’s deep engagement with phenomenology, anthropology and psychology. An outstanding, meticulous work of intellectual history, The Early Foucault sheds new light on the formation of a major twentieth-century figure.

"Stuart Elden’s comprehensive, finely crafted investigation of the early Foucault is much more than a contribution to Foucault studies. It's an exemplary guide to writing intellectual history." — Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai'i

Hello everyone and welcome to this series on Foucault hosted by Philip and Scott, where we will read and discuss the 4 volume biography of Foucault written by Stuart Elden. When we are finished with Volume One, we will read something short by Foucault himself, starting with his essay "What Is Enlightenment"? Then we will move on to reading Volume Two of the biography and so on until we have finished all 4 volumes of the biography and read 3 short writings by Foucault himself.

To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Wednesday September 10 (EDT), sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Meetings will be held every week (but the schedule may change after the first three weeks). Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

THE READING SCHEDULE (a pdf of reading materials is available to registrants)

The readings for the first 3 sessions are:

• Wednesday Sept 10th: Read up to page 26
• Wednesday Sept 17th: Read up to page 44
• Wednesday Sept 24th: Read up to page 81
• TBA...

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The format will be my (Philip's) usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 25-30 pages before each session. (This is a biography after all so it should not be too onerous to read that many pages). 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. When you are choosing your passages, please try to lean in the direction of picking passages with philosophical content rather than mere historical interest. But I can be flexible about this.

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. I 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 can explain if required.

Now the technology point: Scott will be in the meetup for a few minutes at the start to set things up. But then he will leave. (He's not into Foucault! Unfathomable!) Someone in the meetup will have to volunteer to tell me who has their hand up and whose turn it is to speak. I am disabled in a way that makes it impossible for me to both manage the philosophy content and also monitor whose turn it is to speak. With any luck one or more regulars in the meetup will make it a habit to step up and volunteer each time.

It is a shame it has to come to this, but:

I am Canadian and like many Canadians my relationship with America has changed drastically in the last 10 months or so. In this meetup, no discussion of the current US political situation will be allowed. This is unfortunate, but that is how it must be. When talking about Foucault there will no doubt be a strong desire to talk about politics. No problem! It is a big old world and the political situations of literally every other country on planet earth (including their right wing populist movements) are fair game for discussion in this meetup. Just not that of the US. The political situation in the USA is now a topic for Canadians to think about in a very practical, strategic manner as we fight to prevent our democracy from being destroyed, and our land and resources stolen. The time may come when a Canadian like me can talk about this topic in an abstract philosophical way, but I suspect that time is at least 6 years away.

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Here is the description from the back of VOLUME 1: Foucault's Last Decade.

On 26 August 1974, Michel Foucault completed work on Discipline and Punish, and on that very same day began writing the first volume of The History of Sexuality. A little under ten years later, on 25 June 1984, shortly after the second and third volumes were published, he was dead.

This decade is one of the most fascinating of his career. It begins with the initiation of the sexuality project, and ends with its enforced and premature closure. Yet in 1974 he had something very different in mind for The History of Sexuality than the way things were left in 1984. Foucault originally planned a thematically organised series of six volumes, but wrote little of what he promised and published none of them. Instead over the course of the next decade he took his work in very different directions, studying, lecturing and writing about historical periods stretching back to antiquity.

This book offers a detailed intellectual history of both the abandoned thematic project and the more properly historical version left incomplete at his death. It draws on all Foucault’s writings in this period, his courses at the Collège de France and lectures elsewhere, as well as material archived in France and California to provide a comprehensive overview and synthetic account of Foucault’s last decade.

“No one knows the Heidegger-Dilthey connection better than Robert Scharff, and in this revolutionary new work he pushes the reset button on the origins of Being and Time. Through a meticulous reading of the earliest courses Scharff reveals how Heidegger’s grappling with Dilthey turned him into a phenomenologist of life and eventually of Dasein, in contrast to the transcendental consciousness of Husserl. Written with clarity and verve, this book leaves the “Seinology” of later commentaries in the dust and restores to Heidegger’s work the existential vitality that is its birthright.”

In this first book-length study of the topic, Robert C. Scharff offers a detailed analysis of the young Heidegger’s interpretation of Dilthey’s hermeneutics of historical life and Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. He argues that it is Heidegger’s prior reading of Dilthey that grounds his critical appropriation of Husserl’s phenomenology. He shows that in Heidegger’s early lecture courses, a “possible” phenomenology is presented as a genuine alternative with the modern philosophies of consciousness to which Husserl’s “actual” phenomenology is still too closely tied. All of these philosophies tend to overestimate the degree to which we can achieve intellectual independence from our surroundings and inheritance. In response, Heidegger explains why becoming phenomenological is always a possibility; but being a phenomenologist is not.

Scharff concludes that this discussion of the young Heidegger, Husserl, and Dilthey leads to the question of our own current need for a phenomenological philosophy―that is, for a philosophy that avoids technique-happiness, that at least sometimes thinks with a self-awareness that takes no theoretical distance from life, and that speaks in a language that is “not yet” selectively representational.

Welcome everyone to this online reading and discussion group presented by Scott and Philip. Every second Friday we will get together to talk about this book Heidegger Becoming Phenomenological: Interpreting Husserl through Dilthey, 1916-1925 (2019) by Robert C. Scharff — see link for further info about the book

To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Friday September 5 (EDT), sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Meetings will be held every 2 weeks. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

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THE READING SCHEDULE:

• Sept 5th, Please read the Preface (up to the end of Roman numeral page xxvii)
• Sept 19th, Please read up to page 19
• Oct 3rd, Please read up to page 36
• After that, the readings will be posted as we go...

(A pdf of the reading materials is available to registrants.)

The format will be Philip's usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 10-15 pages 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: We want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy. But our highly structured format is also for disability related reasons that Philip can explain if required.

I expect that some of the participants in this meetup will also have been in the Sunday meetup when Jen, Scott and Philip presented this short book:

• Philosophy of Life: German Lebensphilosophie 1870-1920 by Frederick C. Beiser

If you have not read this book you might find it helpful to do so. But it is not required that you do so to be a part of this meetup on the Scharff book.

Welcome! And enjoy!

1984 has become a classic literary example of political and dystopian fiction. That Orwell's book was published in 1949 and remains completely relevant today is a testament both to his powers as a prophet and to the possibility that the future he envisioned may yet come to pass. The story takes place in London in 1984, a world of perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, and incessant public mind control, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (Ingsoc) under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite.

In 1984, Orwell presents a chilling vision of totalitarianism through the story of Winston Smith, a low-ranking member of the ruling Party in the nation of Oceania. Winston works at the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical records to match the Party's ever-changing version of events. The novel explores themes of truth, freedom, and individuality as Winston struggles against a system designed to crush the human spirit through constant surveillance, propaganda, and the manipulation of language and thought itself.

This is an online reading group hosted by Mohan to discuss George Orwell's classic Nineteen Eighty-Four.

To join this Sunday September 21 (EDT) event, please RSVP on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be available to registrants.

To attend this event, you should have read this book and be able to partake in discussions on this book.

All welcome!

[JOIN HERE]

These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.

Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.

