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
109
Kant: Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Right (Week 1)
·OnlineOnlineMeeting link: https://meet.jit.si/moderated/843a4b060b244f4e96dbcf99236d87d8689124873e312bd8a8d20d6e30a65f19
We'll be covering the Preface, Introduction, Introduction to the Doctrine of Right (365 - 397; 32 pages)
Note: Meetings focus on developing a common language and friendship through studying Kant. The host will provide an interpretation of Kant; other interpretations will not be discussed until later in the meeting. Additional interpretations, topics, and questions can be addressed through the Jitsi chat feature.
No prior experience with Kant is necessary.
Reading Schedule (pages are from Cambridge's Practical Philosophy collection):
Week 1 (29):
Preface, Introduction, Introduction to the Doctrine of Right (365 - 397; 32 pages)Week 2 (30):
Private Right, Chapters I and II (401 - 443; 42 pages)Week 3 (31):
Chapter III, Public Right Section I (443 - 481; 38 pages)Week 4 (32):
Public Right Section II, III, and Appendix (482 - 506; 24 pages)PDF: https://annas-archive.gl/md5/d7be559ff61b09b0a414875261a5ee60
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=8-115 attendees
Kant FTΦ: Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Live Reading)
·OnlineOnlineMeeting link: https://meet.jit.si/moderated/843a4b060b244f4e96dbcf99236d87d8689124873e312bd8a8d20d6e30a65f19
We will be starting at Letter XXIII, paragraph 1.
In Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, we see vague suggestions on how aesthetic judgments contribute to culture. In Schiller's letters, we can see a more developed argument on how aesthetic education is required to promote the freedom of the individual as well as transition us between a state of nature and a state ruled by reason.
Hopefully, this reading provides an opportunity to compare Kant's interest in how aesthetic judgments (and moral judgments themselves) contribute to culture with Schiller and expand our interpretation of both.
I've linked the Penguin edition of the book here, but please feel free to use whatever edition you have or want.
PDF: https://annas-archive.org/md5/22dcd586440cfd2d7ada034ca119db79
PDF (with facing German): https://annas-archive.org/md5/005de78cf1a714cc2c155ce569f670cf
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Aesthetic-Education-Man-Friedrich-Schiller/dp/0141396962?sr=8-1
Note: Kant FTΦ (Friends Through Philosophy) is a group of individuals who have connected over reading Kant (and other philosophers).
This meeting will focus on the interests of regular attendees. We will frequently reference Kant and other philosophers. Discussions may involve shared notions that have developed over time. If you are not a regular attendee and feel lost in the conversation, it may be a byproduct of being newer to the meetings: don't hesitate to ask for clarification.
2 attendees
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.
3 attendees
Modernism Ep04 ⟩ “Trouble in Utopia”
·OnlineOnlineWhat is Modernism?
Trouble in Utopia: Architecture, Social Engineering, and the Death of the Future
Hi everyone. Let’s have a 20 second moment of silence and recall Robert Hughes’ honorable Statement of Purpose at the beginning of this series:
I don’t want to do a history of modern art. Instead, I want to evoke its spirit by showing how it’s acted upon society and vice versa: how it’s dealt, for instance, with the idea of pleasure; how it has tried to confirm or reject the political status quo; how it’s tried to construct utopias, and so on.
This week we reach the utopias—and the art with the greatest immediate power to impose one upon us.
Architecture is the one art we cannot avoid. Painting is ignorable. But architecture sculpts the very solid matter that guides the worldlines of our human bodies over time. Hughes calls building “the art we live in,” “the social art par excellence,” “the carapace of political fantasy,” and “the exoskeleton of one’s economic dreams.”
It is the art of cutting, carving, pouring, stacking, enclosing, and joining matter so as to produce the hard limits of empty space. Those limits turn ideas into body-cupping rooms, thresholds, vistas, blind corners, private interiors, public squares, class boundaries, and paths for the moving body. They determine whom we encounter, how long we remain together, what can appear before us, where we may stop, where we must keep moving, and how much of the surrounding world we can grasp at once.
Here the subject–object dialectic becomes concrete. A society externalizes its values, fantasies, antagonisms, and relations of power into the built environment. That environment then returns as the material condition under which subjects move, perceive, associate, remember, suffer, and acquire habits. People produce buildings; buildings thereafter participate in producing people.
