What we’re about
SADHO is a curiosity-driven philosophy Meetup with a critical-theoretical interest in automatic and shared ways of worldmaking.
Method
- We present audiovisual surveys of Western philosophy and of the history and philosophy of science—surveys that are masterpieces of illuminating exposition—performed by the “BBC2 Four” (Bronowski, Burke, Clark, and Magee) and
- discuss them, with
- a philosophy PhD, philosophy professor, or other Guest Expert.
SADHO makes scholarship fun by serving up the greatest embodied minds of all time in bite-sized, Technicolor, beautifully arranged morsels, and by bringing bona fide experts to the table for special lectures and Q&A.
In a word, SADHO is a fun, friendly, frolicsome, fleet-footed, (non-)free-form* forum for philosophizing, fostering fellowship alongside and under the tutelage of (sometimes) famous professional and practicing philosophers.
SADHO’s First Promise
- SADHO’s First Promise — Our excursions and tangents will never stray outside the event’s topical Kuiper Belt.
Unlike other philosophy Meetup groups, whose discussions drift all over the Solar System, our high-quality discussions remain firmly within the Kuiper Belt. That’s our promise to you.
Sound impossible? It’s not. The reason is that SADHO Meetups are … not actually free-form. They are anchored and constrained by a force.
A great force.
A force more powerful than even Vader …
The all-conquering force of radical insight, expressed vividly and clearly, by a master teacher.
There is nothing better than an illuminating and meticulously lucid discourse delivered by a riveting and intensely expressive person. Add to this a great video, diagram, or model, and you have the makings of peak experience.
This force flows neither from Scott & Dave, nor from the great topics we choose, but from the the expository virtuosos that elucidate these topics—i.e., from our Guest Experts and the BBC2 Four.
SADHO’s Second Promise
- SADHO’s Second Promise — Our meetings will always include either a qualified Guest Expert or a member of the BBC2 Four.
If SADHO worships anything, it’s clear speaking. That’s it. That’s the big overarching theme and First Principle that drives all our decision making. Consequently, we spotlight the crème de la crème of English-speaking educators and dive into skillfully (or manically) curated discussions, underpinned by top-tier production values and rigorous preparation. Said educators include both (a) living professional philosophers and (b) those pedagogical giants known as the “BBC2 Four.”
Professional philosophers
Our Guest Experts are top professors from the North Americas. So far, we have hosted the likes of:
The BBC2 Four
SADHO meetings also (and almost always) revolve around recorded performances by the greatest scientific, historical, and philosophical exegetes of all time. While incarnated on the Prime Material plane, these lofty ones were known as Jacob Bronowski, James Burke, Kenneth Clark, and Bryan Magee. These pedagogical saints, these BBC2 Four (aka the British Broadcasting Bards, the Philosophical Fab Four, the BBC-M, etc.) will be our guides.
Here they are again in list view:
What can one say about the BBC2 Four that hasn't already been said? Their work is so widely acclaimed and thoroughly appreciated that finding new words of praise feels like an almost impossible task. I feel compelled to return to Shakespeare, who took great pains to describe the BBC2 Four in that memorable passage from Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1, lines 45–65 (as interpreted by Dave Thomas):
“These engrossing masters of elegant exposition; these dexterous wordsmiths of rhetorical Fabergé eggs; these benevolent ministers of restorative mind-tonics; these tireless disciples of skillful means; these master-architects of felicitous visual models, diagrams, and schemas; these altruistic wielders of knot-cutting logicks; these humble and plain-speaking sweepers of cobwebs; these irreverent deflators of metaphysical extravagance; these fortresses of excellence, built by Oxford for England against intellectual infection; these view-transforming founts of illuminating metaphor; these poetic alchemists of feeling and idea; these massively multi-channel pedagogical improvisors; these fascinating bards of scientific and philosophical history; this happy breed of men; this little world; this precious stone set in the TV-static sea, which serves it in the office of a wall or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier programmes; this nurse; this teaming womb of royal elocutionists, feared by their breed and famous by their birth, renownèd for their deeds as far from home; this blessèd plot, this earth, THIS REALM, THIS BBC2 FOUR!!!”