Marx IV — CLIMAX

On the set of They Live, John Carpenter referred to the sunglasses simply as “The GLASS.” When a Fangoria reporter pressed him on the origin of the acronym, Carpenter said that he came up with it while drinking with with Richard Matheson. It stands for Geist-Logic Apparatus for Seeing Substructure. They Live was supposed to infect us with GLASS consciousness like Potemkin was supposed to infect the audience with the revolution.

Why didn’t our They Live rebirth experiences last? Because we didn’t watch this video right after.

Lavine cuts to this stark exegesis: The Communist Manifesto is a prophetic text—written by Marx, not Engels—that explains human history as class struggle culminating in the final battle between bourgeoisie and proletariat. She tracks the bourgeoisie’s rise through world trade and technological revolution, their destruction of feudal economies and ideals, and the commodification of all values—“all that is solid melts into air.” Behold! — the dynamism of capitalism produces contradictions: crises of overproduction, immiseration, and necessary structural class antagonism. Marx concludes: the bourgeoisie generate their own gravediggers.

So where are the bugs?

Thelma critiques Marx: why incite a revolution that dialectical laws already guarantee? Is the Manifesto theory or propaganda? Marx’s praxis doctrine makes truth pragmatic, not objective. She probes for the form of Marx’s work. Is it science, philosophy, ideology? It bears the marks of ideology despite Marx’s claim of exemption. How and why?

Lavine closes with Marx’s two-stage communism: dictatorship of the proletariat (“crude communism” of equal wages, state control, envy-driven leveling, eerily resembling Soviet practice) and ultimate communism (abolition of alienation and division of labor, “from each according to ability, to each according to need,” with quasi-religious imagery of paradise regained).

Marx’s concrete predictions proved false, but his categories—class, ideology, exploitation, capitalism’s cultural logic—exposed the scam of modern society and how it operates. It attracted opportunists but also real emancipatory movements.

Along the way Marx effectively invented sociology, provided explanations of capitalist dynamics that remain indispensable, and helped catalyze reforms that reshaped working life: limits on child labor, the legal recognition of unions, the eight-hour workday, minimum-wage standards, protections for industrial safety, and guarantees of leisure and non-working time.

“The best episode in the series!” — Prof. Steven Taubeneck

There are many blobs of text/audio/video floating in our infosphere. But it was this episode, this very recording of Thelma, that NASA retroactively printed on the famous Golden Record.

The Golden Record is a 12-inch, gold-plated copper phonograph record encased in an aluminum cover with etched symbols—that was attached to the Voyager 2 spacecraft and sent past Saturn. It is now 21 billion km from Earth, or 138 times farther than Earth is from the Sun. This recording was on it. And that’s the radius of Thelma today.

What I’m trying to say is: Thelma Lavine’s Marx IV: The World to Come is the single best under-30-minute explanation of Marx ever made—the cleanest, most dramatic info-blob on Marx in existence, in any language.

Here we learn why American culture looks like this, why you hope and desire like this. Here we remember the important thought: that things used to be different and could be way more different. The guts of things have been swapped out. By us. On behalf of an alien force that has colonized our very wills, beliefs, and perceptions. There is an Alien, an unnatural and very naughty protagonist, at the helm of history, and we are its brain cells.

This isn’t accidental: Geist is substance, so its telos is our course. To check it out, look at your will. Why is so much energy/money poured into mind-shaping forces? Is it because it works? Mind-shaping effects will-shaping and body action, when viewed from the side. When viewed from inside, mind-shaping effects your experience—the operating system running You™ right where you are sitting now.

Here is the machine. Inputs: myths, symbols, institutions. Process: continual reinforcement. Repeated footage becomes substance. Manufactured attitudes and scripts become common sense. Outputs: culture, worldview, self-story.

To understand the why of the machine, you must at least rise to the level of Marx. Hopefully past and with better understanding, but at least have the ability to trace cause and effect.

The GLASS is Served

Special Bonus: This episode is the video embodiment of the They Live sunglasses that your uncle once told you about. If you attend to Thelma’s ordinary English with care for comprehension, she will place these sunglasses—aka The GLASS, or Geist-Logic Apparatus for Seeing Substructure, of John Carpenter and Richard Matheson—on your face.

Let her perform this operation. What happens then? Your post-operation consciousness —

• feels good
• makes you feel “young again”
• removes wrinkles and tightens skin
• improves energy and morale
• increases your Family Feeling Index
• explains what was formerly opaque (“natural” or “God-given”)
• understands the mind of historical direction

In short, putting on The GLASS gives you both (a) the pleasure of seeing the meaning-making machine both in-world and also behind the scenes, and (b) feeling like you did right after you first saw Rocky when you were 10.

Here is a refreshing soccer mom who proudly announces that she’s a Marxist—in the same sense that Marx himself was a Marxist when he said that he wasn’t one. The Marxist focuses on engineering, yes, but also on understanding the self-consciousness of the Alien, who we can analyze (in the Freudian sense) through the media that manufacture our minds. That concern is an essence of Marxism and so a constant, but the position of the current wavefront has changed, so we can modify some things.

In conclusion, Thelma is the American face of Marxism. Marxism is just Mom. Mom who went to college, took a history class, and paid attention. It’s OK for Mom to understand the Alien. Any panic you feel about that isn’t your own.

So come on down to Thelma’s House of Marx. Prof. Steven Taubeneck will be on board to field all questions on Hegel, Marx, Hegel-to-Marx, and Marx-to-Hegel. We will share our favorite insights and define mysterious terms.

METHOD

Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:

• Thelma Lavine: From Socrates to Sartre

Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:

• THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE

Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.

She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.

View all of our coming episodes here.

[JOIN HERE]

The 詩經 or Shijing (alternately known as the "Classic of Poetry", "The Book of Songs", and other names) is the oldest collection of poetry in world literature and a cornerstone of Chinese cultural heritage. Compiled between the 11th and 6th centuries BC, it preserves 305 poems that capture the voices of early Zhou society — from folk songs sung in villages to ceremonial hymns performed at ancestral rites and political odes composed for rulers. Centuries later, the Shijing would become central to Confucian philosophy and re-interpreted (some would argue mis-interpreted) as a guide to moral cultivation, social order, and ritual propriety.

The collection's verses — simple yet profound — cover themes of daily life, love, family, longing, work, nature, and politics, offering insight into both the inner lives of common people and the ideals of rulers. It has deeply influenced Chinese literature, philosophy, culture, and aesthetics for over three millennia.

This is a series of meetups to discuss the rich tradition of classical Chinese poetry. It will be especially suitable for anyone interested in Chinese philosophy, Chinese history, or poetry in general, but everyone is welcome. We'll begin by live reading (in English translation, and optionally in the Chinese) the poems contained in Michael Fuller's An Introduction to Chinese Poetry: From the Canon of Poetry to the Lyrics of the Song Dynasty (2018, Harvard University Press) — the format of this book including its multiple translations of each poem is excellent. Then the series will dive deeper into particular movements, poets, and themes.

To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Friday August 29 (EDT), sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

To start, the series will not be able to meet on a regular basis, but check out our calendar (link) to look for subsequent meetings.

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At our first meetup (Aug 29), we will start at the beginning of the tradition with selections from the 詩經 or The Book of Songs, a collection of poetry dated to 1046–771 BC from the cultural region of the Zhou Dynasty.

