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: The Life of Oharu (1952) by Kenji Mizoguchi
Mizoguchi’s personal favourite of all his films, The Life of Oharu is in many ways a summary work, the crystallization of his vision of a woman martyred by the callous whims of men and Japan's Meiji era as a dark cauldron of the repressive, misogynistic and feudalist spirits that linger, atavistically, in his contemporary films. Tanaka reveals incredible range in her depiction of a courtesan’s vertiginous fall from grace, a trajectory whose gleaming sharp edge revealingly eviscerates the seedy underbelly of rigid Meiji social structures and mores. The expressive camera movement so celebrated in Mizoguchi’s cinema is given a sublime showcase in the film, with almost operatically soaring movements comparable to the films of Ophüls and Murnau. By garnering the International Prize at the Venice Film Festival, The Life of Oharu brought Mizoguchi to international attention, and by coming the year after Rashomon captured the Golden Lion, helped propel Japanese cinema onto the world stage.
"A work of mature mastery, sorrowful and self-possessed, The Life of Oharu introduced an international audience to the art of Kenji Mizoguchi. It is an art both attached to tradition and radically original." (Criterion)
"No male director understood and revered women like Mizoguchi did, and with Life of Oharu he likens womanhood to a perpetual state of spiritual unrest." (Slant)
"A fierce denunciation of the subjugation of women, the power of wealth, and Japan's unjust though splendid traditions." (The New Yorker)
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Join the Toronto Philosophy Meetup to discuss the 1952 historical drama The Life of Oharu (Japanese: 西鶴一代女) directed, written, and produced by the great Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi, and based on a 1686 Japanese novel by Ihara Saikaku. The film was recently voted the 226th greatest movie of all time in Sight & Sound's international survey of filmmakers. We've previously discussed Mizoguchi's acclaimed 1953 film Ugetsu Monogatari.
Please watch the movie in advance (136 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.
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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/317030302/
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 them all.)
Upcoming events
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Jean-Paul Sartre on Freedom and the Other
·OnlineOnlineOver the next 3 weeks we'll be reading Sartre's account of the concrete ways a free subjectivity relates toward the Other. The readings are from Part 3, Chapter 3 of Being and Nothingness as follows.
October 10: "Our first attitude toward the Other: love, language, masochism" (pp. 529-551 in PDF)
October 17: "The second attitude toward the Other: indifference, desire, hatred, sadism" (pp. 551-591 in PDF)
October 24: "Being-with (Mitsein) and the 'we'" (pp. 591-613 in PDF)⸻ ♦ ♦ ♦ ⸻
So-called ‘enlightened societies’ seem to enter periods of crisis, war and unspeakable violence on a regular basis. Can these events simply be attributed to “the crooked timber of humanity, out of which no straight thing was ever made" (Kant), or is there a deeper, more sinister reason for their occurrence? Could it be that the Enlightenment itself – its rationality, moral outlook and existential condition – possesses a disavowed “dark underbelly” that precipitates catastrophe?We'll explore these questions through arguably the most controversial of the children of the Enlightenment, the Marquis De Sade. In particular, we'll be focusing on 20th century receptions of Sade's work by European writers and philosophers. Not only will this approach offer us possible answers to the questions above, it will allow us to survey major currents of Continental philosophy in the 20th century. See below for an overview of the writers and topics we'll be discussing.
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READING SCHEDULE
Find the up-to-date reading schedule at this link:
https://sites.google.com/view/existentialism-and-its-critics/All texts are available 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 👇
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READINGS OVERVIEW
Barthes extends the structuralist approach developed by Levi-Strauss and Lacan (whom we read previously) to literary theory. In his reading, Sade emerges as a logothete, a founder of a language and a paradigmatic writer of "texts of bliss", whose jouissance derives from the very wounding they precipitate.Foucault redirects the analytical focus away from Barthean semiotics of jouissance and towards what we might call the Sadean episteme. The criterion of the Sadean world emerges as a certain kind of truth: anti-metaphysical, anti-theological, anti-moral. In bracketing away reality, this truth elevates desire to a sovereign status within human experience.
