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
114
Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit (Week 2)
Pilot Project Brewing - Logan Square, 2140 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL, USHegel refers to his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit as “the path of the soul wandering through the series of ways it takes shape, as if these were stations put forward in advance to it by its own nature”.
The idea here is that we can become self-consciously aware of how we understand ourselves and how that understanding shapes and is shaped by the life we share. But it is our peculiar fate that, in any effort to understand ourselves, we inevitably underestimate ourselves—are untrue to our very nature as knowers.
But knowing things, even knowing that we know things, and not knowing this—what it is for us to know—is a curious situation to be in. It is our own understanding that underestimates itself, that becomes dissatisfied with itself, but also moves on from its own deficiencies by reflecting on them. Hegel takes it that these moments matter for understanding ourselves, and that they point the way to knowing what it means for us to know.
The sequence of these moments is a phenomenology of spirit, and at the beginning of that path, the end can be stated as a simple identity: to know is to know absolutely. At its core, this is a claim about the importance of self-consciousness, of apperception, and the way in which it establishes for itself the objective validity of the pure concepts of the understanding—about what must matter to us about anything for anything we think to hold good.
Whether you’re new to discussing philosophical texts or just feel like you aren’t using the middle voice enough, we’d be happy to have you join!
Please read ahead and be prepared to discuss Hegel’s text in detail.
**Reading schedule by week:
- Introduction: §§73–89
- Consciousness: §§90–111, §§112–131
- Consciousness: §§132–165
- Self-Consciousness: §§166–177, §§178–196
- Self-Consciousness: §§197–230
- Reason: §§231–297, §§298–346
- Reason: §§347–393, §§394–437
- Spirit: §§438–483, §§484–537
- Spirit: §§538–595, §§586–671
- Religion: §§672–747, §§748–787
- Absolute Knowing: §§788–808
- Preface: §§1–72
For a translation, we're recommending Miller’s, but others will do just fine.
12 attendees
Modernism Ep03 ⟩ “The Landscape of Pleasure”
·OnlineOnlineWhat is Modernism?
The Landscape of Pleasure: Color and Paradise
At first glance, this looks like the candy episode: Sex. Gardens. Rivers. Cafés. Women in sunlight. Picnics. Boats. Sex. Flowers. Beaches. Monet’s lilies. Matisse’s rooms. Picasso’s Mediterranean erotic machinery.
Surprise: Impressionism is the Original Bush Gardens
Hughes opens with a phenomenology of Impressionism. It seems pre-modern, doesn’t it? It’s a window into a time before the railway, boulevard, camera, department store, and bourgeois leisure economy … it seems. You hear the music box from Burnt Offerings playing when you merge with an Impressionist painting. What’s going on here?
Hughes: Impressionism is modern in historical position and technique, but “pre-modern” in affect. It belongs to the modern city, the modern bourgeoisie, modern leisure, modern optical science, portable painting, and the collapse of academic hierarchy. But it still imagines the visible world as reconcilable: the world is fragmented by light, weather, and momentary perception, but not yet experienced as spiritually ruined, bureaucratically administered, mechanically inhuman, politically catastrophic, or mass-mediatically flattened.
Conclusion? Impressionism is pseudo-premodern—specifically, early Modernist, or better, the first great bourgeois modernism of perception.
Capitalism and Sex
The nineteenth century did not invent pleasure as an aesthetic or erotic ideal; it bourgeoisified and widened the representability of pleasure. What had been coded in eighteenth-century art as aristocratic Arcadia, court leisure, cultivated erotic play, and landed possession becomes, around Impressionism, the intention enchantment of … ordinary bourgeois modern life: cafés, gardens, boulevards, bedrooms, beaches, the Seine, the picnic, the outing, the body in light—all of it is lovely.
As for sex, it morphs from aristocratic privilege (or religious sin, libertine scandal, reproductive duty) into an index of personality, health, identity, taste, private happiness, and self-knowledge. Just like Foucault said—modern capitalist society pretended to repress sex but it really revised it as a public “objective fact” of discourse, classification, confession, medical knowledge, psychology, normality, abnormality, and personal truth. Sex becomes something through which one is supposed to know what one really is, as every reader of Cosmopolitan knows.
Who taught us what a pleasurable life is supposed to look like?
Hughes begins with the old aristocratic dream of pleasure: Arcadia, the fête champêtre, Giorgione, Titian, Rubens, Watteau, Gainsborough. Nature becomes safe. The forest is no longer demonic. It becomes a place of erotic ease, cultivated leisure, property, bodies, gardens, silk, and afternoon idleness. The aristocrats had the official iconography of pleasure: the picnic, the Venus-island, the garden, the estate, the theatrical flirtation, the refined perversity of doing nothing beautifully. And then … the ownership of paradise changes.
In this episode, we learn who created our sexual and hedonic tastes. We certainly don't make them up ourselves, we absorb them from the Kardashians and other "I have a pleasurable life" avatars.
But where did the spirit forms that animate the Kardashians' corpses come from? Can we understand them?
Hughes is here to help! We will learn the genealogy of our desires and hedonic winner-status life goals.
Modernism: The Best of All Non-Philosophical Topics for Philosophers
This is also where Modernism becomes a superb teacher of dialectical historical change. The artists begin acting as if they are changing art because of explicit, intelligible principles. Seurat has a principle. Cézanne has a principle. Gauguin has a principle. Matisse has a principle.
Absolutely insane. Also our world today.