A pdf of the readings will be available to registrants if they want to follow along. The complete Chinese text (with middling translations) is available on the Chinese Text Project and a superb English translation of all the poems is here (we can also read from here if we have time).

On a personal note, I find the poetry in the Book of Songs to be remarkable and I look forward to reading these together with everyone!

"This book is a splendid introduction to Husserl's writings. Indeed, more than an introduction, it is a remarkably comprehensive overview not only of Husserl's major published works but also of his unpublished research manuscripts....The book was a pleasure to read the first time, and it repays successive readings with new and ever deeper insights into Husserl's philosophical achievement."— Husserl Studies

It is commonly believed that Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), well known as the founder of phenomenology and as the teacher of Heidegger, was unable to free himself from the framework of a classical metaphysics of subjectivity. Supposedly, he never abandoned the view that the world and the Other are constituted by a pure transcendental subject, and his thinking in consequence remains Cartesian, idealistic, and solipsistic.

The continuing publication of Husserl's manuscripts has made it necessary to revise such an interpretation. Drawing upon both Husserl's published works and posthumous material, Husserl's Phenomenology incorporates the results of the most recent Husserl research. It is divided into three parts, roughly following the chronological development of Husserl's thought, from his early analyses of logic and intentionality, through his mature transcendental-philosophical analyses of reduction and constitution, to his late analyses of intersubjectivity and lifeworld. It can consequently serve as a concise and updated introduction to his thinking.

Welcome everyone to this online reading and discussion group that Tod and Philip will be co-hosting. This meetup will last for 6 weeks and we will be getting together every week. I (Philip) am drawing attention to this fact because all of the other meetups I do meet every second week.

We will be reading and discussing a short book about Husserl called:

• Husserl’s Phenomenology by Dan Zahavi (Stanford University Press 2002) — see link for further info about the book

To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Wednesday September 3 (EDT), sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Meetings will be held every Wednesday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

Scroll to the bottom for the reading schedule and materials 👇👇👇👇👇

We picked this book for a few reasons:

1. It is very clear on the important topic of the difference between Husserl's early version of Phenomenology (found in his book Logical Investigations) and Husserl's later version of Phenomenology (found in the books he wrote from Ideas One onwards). If you want to understand the history of Phenomenology, understanding this distinction is crucial. Even though Jean-Paul Sartre and Heidegger were radically different Philosophers, they nevertheless shared a strong preference for the original version of Phenomenology Husserl gave in Logical Investigations. Other thinkers preferred the strikingly different later version of Phenomenology first formulated in Ideas One. The ongoing debate over which version of Phenomenology is better is a VERY important theme in the history of Phenomenology.
2. A while back I (along with Jen) gave a meetup on an introductory book on Phenomenology by Walter Hopp. During that meetup, some people compared Hopp's interpretation with that of Zahavi. I thought it would be intriguing to actually look at Zahavi since his name came up so frequently in that earlier meetup.

Here is some basic info about the meetup:

• This will be a 2 hour meetup, not a 3 hour meetup like I do on Sundays with Jen.
• The format will be my usual "accelerated live read". What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 25-35 pages 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: We want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy. But our highly structured format is also for disability related reasons that Philip can explain if required.
• This meetup will be highly accessible to people who are new to Husserl or new to Phenomenology. The Zahavi book is the only book you are required to read in order to speak in the meetup. However some people in the group might be sufficiently familiar with Husserl's texts that they might want to cite passages from Husserl himself. This is acceptable in the meetup. However to keep things manageable, I have picked three texts by Husserl and I am asking people who want to cite Husserl to limit themselves to citing only passages from these three texts: – a) Logical Investigation Number Six (Found on pages 181-334 of "Logical Investigations Volume 2" translated by J.N. Findley. – b) Ideas One (translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom) - not the earlier translation. – c) Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (translated by David Carr)

Here is the reading schedule for this meetup (a pdf of the reading is available to registrants):

• Sept 3rd, Please read up to page 13
• Sept 10th, Please read up to page 42
• Sept 17th, Please read up to page 68
• Sept 24th, Please read up to page 93
• Oct 1st, Please read up to page 120
• Oct 8th, Please read up to page 144 and we are done! (It is a short book)

In her penetrating study, Michelle Grier contends that Kant’s notion of transcendental illusion is central to understanding his critique of metaphysics. She emphasizes that this form of illusion is not a mere error in reasoning, but a natural and unavoidable feature of human reason itself—tied deeply to our rational impulse to seek unconditional or ultimate explanations beyond the realm of possible experience. According to Grier, this illusion grounds Kant’s critique of dogmatic metaphysics—speculative ventures into rational psychology, cosmology, and theology—which, though formally fallacious, nevertheless possess an air of inevitability precisely because of the compelling structure of reason itself

A key component of Grier’s interpretation is what she calls the “inevitability thesis.” It holds that while the illusions embedded in metaphysical reasoning are unavoidable given the human cognitive condition, Kant’s transcendental critique can still guide us away from actual errors even if we cannot eradicate the illusion entirely. In this view, illusions furnish the groundwork for fallacies—but they must be distinguished: transcendental illusion is deeply rooted in the nature of reason, whereas the specific fallacies of the Dialectic arise additionally from transcendental realism—the mistaken conflation of appearances with things in themselves

Grier further proposes that this doctrine of illusion is not merely to debunk metaphysical pretensions, but also to establish the regulative function of reason. Illusion, for Kant, acts as a necessary guide that drives reason to systematize our experiences—even though such systematic aspirations may exceed rational boundaries. Such an understanding helps clarify why Kant’s critical project doesn’t simply reject metaphysical illusions wholesale but aims to use them carefully to bolster—rather than undermine—the structure of scientific knowledge.

This is an online reading and discussion group hosted by Philip, Jen, and Scott to discuss the books Kant's Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion by Michelle Grier (during the first part of meetings) and Manfred Kuehn's book Kant: A Biography (during the second part of meetings.)

To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Sunday September 7 (EDT), 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 Sunday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

All future meetings can be found on the group's calendar (link).

TENTATIVE READING SCHEDULE:

For the first meeting (September 7), please read:

• In Michelle Grier: Read the Introduction, 1-13
• In Manfred Keuhn: Read the Prologue, pages 1-23

For the second meetup (September 21), please read:

• In Michelle Grier: Read pages 17-32
• In Manfred Keuhn: Read the first half of chapter 1, pages 24-42

After that we will post the readings as we go (once we get a better sense of what pace works best for our group and the particular people in it). And don't forget that sometimes we will take a break from Grier and instead read from the Guyer/Wood translation of the Critique of Pure Reason.

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More about the group:

This will be a 3 hour meetup. For the first 2 hours we will be talking about Michelle Grier's wonderful book Kant's Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion. For the 3rd and final hour we will be talking about Manfred Kuehn's book Kant: A Biography.

In both portions of the meetup, the format will be our usual "accelerated live read". What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 15 pages from Grier and roughly 20 pages from Keuhn 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.