Even when exalted by the Sweet Swan of Avon himself, mere words seem insufficient to capture the full essence of the BBC2 Four. Now, with the sad passing of three of its luminaries, we realize the depth of our loss. It is, indeed, the second-greatest blessing to humanity that they devoted their talents to the world through BBC2 in the 70s, leaving us with a treasure trove of audiovisual records of their magnificent performances.
Surely, it is these performances, and not the writings of LRH, that should have been engraved on stainless steel tablets and encased in titanium capsules beneath Trementina Base.
Join Us
You can join us …
- Here, on Meetup.
- By wandering around our massively overproduced Notion page, here.
- By lurking around our embryonic YouTube channel. Video for our events will be uploaded here (if possible) as will videos of our events (eventually, some day, once Dave has finished composing our new theme music).
Thank-Yous
SADHO is organized and managed by David Sternman, with financial support provided by the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia, under SADHO COB Professor Steven Taubeneck.
Upcoming events (4+)
See all- From Socrates to Sartre EP16 ⟩ “Hegel I: A Revolution in Thought”Link visible for attendees
These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.
Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.
Special Preface
Our Meetup copy editor is out indefinitely after what she described, before going dark, as a “spiritual emergency.” What triggered it?
She had just one job: watch Lavine’s Hegel I and write a tidy event blurb.
But Thelma had other plans.
Instead of watching a single episode and jotting out a few cheerful lines, she binge-watched all five Hegel lectures in a single sitting. The last thing she said before reportedly renting a seven-sided coffin and refusing to speak to anyone was: “I have to do nigredo now.”
So, in the absence of our editor and her usually hilarious event descriptions, here’s a placeholder. Except it’s not hers. It’s mine. I’ve watched the first three Lavine Hegels, and now I understand why she disappeared.
These are not lectures. And what they produce is not learning. What they produce is … is …
Hegel Part I; or, Betcha Can’t Watch Just One
Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
If even 1% of the Millionen who casually mention Hegel in Meetups—or drop Hegelian terms (in-itself, for-itself, sublation, dialectic, negation, Absolute) or pretend to refer to Hegelian meanings—were to actually watch this episode, Meetup itself would become a world-historical force.
Here’s the truth: most of your past “Hegelian education” has been a barrage of misunderstoods, assembled with the glue of pretended knowingness into a self-handicapping poison that’s harmed you beyond depths that your self-awareness can even sound. I say this as someone who, until last week, was one of those pretending knowers.
For years we’ve all been eating tomatoes one week and lettuce leaves the next, then showing up at Salad Discussion Meetups posturing like seasoned Saladians.
We can stop pretending now.
Lavine will give you the full salad of Enlightenment philosophy—not just the ingredients, but their right proportions, their internal logics, their interrelations. With zero obscurity.
You’ll Find No Summary Here
Lavine’s trifecta—history lesson, philosophical exposé, and real-time meditation on historical becoming—covers so much terrain, with such cumulative force, that the only honest way to convey it would be to paste the full transcript right here, ribs and all, and ask you to read it like a score—if only to begin hearing the symphony that’s hidden inside the causal mesh of European modernity.
You will never understand Hegel unless you understand why he appears exactly when he does. You cannot grasp the categories of the Phenomenology of Spirit without understanding what the philosophes tried to do—and what went so catastrophically wrong. As Rick Roderick used to say: The guillotine was not a detour. The French Revolution, its rhetoric, its reversals, its collapse into empire—this is not background, it’s marrow.
She reconstructs a whole field of conceptual causality, a logic of emergence in which every figure and event becomes a pressure-point in the unfolding dialectic of modern thought.
