About us
[Note: This group is looking for a new owner! In the meantime, join the Toronto Philosophy Meetup to find many more online philosophy events and activities: https://www.meetup.com/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/
The description below is from the previous organizer of the group.]
Welcome to the Calgary Philosophy Meetup! We're a local community for people interested in reading and discussing philosophy. We hold discussions and other events on a broad range of philosophical topics and problems. No previous experience is required for any of our meetups, only a willingness to engage with the works being discussed. The only basic ground-rule is to please, as with everywhere else in life, be polite and respectful during discussions.
Feel free to propose topics you would like to see (you can do this in the Discussions section), and please contact the organizers if you would like to host an event yourself, or organize events here on a regular basis.
Featured event
Movie Discussion: Johnny Guitar (1954) by Nicholas Ray
"Never seen a woman who was more of a man. She thinks like one, acts like one, and sometimes makes me feel like I’m not…" Sterling Hayden’s finger-picking interloper Johnny might get top billing, but the star of the show in every conceivable sense is Joan Crawford. She is Vienna, a gun-toting, trouser-wearing casino boss whose loose-living ways infuriate the local league of moral decency. Vienna finds herself trapped between two equally unpredictable forces: the aforementioned townsfolk, whipped into a fury by Emma Small, a sexually frustrated, self-hating tomboy; and a gang of layabout toughs under the command of wannabe outlaw Dancin’ Kid. Thanks to Crawford’s cutting but nuanced performance, Johnny Guitar is unashamedly feminist, but Ray’s gleeful subversion of conservative western traditions doesn’t end there. This is a movie for all the outsiders, for anyone who’s ever been judged on their appearance, their outlook or the way they choose to live. That it’s also a rip-snorting yarn packed with shootouts, punch-ups, daring escapes and crackling dialogue simply confirms its masterpiece status.
"The whole thing is weird, hysterical, and quite unlike anything else in the history of the cowboy film."
(Time Out)
"Ray has a knack for finding poetry where others would surely fumble, and here he's at his most poetic." (MUBI)
"One of the boldest and most stylized films of its time – quirky, political, twisted." (Roger Ebert)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Join the Toronto Philosophy Meetup to discuss the 1954 cult classic western Johnny Guitar by the acclaimed American director Nicholas Ray, recently voted the 122nd greatest movie of all time in Sight & Sound's international survey of film critics and scholars. In 2008, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Please watch the movie in advance (110 minutes) and bring your thoughts, reactions, and queries to share with us at the meeting. You can stream it with a viewing link to be posted on the main event listing here.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
We'll be joined by many other participants from the Toronto Philosophy Meetup at this meeting — https://www.meetup.com/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/events/316224051/
Check out other movie discussions in the group, currently happening about 2 or 3 times a month.
This link here is a spreadsheet of the approximately 200 movies we've watched in this group and my ratings for each. You're invited to share your ratings too if you've watched a bunch of these movies with us. (I can add your list here if you send me a link. You can make your own list on sites like Letterboxd or by copying my spreadsheet and filling in your own values. Note that my list doesn't include every movie that Yorgo hosted on cause I didn't watch all of them.)
Upcoming events
171
Kant, Sade, Lacan: Enlightenment and its shadow
·OnlineOnlineOver several weeks we will engage with the thought of Immanuel Kant and the Marquis de Sade, culminating with a reading of Jacques Lacan's seminal essay "Kant with Sade".
The dark side of the European Enlightenment is an enduring topic in critical philosophy. The intellectual encounter of Kant with Sade offers us a particularly intense variation on this theme: Kant the rigorous philosopher of the moral law on one side -- Sade the ultimate antinomian and libertarian on the other. In 1807 Hegel argued that the empty abstraction of Kantian duty led directly to the Reign of Terror spearheaded by Robespierre and the Jacobins. Hegel saw that the absolute freedom glorified by the Enlightenment was an abstract universal devoid of living particularity - a force of pure negativity operating in the human subject. Therefore, any attempt to actualize it was bound to produce the caput mortum and lifeless cadaver left behind by the French guillotine.
Should we read Sade's work as the consummate expression of this sinister conspiracy between absolute duty and death? Can we, following Lacan, regard his Philosophy in the Bedroom as a properly philosophical site, akin to the schools of ancient Greece? Paradoxically, Sade saw himself as a radical naturalist and a slayer of superstitious taboos, ultimately championing the vitality of human reason. If we do take Sade seriously as a philosopher, what does his extreme thought tell us about modernity, the (non-)position of the subject and the destiny of our times? While perennial, these questions have renewed significance in our current cultural and geopolitical climate.