The modernist architects in this episode took that power with deadly seriousness. If irrational cities produced diseased societies, rational cities would produce rational ones. Change the house and you would change the inhabitant. Purify the street, abolish ornament, separate every social function, standardize the dwelling, flood it with hygienic sunlight, and a new human being might finally emerge: healthy, lucid, collectivist, sexually disciplined, politically reasonable, and grateful for the low ceiling.
The result was the most powerful realization of the modernist formal revolution. A painter could reorganize a canvas. The visionary architect could reorganize the home, the block, the city, and—with sufficient state backing—the daily existence of millions. The material of architecture, like that of Soylent Green, is people. And the architect is literally and actually God.
Architects Mean Business!
We move from the sumptuous authority of Beaux-Arts architecture and the end of Art Nouveau into Adolf Loos’ war against ornament; the machine-cities of Antonio Sant’Elia and Mario Chiattone; the Soviet “social condensers” imagined by Melnikov, Rodchenko, and Leonidov; Louis Sullivan and the Chicago steel frame; Henri Labrouste and Max Berg; the mystical cult of glass; Bruno Taut’s crystalline socialism; Mies van der Rohe’s pursuit of absolute form; Le Corbusier’s war against the street; the Bauhaus; De Stijl; Mondrian; the International Style; and finally the large-scale experiments in which the drawings escaped from paper and began trapping actual bodies.
Hughes has a special guest expert with him this time—the great Philip Johnson, who collaborated with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe on the Seagram Building. Johnson recalls how Mies —
believed in the ultimate truth of architecture, and especially of his architecture, that his architecture was closer to the Truth, capital T, than anyone else's, because it was simpler and could be learned.
This episode is packed with a dozen astoundingly excellent locutions. Check out Johnson on Le Corbusier:
His logic was Cartesian. He was French, after all, and the Platonic-Cartesian absolutes were in his heart. And besides, they made wonderful perspectives—and marvellous models of how you’d wipe out the city of Paris. It was a delicious intellectual exercise. How serious he was about it, I don’t believe for a minute. The people who were serious were the Germans. They were the bad ones, because they not only believed it—they built them.
The buildings are so magnificent and breathtaking that being in them knocks you into an apoplectic fugue that invokes every childhood fever dream you ever had while forcing you abdomen into a near-death reunion with the Urgrund. This is the feeling everyone reports inside these spaces. It’s similar to the feeling that 10 year-old American boys get when they visit Chichén Itzá or Uxmal—Chiricoesque dreamscapes that make you giddy with both omnipotence and insignificance.
Funniest Video So Far
I’m a terribly grouchy and depressed person and I find nothing at all funny or amusing. But Hughes’ commentary is so damned funny in this one that I actually had a break out the Albuterol!
Hughes lugs his camera crew into multiple such places, and takes us inside. We see Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitationrising on muscular pilotis and culminating in one the greatest sculptural roof in all of modern architecture. Up there, liberated from the inconvenience of inhabitants, Corbusier is superb! Johnson remarks that —
[Corbusier] was so ill-informed about the habits and traditions of the society that he thought people would go on the roof if he made it beautiful enough. The real point is that he was free there.
Then Hughes goes downstairs and we see the horrors. Here’s a snippet showing the wondeful hilarity we will get to enjoy:
The troubles begin below the roof. The Unité was meant as a social experiment, a prototype for mass housing. There is still a rough nobility to this concrete, even though it is grimy and can never mellow like stone. The piloti, or stilts, are a grand muscular shape, although nobody uses the space under them for anything, and the cars have to park in the green space. And as housing, the Unite has not been a success. Its emblem is the figure of Corbusier's modular man, the distorted great grandchild of Vitruvian man, and unintentionally a symbol of Corbusier's lofty disregard of real human needs.
Privacy and the flats hardly exists. Many of the rooms are little more than cupboards. The shopping mall on the 5th floor is mostly out of business because the French like to shop in real markets, down on the street. Another fact of life that the Formgiver did not grasp. Finally, nobody wanted those plain, morally elevating interiors with their paper lamps and craft rugs and slung chairs and cubist tapestries. And they are now crammed, like this one, with exactly the sort of gaudy, fake period furniture that Corbusier struggled against all his life. He could never understand why the French kept wanting it, but they did, and they still do.
