About us
The Chicago Philosophy Meetup is a community of groups created by and for people interested in engagements with philosophy and the history of such engagements. Our members have a wide variety of backgrounds besides philosophy, including literature, law, physics, theology, music, and more.
We host events suggested by individual members and coordinated by volunteer organizers and offer opportunities for discussion with others who share these interests. If you have an idea for a topic you'd like to discuss, especially if you are from an historically underrepresented group in academic philosophy, let us work with you to make it happen.
Whether you're new to philosophy and looking to get started, or have been doing philosophy for some time and want to dig a bit deeper, we invite you to check us out our calendar!
(Note: this group will not contact you with an offer to read your book in exchange for donations or for any transactions.)
We have basic expectations for how we talk to each other, so:
DO...
Listen to others
Ask for clarification
Get to know people
Help other voices to be heard
Work towards understanding each other
Practice moving past your assumptions about others
DON'T...
Limit others’ performance of items on the DO list
The Chicago Philosophy Meetup opposes any force of exclusion, discrimination, and/or harassment present in its community. Such forces include, but are not limited to, racism, transphobia, misogyny, and antisemitism.
The Chicago Philosophy Meetup seeks to be inclusive because only in this way can we fulfill the DOs list above. We are here to help! If you have concerns, questions about a meeting, or need assistance (e.g. accessibility), please contact either the organizers or the event host for the meeting directly.
"Philosophy is not a theory but an activity."
-- from "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus," Wittgenstein
Discourse cheers us to companionable
reflection. Such reflection neither
parades polemical opinions nor does it
tolerate complaisant agreement. The sail
of thinking keeps trimmed hard to the
wind of the matter.
-- from "On the Experience of Thinking," Heidegger
Upcoming events
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Modernism Ep07 ⟩ “Culture as Nature”
·OnlineOnlineCulture as Nature: When Capital Becomes the Environment
This week Hughes turns from the artist formerly known as “Nature” to what he calls the “forest of media”: cities, commodities, advertising, television, celebrity, electronic noise, shopping malls.
Yeah, yeah—human beings have always lived inside culture. The people who scoffed at the previous announcement of six hours ago are right. There was never some Indigenous-Australian Deep Time when human sentience tasted matter (and its animated blobs) directly. As Yoda said in Episode Zero, “Never a time when consciousness encountered raw Nature—unmediated by language, tools, institutions, and signs—has there been.”
What changes under “late” capitalism is the scale and character of the mediation. The human-made world becomes industrially produced, endlessly reproduced, commercially administered, and finally dense enough to confront us as a kind of second nature. So that’s a real change! Capitalism used to just fill the environment with things, but now it manufactures both the [Heidegger term for field of arising], the perceptual tongs that grok it, and even our very minds. Which is why Rick Roderick always glossed Adorno’s “the culture industry” as the MIND industry.
Art now competes with signs engineered to seize the eye instantly. So Hughes whips out this nice distinction: “Pictures educate; signs discipline.” Well! Let’s see how long that antithesis survives.
Pop Art happened when painters stopped avoiding marketing garbage and starting eating it: Rauschenberg’s junk and image-glut, Johns’s flags and targets, Warhol’s repetition and celebrity, Lichtenstein’s comics, Rosenquist’s billboards, Oldenburg’s swollen consumer objects. In music, back in the 80s, this was called “sampling”; today it’s called “composing.”
Anyway, all your favorites from Postmodernism 101 are here but Hughes is by our side to help us penetrate them. Check this out —
Other and earlier artists had painted in series: Monet, for instance. But when Monet painted his haystacks and lily- ponds, his specific aim was to show, in the most resplendent detail of nuances, that phenomena are not standardized. His “repetitions” were done to glorify the eye, to show how it could discern tiny differences, and how these differences added up to a continuous alteration of reality. Discrimination within abundance was the essence of such painting. Today, we have sameness within glut, and that was what Warhol painted (plate 230). The difference between these approaches is like the difference between high bourgeois French cooking at the end of the nineteenth century, with its strict formats enclosing a continuous variation and metamorphosis of the ingredients, and what one sees in a modern American supermarket.
And speaking of Warhol, check out this piece of crap that sold for $71 million at Christie’s. Can you see the $71 million in it? If not, you have vision problems. Price is, after all, our civilization’s most rigorously quantitative theory of beauty.
Then, because he took a sociology class once, Hughes gets Marxian. Television trains us to experience the world as montage: war → toothpaste → celebrity → catastrophe → game show. One of the old avant-garde dreams actually comes true: ordinary consciousness is reorganized by montage, simultaneity, collision, discontinuity.
Unfortunately, capital owns the montage machine and the machine runs under a certain imperative—i.e., M—C—M′.
