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.
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
Check 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.
Upcoming events
107
Nietzsche: The Gay Science (Week 2)
Oak Park Public Library - Main Library, 834 Lake St, Oak Park, IL, USMarking the end of his efforts “to set up a new picture and ideal of the free spirit”, Nietzsche’s Die fröhliche Wissenschaft suddenly presents all the images and formulations for which he has become infamous: nihilism, the overman (Übermensch), and the death of God at our own hands.
At once an effort to shame and spite us, everywhere at issue throughout the work is the question of truth, “this youthful madness in the love of truth”—if truth is all we have come to stand by, all that matters to us, what remains when all the veils are pulled aside? What, from the perspective of life, can love of truth sustain?
Whether you're new to discussing philosophical texts or can synthesize disparate aphorisms across Nietzsche's corpus, we'd be happy to have you!
Please read ahead and be prepared to discuss Nietzsche's text in detail.
**Reading schedule by week:
- Preface, “Joke, Cunning & Revenge”, Book One §§1–57
- Book Two, §§58–107
- Book Three, §§108–275
- Book Four, §§276–342
- Book Five, §§343–383, & Songs of Prince Vogelfrei
For a translation, we're recommending Kaufman's.
6 attendees
Kierkegaard: Either/Or Part I (Live Reading)
·OnlineOnlineOnline meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/moderated/90411e38a0af35dad141f5479eb902f1a13df4115c47e3a8b66f88916f8cdeba
This is the first meeting of Either/Or, and we'll be starting at page 122 (Danish 101). At the last meeting, we started on page 115 (Danish 95).
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)
5 attendees
Plato - Laws - section-by-section summary (8-12)
·OnlineOnlineHaving finished the text, we'll discuss it in its entirety, but now as a section-by-section review, starting from Book VIII.
The dramatic action is as follows: Three elders—an Athenian, a Spartan, and a Cretan—walk the path of Minos and discuss laws and law-giving.
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, Shorely (HTML): https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0166
Plato's Complete Works:
PDF: https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=B670E9AEA7C9F52B2D40D63FF84F5600
3 attendees
Pleasure and Flourishing — Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
·OnlineOnlineJuly 19 - Chapters 1 through 3 will cover the prevailing opinions about pleasure: On the one hand, (1) pleasure is the supreme good. All things see pleasure and shun pain, and seek pleasure as an end in itself. On the other hand, (2) no pleasure is good. What all things seek is not necessarily good; the opposite of pain may also be bad (or at least neutral); some pleasures are disgraceful.
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Which opinion, if any, is Aristotle's own view about pleasure?
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We are live-reading and discussing Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, book X, which is about pleasure and human flourishing.
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The prerequisite to this book is our answering for ourselves these questions from the prior books, to which we will briefly review:
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1. What is the full-time job of being a human being?
2. What is the systematic structure of the human potential?
3. What is a virtue of character {ēthikē aretē}?
4. How does one come to acquire any of it? (E.g. pride, ambition, bravery, gentlemanliness, generosity, candor, fairness, friendliness, …)
5. How does one formulate right desires?
6. How is one to recover from being bad to becoming a good person?
7. What is entailed in and what is required of being a friend?
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The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows.1 attendee
Past events
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