Ha ha! The residents rejected Corbusier’s morally improving interiors and filled their tiny torture chambers with plastic chandeliers, fake Louis XVI furniture, gilded junk, and everything else the divine Form-Giver had spent his life trying to eradicate. Contrary to expectations, actual human inhabitants reintroduced history, appetite, vulgarity, and contingency into the purified machine.
Corbusier was a genius so divine that Hughes calls him “the Picasso of architecture” and "the supreme inventor of shapes" whose language pulled off the very feat Ayn Rand said was most impossible in The Fountainhead — the fusion of classical Greek lucidity and analytic-mechanical formalism. Corbusier only failed for sociological and anthropologicalreasons. His delightful forms only failed because they were incompatible with human beings’ human-all-too-human ways.
Bauhaus—Everyone’s Favorite
We get a tour of the Bauhaus, the astonishing school that reunified architecture, painting, sculpture, craft, typography, furniture, photography, and industrial production into a new Gesamtkunstwerk. We even hear the great Gropius himself give a remarkably moving account of it. Every student had to pass through a craft workshop before approaching architecture. For a time, his little school made something like non-alienated labor materially plausible: the class division between artist, craftsman, and industrial designer was attacked inside the organization of work itself. The Bauhaus sought a total culture adequate to industrial modernity, redesigning everything from factories and apartment blocks to chairs, lamps, typefaces, teapots—and the proper discomfort in which the New Man ought to sit. It was the Bell Labs of embodied everyday life — a laboratory in which industrial modernity attempted to redesign the entire interface between the human body and its world.
The Miracle of Entire Modernist Top–Down Cities
Next come the largest artist projects in all of human history—entires cities built from principle-saturated Modernist idea systems!
- Sant’Elia’s Futurist city;
- Constructivist palaces and social condensers;
- the rectangular tower-block city;
- Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse and proposed assassination of Paris;
- the Unité;
- Chandigarh, India (which I visited);
- the Weissenhofsiedlung;
- La Défense;
- Pruitt–Igoe;
- and Brasília—the capital of Brazil erected from scratch as a triumph of sunlight, reason, national ambition, and the automobile.
The Brasília section will knock you out and give you chills. Hughes at his poetic best:
The car would abolish the human street, possibly even the human foot. Everyone would have a car. Some people would have aeroplanes too. The one thing nobody would have would be a place to bump into others, walk the dog, chat, strut, or do any of the hundred other random things that one does on a street, and which, being random, were loathed by Le Corbusier. La Ville Radieuse was a nightmare. Not only would its inhabitants surrender their freedom of movement to the omnipotent architect, they would also have to give up their memory, insofar as it was recorded in stone and brick.
The car abolishes the street, making the pedestrian “an irrelevance”—unfortunately, a very large irrelevance, since most inhabitants do not own cars. Result: the photogenic City of Tomorrow became a ceremonial slum of cracking stone, flaking concrete, and rusting metal. Hughes identifies the underlying error with unusual precision: its planners thought in terms of space rather than place, and of single rather than multiple meanings.
But there’s one more secret ingredient that caused these massive failures that Hughes does not mention. Actually, Hughes blames architecture for catastrophes produced by class power, racial segregation, bureaucratic abandonment, private property, and disinvestment. Pruitt–Igoe was not dynamited by formal geometry alone.
But that complication strengthens his central indictment: modernist architects wanted “design” to carry causal powers that fall beyond it. Political-economic antagonisms cannot be defeated by planning and killer geometrical high theory.
This is also the prehistory of Jameson’s later account of architectural space. Jameson describes a “mutation in the object” for which no corresponding mutation has occurred in the subject: built space develops beyond the body’s inherited perceptual equipment and defeats its ability to locate itself. His answer is cognitive mapping—the recovery of some practical relation between the subject’s immediate position and the larger urban and social totality it inhabits.
This is the most important idea of the entire video, and the one that will most improve your quality of life and moral health. To grok this idea, you must watch this video, the most important architecture video on the Internet:
So come enjoy nearly an hour of mirth, admiration, and architectural dread as top-down, geometrically unified utopias are drafted, modelled, poured, inhabited, decorated against instructions, abandoned, and finally dynamited.
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
Past events
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