Very sadly, Robert Hughes died before the really funny part, which is that humans don’t exist anymore. Today the mediation is no longer merely in the air, like culture and space, but in the thing. The world reaches us today already converted into information: camera sensor → compression algorithm → platform → feed → OLED → eyeball. We photograph the sunset or Ace Frehley while looking at the phone screen. We navigate the physical city through Google Maps or the crappy Apple Maps, which almost sent me over a cliff. Forest fires, wars, hurricanes, friends, presidents, galaxies—all arrive flattened onto the same glowing rectangle, which now rests permanently in front of our eyes.
So Hughes’s title is really quaint these days. We didn’t leave Nature and enter Culture. Capital built a second nature, and then also put a screen in front of it, and then also trained the cognizer that interprets it.
By the end of this, the best art history episode of all time, Hughes tells us that Pop and McLuhanism both normalized the idea that what an image says no longer matters much because “the medium is the message.” Hughes rejects this outright! Human beings still judge; questions of taste, truth, choice, and moral responsibility for images remain unavoidable. Pop, in his account, helped strip art of its claims to seriousness just as mass media displaced art as the culture’s dominant image-making power. And so …
The avant-garde died when art ceased to control society’s responsibility for images.
METHOD
- Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.
- As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)
ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK
Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.
View all of our coming episodes here.
4 attendees
Kierkegaard: Either/Or Part I (Live Reading)
·OnlineOnlineOnline meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/moderated/90411e38a0af35dad141f5479eb902f1a13df4115c47e3a8b66f88916f8cdeba
We'll be starting at page 183 (Danish 160). At the last meeting, we started on page 173 (Danish 151).
Kierkegaard’s masterpiece in experimental literature and philosophy, Either/Or, explores themes that permeate his work as a whole. In Part I, Kierkegaard presents his most extensive treatment of the aesthetic worldview, which understands life as governed by fate and seeks to assert itself by taking the reins of existence through imagination.
Text
Part I: pdf, epub
Part II: pdf, epubHere are the plays we read together before beginning Either/Or:
- Sophocles - Antigone
- Scribe - The First Love
- Goethe - Faust
- Video of a production of Faust I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaogjXLdPow
Additional works you could look at while we read Either/Or:
- Goethe - Clavigo
- Mozart/Ponte - Don Giovanni
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQBmLHSXQdg
- Mozart/Schikaneder - The Magic Flute
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om_qtZ-Hm7k
- Mozart/Ponte - The Marriage of Figaro
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55ik-PzAXsQ
On the Friday Meetings:
The Friday meetings began on January 1, 2016, with an initial goal of reading through the first half of Søren Kierkegaard's works. Due to continued interest, we have decided to return to previous works for review, study more background texts, and continue beyond the first half of Kierkegaard's writing.
Works read so far in the series:- The Concept of Irony, With Continual Reference to Socrates (Kierkegaard)
- Notes of Schelling's Berlin Lectures (Kierkegaard)
- Either/Or (Victor Eremita, et al.)
- Two Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
- Fear and Trembling (Johannes de Silentio)
- Repetition (Constantin Constantius)
- Three Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
- Four Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
- Two Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
- Three Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
- Philosophical Fragments (Johannes Climacus)
- Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est (Johannes Climacus)
- Concept of Anxiety (Vigilius Haufniensis)
- Prefaces (Nicolaus Notabene)
- Writing Sampler (A.B.C.D.E.F. Godthaab)
- Four Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard)
- Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (Kierkegaard)
- Stages on Life's Way (Hilarious Bookbinder)
- Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (Johannes Climacus)
- The Sickness Unto Death (Anti-Climacus)
- Works of Love
Works read for background:
- The First Love (Scribe)
- The Berlin Lectures (Schelling)
- Clavigo (Goethe)
- Faust Part I (Goethe)
- Antigone (Sophocles)
- Axioms (Lessing)
- The Little Mermaid (Anderson)
Works read inspired (at least in part) by Kierkegaard
- The Escape from God (Tillich)
- You Are Accepted (Tillich)
2 attendees
Plato - Statesman (Live Reading)
·OnlineOnlineOver the last few years, we have done a close reading of the Republic and the Laws. Now we turn to the Statesman.
This week we will begin reading at 283b (last week we began at 277a).
The dramatic action is as follows: we pick up after the Eleatic Stranger has finished the discussion that takes place in the dialogue titled the Sophist (which we read several years ago). The discussion turns to the figure of the Statesman, and while the interlocutor in the Sophist was Theaetetus (who resembled Socrates), a youth named Socrates takes on the role of interlocutor (Socrates himself is present).
Meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/moderated/3a0e5ab74d311938358f82a075568a48c1d47ab6d5fe86398e72d80ab11b4925
No particular edition is required, but we can discuss what we want to use during the meeting. Because of this, sharing some editions that are generally available digitally in the comments may be helpful. I'll also try to keep the Greek text handy (probably through a Loeb edition, but anyone can look at Perseus as well).
If you want to familiarize yourself with the text in advance, here are some different editions:
On Perseus, Fowler (HTML): https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=plat.+stat.+257a
Plato's Complete Works:
PDF: https://annas-archive.gl/md5/b670e9aea7c9f52b2d40d63ff84f5600
2 attendees
Past events
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