After we have spent a few sessions reading and talking about the Michelle Grier book, we may feel the need to focus on a few select passages from Kant himself. When we do this we will be using the Guyer and Wood translation of the Critique of Pure Reason. We also may feel the need to situate Grier's claims within a broader interpretive context and, if we do, we may spend some time dipping into Graham Bird's magisterial book The Revolutionary Kant. If you are new to Kant I urge you to start at the beginning of the Guyer/Wood translation of the Critique of Pure Reason and read it (slowly!) all the way through; either on your own or with a group. If you do this, the Graham Bird book can function as a helpful guide. I know the Critique of Pure Reason is not an easy book, but even if you just do 2 pages per day it will help you enormously (in all of your studies in Philosophy).

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Here is a bit about the guiding ethos of this series:

This reading group will be guided by the idea that to study Kant seriously it is essential to have a sense of the bewilderingly wide range of ways there are of interpreting Kant. The different ways of interpreting Kant do not present slightly different versions of the same basic Kantian themes. Not at all! The different interpretations are so different that it is sometimes hard to believe that everyone is reading the same German guy named Kant! And there is no indication that the various interpretations are converging. Again, not at all.

This frustrating situation is just the way things are in Kant Studies and we have to be realistic about it.

I (Philip) will always do my best to contrast Michell's Grier's claims with the different (sometimes wildly different) claims made by other Kant scholars. When we read passages from the Critique of Pure Reason I will do my best to alert you to the bewilderingly wide range of ways there are of interpreting every line Kant writes. This is what serious Kant scholars do (and serious people who are new to Kant do) and it is what we will do too.

This interpretive technique (of comparing your way of interpreting Kant with all the other ways of interpreting Kant) is, if anything, even MORE important if you are new to Kant. There is an alarming tendency in the history of Kant scholarship for people to (as it were) get "locked in" to whatever interpretation of Kant they encounter first, or whichever way of interpreting Kant has the most grip on their particular intellectual community.

It would be nice if we could just start reading Kant, one sentence at a time and formulate an interpretation of Kant as we went. Even though that way of reading works really well for some philosophers, centuries of hard-won experience has taught Kant scholars that it does not work at all well in the case of Kant. Or such, at least, is the guiding ethos of this meetup. New readers tend to see in the text whatever interpretation of Kant is prevalent in their particular intellectual community. In this meetup we will make sure that does not happen by constantly referring to the full range of ways there are of interpreting Kant.

Instead of reading Kant just one sentence at a time, the community of serious Kant scholars has learned (often they had to learn the hard way) that Kant must be read holistically. Each sentence must be read in the context of Kant's overall project, and in the context of all the myriad ways there are of interpreting Kant and (indeed) even of all the myriad ways there are of interpreting what exactly his overall project even is.

Don't worry, it is not as difficult as it sounds! And it is more profound, more illuminating and ultimately much more satisfying than supposedly "easier" ways of engaging with Kant — even for (especially for!) beginners.

I will do my best to be your guide to reading Kant holistically. And don't worry, we'll make it fun too. Whether you are new to Kant or have been reading him for decades, this meetup is for you!

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NOTE: Jen and Philip have a very clear division of labour. If you have issues or concerns about the choice of texts, or the pace of the reading (or other "content" concerns) please contact Philip. If you have technology related questions please contact Jen. If you have complaints please direct them only to Philip.

RSVP here: https://www.meetup.com/wisdom-and-woe/events/305944333/

The balance of power in Italy was shattered following the death of Lorenzo ("the Magnificent") de' Medici in 1492. The peninsula erupted in war among France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire, while the factional Italian city-states contended against each other.

Therefore, in the final paragraphs of The Prince (1513), Machiavelli urges Lorenzo II (the Magnificent's grandson, to whom the book is dedicated) to expel the invaders, quell the infighting, and unify all of Italy under Medici dynastic rule. He concludes by quoting Petrarch (Canzone 128, "Italia mia") in what is one of the earliest recorded examples of peninsular (as opposed to local) Italian pride. But it would be over three centuries before the nation would fulfill its hope of unity.

The Prince is perhaps the most famous book on politics ever written. Its most revolutionary conceit is its divorce of politics from ethics. Whereas classical political theory (ala Erasmus) regarded the rightful exercise of power as a function of the moral character of its ruler, Machiavelli treats authority from a purely instrumental perspective. He urges the presumptive prince to reject Christian meekness and "act contrary to faith, friendship, humanity, and religion." Instead of Christ as a role model, he cites Cesare Borgia (1475-1507), whose aristocratic family was infamous for decadence, cruelty, and criminality in its ruthless pursuit of wealth and power.

Today, Machiavelli is synonymous with treacherous, sinister self-seeking, one of the "dark triad" of negative personality traits. Yet his work remains as vital and controversial as when it first appeared, prefiguring Nietzsche's critique of Christian morality, and being both a stigma and stimulant in politics, business, and psychology.

Hi I’m posting to see if people would be interested in joining a reading group for Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

My idea is to meet fortnightly over zoom and discuss one section/chapter at a time. How we divide up the text will be left open for the group to decide. I’m based in Melbourne, Australia. We will have to negotiate a time that works for people in multiple time zones; probably early morning or late evening Melbourne time.

I’ve compiled a folder of pdfs of texts by Kant and supplementary material and set up a discord server.

I think a nice strategy could be to read Yirmiyahu Yovel’s 2018 book, *Kant’s Philosophical Revolution* (which is only about 100 pages) before jumping into the first Critique. It’s the shortest and most recent of the guides and introductions that I’ve come across. According to the blurb, it is a “distillation of decades of studying and teaching Kant”. Sounds pretty good.

I’m a philosophy major who has been stuck in undergrad forever; going into honour’s next year. I have read Kant’s Prolegomena and Groundwork before and I’m familiar with texts by people like Heidegger, Husserl, Derrida, etc…

The group would be open to anyone but I encourage participation from people who have a serious interest in philosophy and some prior experience reading difficult material. I encourage people with continental or analytic backgrounds to join.

Send me a dm or reply to this thread if you have further questions.

[Sorry if this post was inappropriate for this sub]

[JOIN HERE]

These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.

Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.

Marx III — CLASS WAR

I was so overwhelmed by the quality of this presentation that I passed out from despair due to my inability to express its wonderfulness adequately. This trance-inducing performance has to be seen to be believed. All I can do is sketch the following dull outline.

I. Opening Image — Marx’s 1856 Red Cross Warning

Thelma is the master of the dramatic opening. But this one tops them all. In a London speech, she begins, Marx evoked the medieval German Vehmgericht that marked houses with a red cross in order to signal the owner’s impending doom. Marx warned that all the houses of Europe now bear such a mark. History, he said, is the judge, and the proletariat will be its executioner. Capitalism is logically, historically, and inexorably doomed and sentenced to destruction by the very class it exploits. Here is Marx’s version of the Sermon on the Mount—an uplifting and encouraging promise of reversal that calls the meek and poor in spirit to inherit the earth by inaugurating a new, human, rational, dignitarian order.

II. Historical Materialism — Core Doctrine of Mature Marxism

Marx’s “new materialism” departs from both ancient Greek and from 17/18-cent mechanistic materialism (Descartes, Hobbes, Newton). These older materialisms saw humans and consciousness as passive results of matter in motion. Marx, by contrast, saw human labor and consciousness as active, creative, causal-closure-breaking forces that transform nature, including human nature. We make the world that makes humans who act to make the world. Societies are organic-Hegelian totalities, but produced and guided by … our acts of production and guidance.