De Beauvoir argues that we must not burn Sade, though we must approach him with caution. Sade exemplifies the existentialist credos of choosing one's freedom and confronting existence without illusions. He is also one of the first to confront the problem of the Other head-on. Yet his glaring fault is to have succumbed to radical solipsism – a brutal compulsion to efface the Other rather than engage existentially with the singularity of Difference.
Klossowski and Bataille offer a quasi-theological interpretation of Sade, linking his texts to the subterranean persistence of the sacred in modernity. Bataille develops his central notion of heterology with reference to Sade's work.
For Blanchot, the Sadean paradox consists in apathy: the most radical and extreme actions are not done out of passion but out of detached rational reflection. Such a state of indifference amounts to an absolute sovereignty, the complete separation of the ego from its relations to the world.
Adorno and Horkheimer find in Sade a prime illustration of their thesis that the calculative rationality of the Enlightenment is cold, objectifying and founded on domination. They regard him as a diabolical truth-teller whose works pre-figure the horrors of totalitarian bureaucracy.
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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. Speaking priority will be given to those who have done the readings.
- 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, keep mics muted when not speaking, and maintain a respectable dress code.
- We'll focus the discussion with key passages and discussion questions. Be sure to bring your favorite passages, questions, comments, criticisms, etc. to the meeting.
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: If you prefer 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).
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Art: The Gray Forest (1927) by Max Ernst1 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.
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From the translator's "Note" on the text:
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"This translation is conservative in interpretation and traditional in aim. It aims to translate the text as accurately as possible.
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"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.
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"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.)
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"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.
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"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.
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"I will occasionally refer to the scholars’ dialect (‘Gringlish’) and its traditional glossary in the Notes."
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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.
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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.1 attendeeMovie Discussion: The Life of Oharu (1952) by Kenji Mizoguchi
·OnlineOnlineMizoguchi’s personal favourite of all his films, The Life of Oharu is in many ways a summary work, the crystallization of his vision of a woman martyred by the callous whims of men and Japan's Meiji era as a dark cauldron of the repressive, misogynistic and feudalist spirits that linger, atavistically, in his contemporary films. Tanaka reveals incredible range in her depiction of a courtesan’s vertiginous fall from grace, a trajectory whose gleaming sharp edge revealingly eviscerates the seedy underbelly of rigid Meiji social structures and mores. The expressive camera movement so celebrated in Mizoguchi’s cinema is given a sublime showcase in the film, with almost operatically soaring movements comparable to the films of Ophüls and Murnau. By garnering the International Prize at the Venice Film Festival, The Life of Oharu brought Mizoguchi to international attention, and by coming the year after Rashomon captured the Golden Lion, helped propel Japanese cinema onto the world stage.
"A work of mature mastery, sorrowful and self-possessed, The Life of Oharu introduced an international audience to the art of Kenji Mizoguchi. It is an art both attached to tradition and radically original." (Criterion)
"No male director understood and revered women like Mizoguchi did, and with Life of Oharu he likens womanhood to a perpetual state of spiritual unrest." (Slant)
"A fierce denunciation of the subjugation of women, the power of wealth, and Japan's unjust though splendid traditions." (The New Yorker)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Join the Toronto Philosophy Meetup to discuss the 1952 historical drama The Life of Oharu (Japanese: 西鶴一代女) directed, written, and produced by the great Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi, and based on a 1686 Japanese novel by Ihara Saikaku. The film was recently voted the 226th greatest movie of all time in Sight & Sound's international survey of filmmakers. We've previously discussed Mizoguchi's acclaimed 1953 film Ugetsu Monogatari.
Please watch the movie in advance (136 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/317030302/
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 them all.)
1 attendee
Past events
2157