Just take a gander here at who and what she brings into her com-position:
Figures
- Marie Antoinette, Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, La Mettrie, Helvétius, Holbach, Condorcet, Newton, Karl Marx, Louis XVI, Napoleon, Locke, Immanuel Kant, Tom Paine, C. I. Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, Sartre.
Events & Processes
- The French Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation, the American and English Revolutions, the Reign of Terror, the rise of modern science, the Kantian epistemological rupture, and the delayed reception of the Enlightenment in Germany (Aufklärung).
Great Showings
- Enlightenment as the attempt to transform power by reconceiving nature, reason, and rights
- The philosophes as radical synthesizers of empiricism and rationalism, aimed at dismantling Church and Crown
- The French Revolution as both the triumph and betrayal of Enlightenment reason
- The Reign of Terror as the moment when rational universality gives way to the will of the people
- The German Enlightenment’s belated and metaphysical trajectory
- Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a response to Hume, and a re-grounding of science through the mind’s synthetic a priori
- The price of Kant’s certainty: alienation from things-in-themselves, and a rift between appearance and reality
- The structure of modern alienation as the conceptual setting for Hegel
- Hegel’s system as an effort to overcome this fracture, to bring unity out of Enlightenment contradiction, and to philosophize the failure of modernity without abandoning its promise
Unforgettable Learnings
- Lavine’s remarkable synthesis of Enlightenment history, from Newton to Napoleon
- The shift from metaphysical rationalism to Kantian epistemology
- Why the French Revolution matters philosophically—and how it becomes a dialectical template
- Hegel’s deep insight: modernity is alienation (more below)
- Why unity, reconciliation, and mutual recognition are more urgent—and elusive—than ever
What About Our Alienation?
We’ll use Hegel’s concepts to confront the very real crises of today: loneliness, social breakdown, the collapse of meaning. Philosophy must be made practical again. We will discuss together:
- What forms of solidarity are still possible?
- Can philosophical understanding become a mode of therapy?
- What kind of modern ‘happenings’ or spontaneous experiences might reconnect us?
At the heart of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit lies an uncanny diagnosis of our condition: separation from others, from ourselves, and from the world. Hegel calls it unhappy consciousness. Today we call it nature, necessity, just another Groundhog Day of pantagonism.
We are more fragmented, more disunified than ever—yet we need each other more than ever.
Alienation isn’t a glitch. It is modernity.
Come. Get help. And really understand Hegel for the first time, from the ground up.
Bonus Addendum
In my distress over Ingrid’s sudden Rosicrucian conversion, I forgot to mention the additional good news.
Our upcoming Hegel series won’t be the usual intellectual trapeze act of Dave, our Conant-trained mathematical surgeon, and me, your overcaffeinated phenomenological hype-man. This time, we’re calling in a real Hegelian.
Professor Steven Taubeneck—renowned scholar, card-carrying Hegel interpreter, and the first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English—will be guiding us through Lavine’s Hegel I and beyond.
What this means is that all questions, including the hardest that you thought you'd never get clarity on, are not only welcome but will get a correct answer!
METHOD
Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE
Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.
She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.
View all of our coming episodes here.
- From Socrates to Sartre EP17 ⟩ “Hegel II: The Real is the Rational”Link visible for attendees
These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.
Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.
When I first saw one of her broadcasts on Public Access, I scoffed and jeered at the odd elements—for about 90 seconds. Then it hit me: her clarity and precision delivered a more powerful impact than anything I’d ever encountered.
Her unmatched ability to transmute the foundational ideas—banalized into clichés by others—into potent, transformative psychedelics turns even the most familiar concepts into insights so profound they catch in your throat.
While Magee is, as Eric Clapton once said, “by far and without a doubt the most gifted philosophical conversationalist alive today,” Lavine’s hypnotic delivery, along with her genius for crafting perfect metaphors and examples, makes her the most masterful foundation-demystifier in Anglophone philosophy. She’s one of a kind and I’m sure you’ll fall in love with her.