Hughes lets us watch styles fail by their own success. Impressionism wins the visible world, then discovers that the visible world is too fleeting. Seurat breaks the shimmer into dots and rebuilds it as order. Monet sinks into the act of seeing until garden, reflection, surface, and mind become one unstable field. Cézanne makes every sensation stand trial before form. Gauguin and the Fauves release color from description. Matisse builds an indoor republic of pleasure from the ruins of that release.
Each artistic answer generates the next artistic problem. Modernism becomes legible as a chain of determinate negations: pleasure, then analysis; sensation, then structure; nature, then construction; color, then expression; freedom, then discipline.
What make the Modernists the best teachers of Hegel is that they think that they're doing things because of clearly expressed and intelligible explicit principles. No one else had done this before. Things changed (very slowly) for ordinary historical-materialist reasons. But now, things were changing due to self-consciously chosen or discovered or theorized or otherwise invented reasons—powers and energies from another dimension outside the infrastructural flow! People were pulling ideas from science and engineering plane and attaching “art should …” reasons to them. It was absolutely insane. We're sill in the super-artificial fake free agency mode still now, but we don't have the They Live sunglasses necessary to see them. But we can see them here, and that's a great practice session for mastering our own lives.
Now check out these sample sentences which show why Hughes is famous (dense, poetic, exact, funny, rightly cruel) and that he really is our qualified Charon:
Check out these on Seurat
The unit, the building block of Impressionism, had been the brush stroke which was as personal as handwriting. The greatest of the younger artists was Georges Seurat, who replaced the stroke with the dot. Hundreds of them. Thousands. The dot was impersonal. It grew in colonies like coral. It stiffened the shapes and gave them the archaic Egyptian stillness that Seurat contrived as the antidote to the Impressionist love of the moment. Above all, the dot meant control of colour, step by step. Seurat's eye for colour was one of the subtlest in all art history, and he wanted each touch to have the analytic clearness of scientific thought.
His subject matter was that of Impressionism, but his aims were not. He wanted to give his images the density and permanence of classical art, order, system, dignity. He didn't want snapshots. He wanted to reveal the processional aspect of modern life, something formal and rigorous, and akin to the heroic dandyism that Baudelaire had seen in Paris 30 years before.
Seurat built his space like a Renaissance fresco with the most exacting precision. It held together by complicated rhymes and chords of shape, some of which you hardly notice at first. The woman fishing there is the twin of that tiny figure in the extreme distance. The monkey's tail emulates the hook of the dandy's cane. The decorum of posture and gesture, the distances people allow themselves on that green lawn, is turned into the decorum of classical art itself. He's a bit ironic about his middle class moderns. They glide about on the grass like tin toys on wheels. But the irony is part of the modernity.
[T]he spectacle of art as a language fascinates Seurat. He had grasped that there is something atomized and divided about modernist awareness. To build a unified meaning, the subject had to be broken down into molecules and fragments, and then reassembled under the eye of formal order. Hence the dots. You could make reality permanent by displaying it as a web of tiny stillnesses. That is what La Grande Jatte was really about—infinite division, infinite relationships.*
In other words, the Seurat, like all Modernists, applied to art a reasonable, scientific, inspiring, attractive, convincing, and manifesto-ready Idea that he pulled from the Heaven of causal-closure-penetrating reasons and then tried to realize it, thereby concretizing his own metaphysical principles.
And These Sentences on Monet
[I didn’t know this: Monet built the garden he (re)painted every day for 43 years and then merged with it. He literally merged with the flora and disappeared into it like David in “The Man Whom the Trees Loved.” — Ed.]
Hughes is poetic and great here. You can use this on someone some day and blow them away:
The pond was as artificial as painting itself. It was flat as a painting is. What showed on it, the clouds and lily pads and cat’s-paws of wind, was caught in a shallow space just on the surface like the space of painting. The willows touched it like brushes. No foreground, no background, a web of connections.
Monet's water lilies were a slice of infinity. In them, emptiness matters as much as fullness. Reflections have the weight of things. To seize the indefinite, to fix what is unstable. To give form to sights so complex, so nuanced that they can hardly be named. This was a basic project of modernism. It went against the smug view of reality that materialism gives us.
And On Cézanne
He wanted his images to be the accumulated evidence of thought. Every painting a deposit, a sort of uneven crust of observations. The more he painted, the more he saw. And the more he saw, the more manifold and unattainable truth became.
No painter ever achieved more in such isolation. Instead of facility, he had an immense scrupulousness, and so he was frustrated most of the time right up to the end. A few weeks before his death, he wrote a letter to his son in Paris: “I must tell you that as a painter, I am becoming more clear-sighted before nature. But with me, the realization of my sensations is always painful. I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I do not have the magnificent richness of coloring that animates nature.”
Conclusion
So come join us for sex, gardens, color, metaphysics, bourgeois paradise, optical atomism, Monet’s self-absorption into vegetation, Cézanne’s sacred frustration, Matisse’s indoor utopia, Picasso’s erotic Mediterranean machinery, and the question of why the image of a pleasurable life still owns us.
Also, Seurat is not pronounced “Seurat.”
Come learn about your true father.
All aboard the Hughes Express for a night of sexy, depressing fun.
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
This is the first meeting of Either/Or, and we'll be starting at page 115 (Danish 95). At the last meeting, we started on page 106 (Danish 86).
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)
3 attendees
Plato - Laws - section-by-section summary (5-12)
·OnlineOnlineHaving finished the text, we'll discuss it in its entirety, but now as a section-by-section review, starting from section 5.
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
4 attendees
Past events
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