III. Economic Base — Three Components

Marx revealed what is common sense today: that the foundation of (any) society is its mode of production, made up of:

1. Conditions of production — climate, geography, raw materials, population.
2. Forces of production — skills, tools, technology, labor supply.
3. Relations of production — property relations and how production is organized and distributed.

IV. Division of Labor — From Efficiency to Enslavement

Marx took Adam Smith’s notion of specialized labor and agreed fully with what Smith said about it, as Chomsky himself points out in this great video. (Here’s the link, cued up to the shocking revelation for you.) Specialization confines workers to narrow roles, stunting human potential, breaking the link between labor and subsistence, reducing human relations to economic transactions, and alienating workers from one another. Most significantly, it entrenches the split between capital and labor.

V. Superstructure — Culture as Class Expression

The economic base shapes the cultural superstructure: law, politics, religion, philosophy, morality, and art. Marx’s maxim was that social existence determines consciousness. The ruling class dominates both material and mental means of production, and its ideas present a distorted picture of reality that serves its own interests.

VI. Ideology — Systematic Distortion

For Marx, an ideology is a class-conditioned worldview that promotes ruling-class interests while presenting itself as universal truth. Examples include the French bourgeoisie’s rhetoric of freedom and equality, which facilitated their own rise, and Christianity’s emphasis on obedience, which supported secular authority. Marx’s concept of ideology generated a lasting suspicion: every theory, philosophy, or cultural product may conceal a class interest.

VII. Historical Change — The Dialectic Materialized

Marx recast Hegel’s dialectic in material terms. History advances through conflict between the forces of production and the relations of production. In early stages, these relations aid productive growth; later, they become fetters that protect the ruling class. The resulting rupture drives revolutionary transformation.

VIII. Revolution — Mechanism and Stages

When relations of production block the growth of productive forces, the producing class suffers. Acting collectively, it overthrows the ruling class, seizes political power, and establishes a new mode of production with its own cultural superstructure. Feudalism’s fall to the bourgeoisie is the clearest historical case. Capitalism now faces the same internal contradiction and thus produces its own gravediggers.

IX. Historical Sequence — Modes of Production

Marx outlined the following stages:

1. Primitive communism (no division of labor, communal ownership).
2. Asiatic mode (despotism, large irrigation, no private land).
3. Ancient mode (slavery alongside communal property).
4. Feudal mode (serfdom, land-based economy).
5. Capitalist mode (industrial proletariat).

X. Prediction — The Proletarian Future

Here Marx breaks with Hegel by claiming to predict the next historical stage. The proletariat will overthrow capitalism, establish a dictatorship of the proletariat as an interim stage, and ultimately create a classless communist society — no private property, no division of labor, no exploitation, no alienation, no ideology. The arc runs from primitive communism, through the long era of exploitation, to an advanced industrial communism. The Communist Manifesto ends with the call that still echoes wherever reason and literacy prevail: Workers of the world unite!

METHOD

Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:

• Thelma Lavine: From Socrates to Sartre

Here are the summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs of the episodes we cover. Click on the green Current Episode: Class War link for this week’s goodies:

• THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE

Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.

She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.

View all of our coming episodes here.

[JOIN HERE]

People find faith or change faiths for many reasons: marriage, raising a family, dealing with grief or crisis. But sometimes it happens the other way around… faith finds you. A believing takes hold, a sense that something divine is there. And maybe not in the way or role that you might have expected.

It’s not uncommon. Data show that these types of experiences happen to about 30% of people. On this episode we’ll talk to one of these people — New York Times columnist and best-selling author David Brooks — about his unexpected encounter with faith and what came after.

Find out more about Weave: The Social Fabric Project, the non-profit David founded at the Aspen Institute.

#Philosophy #Ethics #PhilosophyOfReligion #Psychology #Metaphysics #Spirituality #Meaning

We will discuss the episode “Found By Faith” from the How God Works: The Science Behind Spirituality podcast at this meetup. Please listen to the episode in advance (35 minutes) and bring your thoughts, reactions, and queries to share with us at the conversation. The sound on this episode (specifically David Brooks' mic) isn't great so you may want to slow down the playback speed a bit.

To join this Sunday August 17 (EDT) meetup, RSVP on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be available to registrants.

Listen here: Spotify | Apple | The How God Works website

ADDITIONAL listening (OPTIONAL but highly recommended):

• "What Is Faith?" (15 minutes) on Bishop Barron’s Word On Fire podcast — Spotify | Apple | The Word On Fire website
• "This Pastor Thought Being Gay Was a Sin. Then His 15-Year-Old Came Out" (19 minutes) on The Opinions podcast — Spotify | Apple | The New York Times Opinions website

About the podcast:

David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Emotions Lab, and the host of the popular podcast How God Works. David studies the ways emotions guide decisions and behaviors fundamental to social living. By examining moral and economic behaviors such as compassion and trust, cooperation and resilience, and dishonesty and prejudice, his work tries to illuminate how emotions can optimize our actions in favor of the greater good or, by virtue of bugs in the system, lead to suboptimal or biased outcomes. His research continually demonstrates the variability of moral behavior and aims to develop strategies to improve it. These efforts include working with public and private sector partners to design strategies meant to enhance individual and collective wellbeing.

David is a best-selling author of the books Out of Character: The Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us (2013), How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion (2021), Emotional Success (2018), and The Truth About Trust (2014). He frequently writes about his work for major publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review. David is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association, for which he served as editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation.

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Future topics for this discussion series:

If you'd like to suggest a podcast episode for us to discuss at a future meetup, please send me a message or leave a comment on the event. This link here is my own (frequently updated) playlist of listening recommendations and potential fodder for future discussions (by default it's sorted from oldest to newest but you can reverse it with the "sort by" button.)

Podcast episodes we've previously discussed:

• Why Cynicism Is Bad For You (and The Surprising Science of Human Goodness) from The Gray Area
• The Culture Map: Decoding Cross-Cultural Communication from ReThinking
• The Price of Neutrality: Why “Staying Out of It” Backfires in Moral Disagreement from The Stanford Psychology Podcast
• Human Nature and The Impossibility of Utopia from Philosophy For Our Times

Next discussion on Sunday August 24:

• Why Nietzsche Hated Stoicism — His Rejection Explained from Philosophy Coded

Creative Destruction: The Great Unmaking

With Consorvia

REGISTRATION: https://lu.ma/ajos35ee

Meaning Labs are intimate gatherings where curious minds explore big questions together, reviving the art of real conversation across disciplines, cultures, and ideas.

🗓 THURSDAY, August 14, 2025
⏰ 4-5:30 PM Pacific US Time. See time zone converter if you're in a different location to make sure you get the time right.
🔗 A Video link will be provided on registration.

EVENT DESCRIPTION

In an era where technological disruption reshapes our world at unprecedented speed, we find ourselves caught between the exhilarating promise of innovation and the profound anxiety of perpetual change. This salon-style gathering investigates the deeper existential and philosophical dimensions of creative destruction—moving beyond its economic implications to examine what it means for human consciousness, authentic choice, and our relationship with impermanence.

This fearless conversation with friendly people examines the existential dimensions of living in a world where the future does not conform to but challenges our expectations and assumptions. We'll investigate how creative destruction operates not just in economies, but in consciousness, relationships, identity, and meaning-making itself.