Like a Virgin, Seeing Foundations for the Very First Time
Professor Lavine is the tough-love mom I wish I had as a child. And she has a message for all of us non-, partial-, and pseudo-grokkers: foundational mastery in philosophy isn’t about delivering smooth confusionist performances or stringing together philosophical buzzwords. True mastery—the kind Lavine demands—requires effort on the level of authentic self-reinventive cultural immersion or learning a second language. Philosophy, approached seriously, means internalizing the metaphysical and epistemic assumptions of the great thinkers we read and letting them infect and possess us.
Philosophical understanding isn't normal. It requires something not dissimilar to religious conversion—a wholesale transformation of how you see and think about the world. To truly grok Descartes, for example, you cannot simply study his arguments, you have to induce a kind of trance. You have to inhabit the core of his thought, down to the foundations, in the same way an actor might embody a role—not just the personality, but the underlying worldview and backstory that motivates it.
The same goes for Hume’s radical empiricism. Entering into his world means actuallyexperiencing life as a flux of flashing sense data and questioning the coherence of our everyday projections. It’s disconcerting, even disorienting. But if you can immerse yourself in these frameworks, the rewards will be profound. You will see the clarity and brilliance of the thinkers in a way that mere conceptual understanding can’t provide.
In her stunningly clear lectures—as clear as a chrome airhorn on a bright winter day—the preternatural Lavine guides us through just these kinds of transformative experiences. She exposes the core commitments and hidden absurdities within each system, and demands that we confront the real stakes behind the systems we study and take them absolutely seriously. This is not philosophy as intellectual gymnastics—it’s philosophy as immersive and experiential and I dare say devotional.
Join us for a series of sessions that will push us to engage with the true depth of all the fundamental and foundational stuff that everyone loves to skip over and replace with popular caricatures. Lavine will cure you of that real quick. She doesn’t just present ideas; she forces you to method-act the systems from the inside and take a stand.
METHOD
Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE
Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.
She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.
View all of our coming episodes here.
- From Socrates to Sartre EP18 ⟩ “Hegel III: Master and Slave”Link visible for attendees
These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.
Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.
When I first saw one of her broadcasts on Public Access, I scoffed and jeered at the odd elements—for about 90 seconds. Then it hit me: her clarity and precision delivered a more powerful impact than anything I’d ever encountered.
Her unmatched ability to transmute the foundational ideas—banalized into clichés by others—into potent, transformative psychedelics turns even the most familiar concepts into insights so profound they catch in your throat.
While Magee is, as Eric Clapton once said, “by far and without a doubt the most gifted philosophical conversationalist alive today,” Lavine’s hypnotic delivery, along with her genius for crafting perfect metaphors and examples, makes her the most masterful foundation-demystifier in Anglophone philosophy. She’s one of a kind and I’m sure you’ll fall in love with her.
Like a Virgin, Seeing Foundations for the Very First Time
Professor Lavine is the tough-love mom I wish I had as a child. And she has a message for all of us non-, partial-, and pseudo-grokkers: foundational mastery in philosophy isn’t about delivering smooth confusionist performances or stringing together philosophical buzzwords. True mastery—the kind Lavine demands—requires effort on the level of authentic self-reinventive cultural immersion or learning a second language. Philosophy, approached seriously, means internalizing the metaphysical and epistemic assumptions of the great thinkers we read and letting them infect and possess us.
Philosophical understanding isn't normal. It requires something not dissimilar to religious conversion—a wholesale transformation of how you see and think about the world. To truly grok Descartes, for example, you cannot simply study his arguments, you have to induce a kind of trance. You have to inhabit the core of his thought, down to the foundations, in the same way an actor might embody a role—not just the personality, but the underlying worldview and backstory that motivates it.