Note: Sade's work is notoriously provocative. For this group, we will avoid his graphic portrayals and focus on the philosophical outlines of his radical naturalism and its consequences. Our aim will be to put this perspective in a mature philosophical dialogue with thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Lacan and the Ancients. As with all texts of this nature, readers' discretion is strongly advised.
We will begin with a reading from Kant's Groundwork, proceed with several sections from Sade, then return to Kant and work our way up to Lacan's essay encompassing both thinkers. Depending on group interest, we may bring other voices into the conversation along the way, such as Hegel, Ancient materialists (Aristippus, Lucretius, Epicurus), contemporary psychoanalysts, French readers of Sade, etc.
⸻READING SCHEDULE
As the reading schedule may evolve, please use the link below for the most up-to-date version:
https://sites.google.com/view/existentialism-and-its-critics/You can find all texts in the Google folder linked at the VERY BOTTOM of this description. The Google Meet link is also posted there.
👇 scroll all the way down for the links 👇
⸻ ♦ ♦ ♦ ⸻
ABOUT THIS READING GROUP
This is a comprehensive reading group focusing on 20th century French philosophy. Our current project was stimulated by our recent reading of George Bataille's Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Other writers we have discussed include Sartre, de Beauvoir, Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, Kristeva, etc.
⸻
GROUP RULES- Please spend 1-2 hours per week reading and preparing for the discussion.
- Keep your comments concise and relevant to the text.
- Please limit each comment to a maximum of 2-3 minutes. You're welcome to speak as many times as you wish.
- Virtual meeting courtesy applies: let's not interrupt each other and keep mics muted when not speaking.
- We'll focus the discussion with key passages and discussion questions. Be sure to bring your favorite passages, questions, comments, criticisms, etc.
⸻
LINKS AND RESOURCES
Join the Facebook group for more resources and discussion:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/755460079505498If you have attended previous meetings, please fill out a brief survey at this link: https://forms.gle/tEMJ4tw2yVgnTsQD6
All readings can be found in this Google folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VPRdvZYmUKBY3cSxD8xC8sTYtSEKBXDs
Google Meet link to join the meeting:
https://meet.google.com/uho-cdks-dcbNote: To join the Google Meet anonymously, first log out of your Google account and then open the link. Alternatively you can open the link in an Incognito window (Chrome) or Private Browsing (Safari).
⸻⸻
Art: Tous les Éléments / All the Elements by Toyen (Marie Čermínová) (1950)1 attendee
Live-Reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics – American Style
·OnlineOnlineLet's try something new. For the next dozen weeks or so, starting 4/17/2022, we are going to live-read and discuss Aristotle's ~Nicomachean Ethics~. What is new and different about this project is that the translation, by Adam Beresford (2020), happens to be rendered in standard 'Murican English.
.
From the translator's "Note" on the text:
.
"This translation is conservative in interpretation and traditional in aim. It aims to translate the text as accurately as possible.
.
"I translated every page from scratch, from a clean Greek text, rather than revising an existing translation. ... I wanted to avoid the scholars’ dialect that is traditionally used for translating Aristotle.
...
"I reject the approach of Arthur Adkins, Elizabeth Anscombe, and others who followed Nietzsche in supposing that the main elements of modern thinking about right and wrong were unknown to the Greeks, or known to them only in some radically different form. My view of humanity and of our shared moral instincts is shaped by a newer paradigm. This is a post-Darwinian translation. (It is also more in line with the older, both Aristotelian and Christian view of human character.)
.
"Having said that, I have no interest at all in modernizing Aristotle’s ideas. All the attitudes of this treatise remain fully Greek, very patriarchal, somewhat aristocratic, and firmly embedded in the fourth century BC. My choice of dialect (standard English) has no bearing on that whatsoever. (It is perfectly possible to express distinctively Greek and ancient attitudes in standard English.) ... I have also not simplified the text in any way. I have translated every iota, particle, preposition, noun, verb, adjective, phrase, clause, and sentence of the original. Every premise and every argument therefore remains – unfortunately – exactly as complex and annoyingly difficult as in any other version in whatever dialect.
...
"Some scholars and students unwarily assume that the traditional dialect has a special connection with Greek and that using it brings readers closer to the original text; and that it makes the translation more accurate. In reality, it has no special tie to the Greek language, either in its main philosophical glossary or in its dozens of minor (and pointless) deviations from normal English. And in my view it certainly makes any translation much less accurate.
.
"I will occasionally refer to the scholars’ dialect (‘Gringlish’) and its traditional glossary in the Notes."
.
.
Here is our plan:
1. Read Intro excerpts or a summary to gain the big picture.
2. Read a segment of the translated text.
3. Discuss it analytically and interpretively.
4. Repeat again at #2 for several more times.
5. Discuss the segments evaluatively.
.
.
Zoom is the project's current meeting platform, but that can change. The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows.2 attendees
Past events
2111