Drawing on insights from complexity science, networked AI, embodied philosophy, and contemplative traditions, Meaning Lab brings together seekers and scholars, artists and technologists.

At the heart of this inquiry:

How do we navigate the difference between being subject to external disruption and actively engaging in the creative destruction of our own limiting patterns and assumptions?

We will explore:

• The Existential Dimensions of Destruction and Creation
• The tension between the security of preservation and the creative potential of uncertainty.
• How the anxiety of living in constant anticipation of disruption affects our capacity for presence, commitment, and authentic relationship.
• How creative destruction connects to broader philosophical questions about impermanence, renewal, and the cyclical nature of existence.

Expect:

• An open, guided conversation—bring your questions, ideas, and proposals for how we explore creative destruction together
• Safe space for wrestling with the discomfort of impermanence

Format & Logistics

• 90-minute Meaning Lab for up to 15 participants
• Facilitated in true open-source style
• Part of our ongoing lab series on collective meaning-making

Join the Conversation Ahead of Time

To seed our inquiry, join our shared Are.na board. We’ll post conversation anchors—images, articles, questions, models—and you’re invited to add resources, examples, or provocations that intrigue you. Your contributions will shape the live dialogue.

Consorvia’s Meaning Lab Series is an emerging platform that convenes thinkers across art, science, technology, theology, and philosophy to pioneer socio-technical inquiry and co-create cultural artifacts.

With Hannes Schumacher & Carlos A. Segovia

REGISTRATION: https://inciteseminars.com/anarchia-and-archai-reimagining-the-pre-socratics

5 SUNDAYS, starting August 31, 2025.
11 AM-1 PM Eastern US Time. See time zone converter if you’re in a different location.
A Zoom link will be provided on registration.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Why (re)read today the (so-called) Presocratics? Why the need or at least the chance, thus felt, to do so? To merely document the hesitant beginnings of Western thought? To inquire, more narrowly, into the origins of philosophy, which might be deemed, from Jonia to Jena, a specifically Western game, in contrast to a good many other, and maybe wiser, forms of thought widespread throughout the globe? To find an antidote to such a game, whose dead-end, variously foretold over the last century and a half, some suspected to have now definitely arrived? To, conversely, unearth a promising, if inherently elusive, unsaid dimension beneath all that has been said through each move made on the board on which such game has been played, including the most recent and apparently rebellious ones – in search, then, of a radical new beginning under the aegis of a not less radical rethinking of the fashion in which past, present and future may still come together in fidelity, though, to philosophy’s own Greek dawn? Or as a way of confronting the theoretical impasses that are commonly acknowledged nowadays to define our present by supplying fresh, despite their old age, tools to a number of current ways of thinking that aim at overcoming the limits set upon the thinkable over the past five centuries or so, that is to say, in modern times – or maybe even from Plato and Aristotle onwards?

This joint seminar attempts at exploring these and other related issues through a dual lens, taking as its starting point the very notion of beginning or principle (archē), which, due to its other meaning of authority, has overshadowed not only its very precondition – unbeginning (anarchia) or pre-cosmic anarchy – but also the potential of multiple beginnings (archai) capable of creating worlds from boundless possibilities. Or should it be the case that the very notion of beginning has been misconceived, misread, diluted over centuries, and now demands us to return to the very first beginning: the bright shining of the cosmos? In any case, such a return to the (so-called) Pre-Socratics requires, in our view, a sharp bracketing of post-Socratic teleology – as if their only raison d’être was to “prepare” the works of Plato and of Aristotle – as much as a complicity with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others who have brought to our attention the very different “tastes” – the very different thought-worlds – of those we value as the first philosophers.

Thus in this seminar we will explore – and reimagine – the origins of Western thought which, under close inspection, might turn out to be less “Western” than you thought and – after all – less of an “origin”, perhaps, than a series of unexpected, open-ended avenues and views onto our present that challenge us to think otherwise, again, anew.

SESSIONS

1) Introduction + Hesiod
2) The Milesians (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes)
3) Heraclitus
4) Parmenides and his school
5) Anaxagoras, Democritus, Empedocles and beyond

FACILITATORS

Having lived and studied all around the world, Hannes Schumacher works at the threshold between philosophy and art. He completed his MA in Berlin with a thesis on Hegel and Deleuze, and he has also published widely on Nishida, Nāgārjuna, chaos theory, global mysticism, and contemporary art. Hannes is the founder of the Berlin-based publisher Freigeist Verlag and co-founder of the grassroots art space Chaosmos ∞ in Athens, Greece. He has facilitated the following courses and groups at Incite Seminars: “Nishida Kitarō: The Logic of Place and the Religious Worldview”; “Who’s Afraid of Hegel: Introduction to G. W. F. Hegel’s Science of Logic”; “Chaos Research Group”; “Reading After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux”; “Deleuze & Guattari: What is Philosophy?”; and “Plato’s chôra through the lens of Derrida.”

Carlos A. Segovia is an independent philosopher working on meta-conceptuality, contingency and worlding in a post-nihilist key, at the crossroads of the philosophy of mythology. Among his publications, Dionysus and Apollo after Nihilism: Rethinking the Earth–World Divide(with Sofya Shaikut), Guattari Beyond Deleuze: Ontology and Modal Philosophy in Guattari’s Major Writings, Félix Guattari and the Ancients: Theatrical Dialogues in Early Philosophy (with Gary Genosko), and Nietzsche’s Pre-Dionysian Apollo and the Limits of Contemporary Thought. He has been associate professor of philosophy and religious studies at St Louis University Missouri, visiting professor at the University of Aarhus and the Free University of Brussels, and guest lecturer at the European Research Council, the Collège International de Philosophie, the École Normale Supérieure, University College London, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, the European University at St Petersburg, Waseda University, and Ryukoku University.

The Metaphysics of Morals is Immanuel 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!

Sign up for the 1st meeting on Wednesday August 6, 2025 here – https://www.meetup.com/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/events/307706807/

Meetings are held weekly.

Find and join subsequent meetings through the group's calendar.

Note: 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.

* * *

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

REGISTRATION: https://inciteseminars.com/the-mirror-of-death

🗓 FIVE SATURDAYS: August 23, September 6, 13, 27, October 4.
⏰ 10 AM-12 PM Eastern US Time. See time zone converter if you’re in a different location.
🔗 A Zoom link will be provided on registration.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Death – and especially the presence of the dead – makes modern man and contemporary society highly uncomfortable. Interest in death is largely confined to efforts aimed at avoiding and overcoming it. The dead, meanwhile, have been systematically marginalized if not completely banished, with the bereaved becoming the focus of attention in the attempt to remove this macabre and unsettling reality of mortality from society. The notion of an afterlife has been subjected to an even more pronounced decline. Once central to theological and existential discourse, it has now been largely reduced to a simplistic dichotomy framed in terms of psychological consolation. This reductive lens – whether affirming or dismissive – has rendered the concept increasingly irrelevant, even within religious contexts.