The same goes for Hume’s radical empiricism. Entering into his world means actuallyexperiencing life as a flux of flashing sense data and questioning the coherence of our everyday projections. It’s disconcerting, even disorienting. But if you can immerse yourself in these frameworks, the rewards will be profound. You will see the clarity and brilliance of the thinkers in a way that mere conceptual understanding can’t provide.
In her stunningly clear lectures—as clear as a chrome airhorn on a bright winter day—the preternatural Lavine guides us through just these kinds of transformative experiences. She exposes the core commitments and hidden absurdities within each system, and demands that we confront the real stakes behind the systems we study and take them absolutely seriously. This is not philosophy as intellectual gymnastics—it’s philosophy as immersive and experiential and I dare say devotional.
Join us for a series of sessions that will push us to engage with the true depth of all the fundamental and foundational stuff that everyone loves to skip over and replace with popular caricatures. Lavine will cure you of that real quick. She doesn’t just present ideas; she forces you to method-act the systems from the inside and take a stand.
METHOD
Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE
Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.
She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.
View all of our coming episodes here.
- From Socrates to Sartre EP19 ⟩ “Hegel IV: The Cunning of Reason”Link visible for attendees
These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.
Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.
When I first saw one of her broadcasts on Public Access, I scoffed and jeered at the odd elements—for about 90 seconds. Then it hit me: her clarity and precision delivered a more powerful impact than anything I’d ever encountered.
Her unmatched ability to transmute the foundational ideas—banalized into clichés by others—into potent, transformative psychedelics turns even the most familiar concepts into insights so profound they catch in your throat.
While Magee is, as Eric Clapton once said, “by far and without a doubt the most gifted philosophical conversationalist alive today,” Lavine’s hypnotic delivery, along with her genius for crafting perfect metaphors and examples, makes her the most masterful foundation-demystifier in Anglophone philosophy. She’s one of a kind and I’m sure you’ll fall in love with her.
Like a Virgin, Seeing Foundations for the Very First Time
Professor Lavine is the tough-love mom I wish I had as a child. And she has a message for all of us non-, partial-, and pseudo-grokkers: foundational mastery in philosophy isn’t about delivering smooth confusionist performances or stringing together philosophical buzzwords. True mastery—the kind Lavine demands—requires effort on the level of authentic self-reinventive cultural immersion or learning a second language. Philosophy, approached seriously, means internalizing the metaphysical and epistemic assumptions of the great thinkers we read and letting them infect and possess us.
Philosophical understanding isn't normal. It requires something not dissimilar to religious conversion—a wholesale transformation of how you see and think about the world. To truly grok Descartes, for example, you cannot simply study his arguments, you have to induce a kind of trance. You have to inhabit the core of his thought, down to the foundations, in the same way an actor might embody a role—not just the personality, but the underlying worldview and backstory that motivates it.
The same goes for Hume’s radical empiricism. Entering into his world means actuallyexperiencing life as a flux of flashing sense data and questioning the coherence of our everyday projections. It’s disconcerting, even disorienting. But if you can immerse yourself in these frameworks, the rewards will be profound. You will see the clarity and brilliance of the thinkers in a way that mere conceptual understanding can’t provide.
In her stunningly clear lectures—as clear as a chrome airhorn on a bright winter day—the preternatural Lavine guides us through just these kinds of transformative experiences. She exposes the core commitments and hidden absurdities within each system, and demands that we confront the real stakes behind the systems we study and take them absolutely seriously. This is not philosophy as intellectual gymnastics—it’s philosophy as immersive and experiential and I dare say devotional.
Join us for a series of sessions that will push us to engage with the true depth of all the fundamental and foundational stuff that everyone loves to skip over and replace with popular caricatures. Lavine will cure you of that real quick. She doesn’t just present ideas; she forces you to method-act the systems from the inside and take a stand.
METHOD
Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE
Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.
She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.
View all of our coming episodes here.