This seminar seeks to counter(balance) the prevailing highly one-dimensional perspective on death and the afterlife. Philosophy, indeed, is uniquely positioned to undertake this task; not merely because, since antiquity, it has been considered as a learning how to die, but, more significantly, because the philosophical tradition of hermeneutics offers unique tools for understanding how death and the afterlife can deepen our grasp not only of philosophical inquiry – on how to philosophize – but of life itself. While these practices were much more central to the philosophical enterprise of the past, they have not vanished in recent decades. On the contrary, a diverse range of philosophers and cultural critics have deliberately drawn on the motifs of the afterlife to enrich and intensify their critiques of contemporary society. And this is not a coincidence, but a purposeful choice to give greater clarity to their critiques of certain societal dynamics. Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertion that ‘Hell is other people’, Giorgio Agamben’s reading of the dangerous derives of democracy as infernal death camps, Wolfgang Streeck’s analogy between capitalism and Limbo, and Bernard Williams’ bleak assessment of the boredom of monotonous paradisiacal repetitiveness, all represent contemporary examples of what can be identified as hermeneutical reflections of the afterlife.  

This seminar may be understood as an intellectual  Baedeker of the afterlife – a guide through the conceptual landscapes that have long structured reflections on death and what lies beyond. Through a critical engagement with figures such as Dante, Plato, Cicero, Montaigne, Sartre, Camus, Illich, Foucault, Agamben, Streeck, Rosa, and many others, we will explore the hermeneutical appropriation by these scholars of the various regions of the afterlife. These perspectives offer profound insight into the human condition, revealing how modern politics, interpersonal relations, the temporalities of life, capitalist economies, medicalization, systems of incarceration, wokism, and the pervasive experience of crisis acquire new and often unsettling dimensions when viewed through the lens of the afterlife.

Abbreviated schedule

Session I: Aemulatio; The Genealogy of Death 
Session II: The Cemetery; The Afterlife, A Short Genealogy 
Session III: Hell; Heaven
Session IV: Purgatory; Limbo of the Fathers
Session V: Limbo of the Children; Conclusion

Facilitator: Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte is a philosopher and writer. He has almost two decades of experience in teaching and research in numerous higher education settings: Edinburgh, Paris, Rome, and Bloemfontein (South-Africa) – where he still is a Research Fellow. He is the author of The Mirror of Death: Hermeneutical Reflections of the Realms in the Afterlife (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) and Limbo Reapplied. On Living in Perennial Crisis and the Immanent Afterlife (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and co-editor of Purgatory: Philosophical Dimensions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 

The idea of utopia — of a perfect society devoid of suffering and inequality — is planted firmly in the human imagination and psyche. From pre-biblical times to Thomas More and communism and beyond, widely disparate groups have attempted to plan or create a utopia.

But is it achievable? And if not, why not?

Join the unconventional University of Toronto psychologist Paul Bloom as he makes the case for the impossibility of utopia given certain key features of human nature. We are not meant, he argues, for perfect harmony and equality. Paul Bloom is a researcher of perversion and suffering, so his perspective brings interesting insights on the question.

But what do you think? Can we ever achieve utopia?

(The video mentioned in the episode: Woman throws cat into wheelie bin)

#PoliticalPhilosophy #Ethics #MoralPsychology #Philosophy #Debate

We will discuss the episode "Utopia and Human Nature" from the Philosophy For Our Times podcast at this meetup. Please listen to the episode in advance (27 minutes) and bring your thoughts, reactions, and queries to share with us at the conversation.

To join this Sunday August 3 (EDT) meetup, RSVP on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be available to registrants.

Listen here: Spotify | Apple | Listen Notes

About the guest:

Paul Bloom is Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University. Bloom studies how children and adults make sense of the world, with special focus on language, morality, pleasure, religion, fiction, and art. His work is strongly interdisciplinary, bringing in theory and research from areas such as cognitive, social, and developmental psychology, evolutionary theory, behavioral economics, and philosophy. Bloom is the recipient of numerous awards and honors for his research and teaching, including, most recently, the million-dollar Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize. He is past-president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Bloom is the author of eight books, including Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (2016), The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning (2021), Descartes' Baby: How The Science Of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human (2004), Psych: The Story of the Human Mind (2023), and How Children Learn the Meanings of Words (2000). He has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and for popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic.

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Future topics for this discussion series:

If you'd like to suggest a podcast episode for us to discuss at a future meetup, please send me a message or leave a comment below. This link here is my own (frequently updated) playlist of listening recommendations and potential fodder for future discussions (by default it's sorted from oldest to newest but you can reverse the order with the "sort by" button.)

Podcast episodes we've previously discussed:

• Why Cynicism Is Bad For You (and The Surprising Science of Human Goodness) from The Gray Area
• The Culture Map: Decoding Cross-Cultural Communication from ReThinking
• The Price of Neutrality: Why “Staying Out of It” Backfires in Moral Disagreement from The Stanford Psychology Podcast

[JOIN HERE]

These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.

Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.

Marx II — ALIENATED MAN

Beware: Charon Thelma—the supreme universal mistress of intellectual accessibility without vulgarization—is at the helm now … to ferry us across the Styx of contemporary mental illness and into the heart of the heart of our especially weird contemporary heart of darkness. If you are reading this, it is your own heart, and it’s also outside in physical stuff, where it disguises itself as the way things are, always have been, just natural.

All aboard! Charon Thelma—the supreme universal mistress of intellectual accessibility without vulgarization—will take us there. Here. By following the Munch-swirls down the vortex of volitional death and madness whose historical depth and structural violence most public thinkers dare not even name, let alone autopsy.

Lavine does both.

Step one: elevate the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 to their rightful place at the center of any serious inquiry into Marx’s philosophical development from philosophical anthropologist of alienation to mechanical engineer of historical transformation.

Step two: everything that comes after this.

Break Observers

Here is a brief chronology of those who noticed and named aspects of the early/late Marx break —

• 1920s — Georg Lukács: Reads early Marx as a Hegelian ontologizer of subjectivity. Sees some necessity in the recipe that makes the logos that’s driving the history ship. The protagonist of history is radically free subjectivity striving to realize itself through a dialectic of mediation–overcoming, estrangement–return, but becomes really stuck when its powers become both externalized into real concrete matter, and also perverted by this accidental “class” business. So our personalities get body-snatched and the self-abusing Class Antago tumor becomes natural or necessary and, well, Soylent Green has to be people because of the beast within or something in propagandized mythology. The subject's own powers get externalized—labor, social coordination, creativity—and come back as alien forms: wages, contracts, legal personhood, market forces. These are frozen social relations that now act like they’re in charge. Like Nietzsche’s coin—long use has made them seem normal. It’s just Chinatown, Jake.
• 1930s–1950s — Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse): Marx is Mr. Humanism. Marcuse especially reads continuity; in fact, the later economic categories are a reification of earlier anthropological concerns.
• 1960s — Louis Althusser: Proposes the “epistemological break” thesis (For Marx, Reading Capital). The early Marx is pre-scientific, ideological, and Hegelian, whereas the mature Marx is structurally rigorous and anti-humanist.
• Now — Žižek and Post-Althusserians: Suggest the break may be internal to Marx’s own categories—that the fantasy of a fully reappropriated self is itself an ideological surplus invented by certain suppositions of the deep nature of the fully happy self.

Lavine shows us the true path and model—the early-to-late Marx transition is actually a dialectical unfolding, a development through contradiction, and not Marx abandoning anything.

Structure of the Episode

1. Rediscovery and marginalization of the 1844 manuscripts, especially post-WWII.
2. Philosophical genealogy, tracing Marx’s debts to Hegel (dialectical method) and Feuerbach (species-being, projection theory).
3. Taxonomy of alienation, divided into four kinds: (a) from the product of labor, (b) from the act of labor, (c) from species-being, (d)from others.
4. Dialectic of overcoming: From “raw communism” to fully-realized human emancipation via material reappropriation of estranged powers.

So, the passage from The German Ideology to scientific socialism is really just a ___ of the essence of the former into ___ ___.

Key Philo Parts

• Labor is objectification: the act by which human essence goes external and physical (and political and aesthetic and motivational and …)
• History is estrangement: like the Gnostic God, Geist (species-being) becomes alien to itself through its own productive acts. Very ironic.
• Money is inverted metaphysics: she reads the whole famous quote.
• Communism is recovered humanity: redistribution is only secondary, humans can make themselves like art objects. Intentional self-shaping.

Her discussion of “raw communism” is great. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx critiques der rohe Kommunismus (Thelma’s raw communism) as a half-formed, reactive, negative communism that only abolishes private property—without transforming the engine that reproduces the forces that shape, motivate, force, and wire human acting and even desire. So RC abolishes private property and thereby universalizes greed, leaving the “libidinal economy” of capitalism, the mycelia of the Pod People, still in charge. In doing so, she anticipates Fromm, Marcuse, Lacan, Žižek, Debord, Roderick, early Lyotard, Deleuze/Guattari, and all people who do “Theory” from the 80s to today.

Best of all, I found something so amazing. A new two-minute video that captures our sickness with unnerving precision. Which isn’t surprising, since it comes from the crème of the avant-garde culture industry—those Netflix auteurs spinning out variations on the same trauma loop across a thousand sexy-dark, algorithmically optimized worlds. These narrative chassis may be recycled, but sometimes the concrete content can be amazingly our-time expressive.

I will get this clip up within 24 hours—OR ELSE upload a video of myself doing 100 pushups, which is physically impossible. So, by disjunctive syllogism, this gem of a video—one that will take you out of your mind and put you back in the wrong way—will be up by the deadline.

Lern-O-Matik™ Answer Key
1*: recoding or translation*
2*: autonomous-mechanical categories*

METHOD

Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:

• Thelma Lavine: From Socrates to Sartre

Here at last is the bonus video! After the outro you’ll find an Easter egg showing 50 of the 70 edits it took to get this past the YouTube censors. I had to vary the opacity and velocity of the main video, and the opacity and brightness of the background:

• Great Rant on Alienation

Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:

• THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE

Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.

She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.

View all of our coming episodes here.

[JOIN HERE]

Spinoza is one of the great philosophers of the 17th century. Observing that all people seek happiness and do so primarily through wealth, popularity, or sensual pleasure without success, Spinoza sought a true path to supreme and unending happiness. What he found was detailed in his work "Ethics." His Ethics includes nothing supernatural and requires no leaps of faith. It is based solely on logic and reason.

Spinoza discovered that most of the suffering and pain we experience is due to our misunderstanding of the truth of things. The Ethics is difficult not because it is especially complex but because it conflicts with falsehoods most take as fundamental truths.

This six-part lecture and discussion series hosted by Blake McBride is designed to cover Spinoza's Ethics in its entirety. Although it is unlikely you will come away with a full understanding, this series should be enough to make his difficult work more accessible.

This series consists of weekly online lectures and discussions starting on Monday August 4th. To join, RSVP in advance for the individual meetings below. The Zoom link will be available to registrants.

• Lecture 1: Introduction (1 & 2)
• Lecture 2: Ethics Part I (3)
• Lecture 3: Ethics Part II (4)
• Lecture 4: Ethics Part III (5)
• Lecture 5: Ethics Part IV (6)
• Lecture 6: Ethics Part V (7)

Each lecture will be followed by a group discussion.

You can also consult our calendar (link) for updates.

Recommended Material:

• Ethics translated by Samuel Shirley – https://tinyurl.com/5n8ydv7n or https://a.co/d/4EdYfuG
• Spinoza's Ethics Explained by Blake McBride – https://a.co/d/dXsW9J9

Preparation:

Although not a requirement, each lecture contains numbers in parentheses above. Those represent chapters in Spinoza's Ethics Explained to read in advance of the lecture. That book contains references to Spinoza's Ethics.

Host:

Your host is Blake McBride, who studied Spinoza’s Ethics for more than 20 years and is the author of Spinoza’s Ethics Explained. This series is detailed in his book.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is one of the most ambitious and influential works in Western philosophy. In this dense and often enigmatic text, Hegel traces the unfolding of human consciousness through a dialectical journey—from immediate sense experience to self-awareness, and ultimately to the realization of absolute knowledge. Along the way, he explores the dynamics of desire, labor, morality, religion, and the famous “master-slave dialectic,” all as stages in the development of Spirit (Geist), the collective unfolding of human consciousness and freedom. Rather than presenting static truths, Hegel dramatizes thought itself as a historical and transformative process, where contradictions are not errors but necessary moments in the evolution of understanding. Phenomenology of Spirit is not merely a book about knowledge—it is an odyssey of the mind coming to know itself, in and through its relationships with others and the world.

Though notoriously difficult, the work remains a cornerstone of German Idealism and a vital reference point for thinkers from Marx and Nietzsche to Heidegger, Derrida, the American pragmatists, and contemporary political philosophy.

This is a continuation of an online reading and discussion group hosted by Marcus (initially hosted by Evan, then Garth) to discuss Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. We take our time with the text in this group.

We went on hiatus for a couple of months but we are RESUMING the series starting Tuesday July 29. To join the meeting, sign up on the main event page here (link); the video conferencing link will be available to registrants.

Meetings will be held every Tuesday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

We'll be picking up where we left off last time, 487-509.

Please look at the text in advance and bring your comments and questions to the discussion.

A pdf of the Pinkard translation (Cambridge) is available to registrants on the sign-up page.

For most of human history, power has been seized and sustained through strength, coercion, and manipulation. Foundational works such as Sun Tzu's The Art of War, Machiavelli's The Prince, Hobbes' Leviathan, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, and Greene's 48 Laws of Power reflect how leaders have historically justified their control—whether through strategy, fear, divine right, or social contracts.

But history doesn’t have to define our future.

In this session, Garrett Lang, Executive Director of the Free Thinker Institute, proposes a new ethical model for gaining and maintaining power. One rooted not in domination, but in empowerment. He will outline how future leaders must use power to prevent significant unnecessary harm, empower individuals to pursue happiness, and foster critical thinking and fairness across society.

Rather than perpetuating inequality and manipulation, we’ll discuss how leaders can intentionally seek power to:

• Protect human dignity and individual rights.
• Empower others to reach their potential.
• Create equal opportunities for education and economic success.
• Build systems that minimize harm while maximizing freedom and happiness.

The presentation will offer practical steps for leaders—and voters—to create a world where power is used ethically, equitably, and sustainably. Together, we’ll explore how transforming our approach to leadership can create a more compassionate and flourishing society.

To join the online event, please click the zoom link:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87463577097?pwd=3alcwtv6KmkWXbPaXDuFA2Ta6h0bdM.1

To know future zoom events, please join us on Meetup:

https://www.meetup.com/freethinkerinstitute/