What we’re about
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
Upcoming events
130
•OnlineKant: Critique of the Power of Judgment (Week 3)
OnlineMeeting link: https://meet.jit.si/CPM-Kant-Wednesdays
We'll be covering Book I - Analytic of the Beautiful (§1 - 23) (89 - 127, 38 pages)
Note: Meetings focus on developing a common language and fostering friendship through the study of 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 knowledge of Kant is necessary!
We continue with Kant's Critiques, now onto the third which examines the beautiful, sublime, and teleology as occasions where our senses are originally related to our understanding (judgment of taste), as well as how the understanding originally relates to reason (teleological judgment).
PDF: https://annas-archive.org/md5/b697b96b3dd98970c44942d6686e3a20
Amazon Link:
https://www.amazon.com/Critique-Power-Judgment-Cambridge-Immanuel/dp/0521348927/ref=sr_1_1(Note - page numbers are from Cambridge edition)
Week 1:
First Introduction (3 - 51, 48 pages)
(NOTE: this is not an editor or translator introduction, it is by Kant. It is sometimes at the end of the book.)Week 2:
Preface and Introduction (55 - 83, 28 pages)Week 3:
Book I - Analytic of the Beautiful (§1 - 23) (89 - 127, 38 pages)Week 4:
Book II - Analytic of the Sublime (§23 - 30) (128 - 159, 31 pages)Week 5:
§30 - 43 (160 - 182, 22 pages)Week 6:
§43 - 55 (182 - 212, 30 pages)Week 7:
The Dialectic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment (§55 - 61) (213 - 230, 17 pages)Week 8:
Analytic of the Teleological Power of Judgment (§61 - 69) (233 - 255, 22 pages)Week 9:
Dialectic of the Teleological Power of Judgment (§69 - 79) (257 - 284, 27 pages)Week 10:
Appendix §79 - 87 (285 - 313, 28 pages)Week 11:
Appendix §87 - END (313 - 346, 33 pages)5 attendees
•OnlineRationalism Befalling Objectivist Stance about Trump - A Case Study, Redux
OnlineMethods for comprehending the world can be classified generally into
- (1) inferring from universal principles--rationalism,
- (2) gathering reports from sense-data--empiricism, or
- (3) inducing ever-higher generalizations from perception--objectivism.
This classification on methodology contextualizes the epistemology of Objectivism, the philosophy as outlined by 20th-century novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand.
Yet intellectual leaders of organized Objectivism--i.e., those institutions setup after her death, such as the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI)--don't practice what they preach in the sphere of politics.
Cultural critic Sherwin Newman argues that, on the question of whether or not to endorse the Trump 45/47 administrations, Objectivists of organized Objectivism fall back on the method of rationalism to answer the endorsement question.
Meeting Outline:- Reviewing the MDI methodological hypothesis: misintegration, disintegration, and integration, mapping them to rationalism, empiricism, and objectivism
- Reading the writings of Onkar Ghate and Harry Binswanger--the organized Objectivism's position about the current federal administration
- Reading Newman's argument for why these thought leaders are methodologically rationalistic
- Applying the Objectivist method to analyze some current policies from the current Trump administration
- Q & A
Critic's Bio:
- Sherwin Newman: Objectivist and intellectual activist with a mission to advance truth in the American culture war; addressing the current state of the Objectivist community; writing actively on Facebook, Substack, and Instagram. Sherwin is a graduate from the University of South Africa and currently lives in New Hampshire.
Join in for a discussion on applied philosophy.
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Image source: WSJ video-image4 attendees
Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy (Week 3)
Oak Park Public Library - Main Library, 834 Lake St, Oak Park, IL, USFriedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music is an early work blending classical philology with an interpretation of the tragic form of life.
Born of a tension between contrary impulses—one toward form and order, another toward chaos, ecstasy—tragedy, once transformed into sublime art, enabled the Ancient Greeks to face existence: its fragility and lack of ultimate justification. But for Nietzsche, the subsequent decline of tragedy through Euripides to Socratic rationalism signals a victory of reason over depth, giving rise to an enduring temptation to make it seem as though everything in life were explained.
Whether you're new to discussing philosophical texts or can synthesize disparate passages across Nietzsche's corpus, we'd be happy to have you!
Join us every Thursday at 6!
**Reading schedule:
- Attempt at a Self-Criticism, Preface to Richard Wager, §§1–6
- §§7–15
- §§16–25
Walter Kaufman's translation is standard, but in the new year, the complete works will become available.
6 attendees
•OnlineFrom Socrates to Sartre EP27 ⟩ “Sartre III: ‘Condemned To Be Free’”
OnlineThese, 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.
Sartre III: Condemned To Be Free
Welcome to your life sentence, displayed before you by Thelema as she dons her Ghost of Christmas Past hat and carries us back to a Christmastime Sartre writing away at the height of his powers.
Paris, Winter 1942–43. Outside, the Left Bank shivers under crystal bitters; inside, the cafés thicken with smoke and din, wine-dark chatter, and the clink of glass (just as is heard here in this Hendrix song). Amid the murmur and the weight of occupation, in that Satanic forge of warmth and barbarism, Sartre’s interior intensity surges, and after some amphetamine-fueled hammering, Being and Nothingness is born.
In it you will find the most famous counterintuitive truth of the 20-cent —
Man is condemned to be free.
Thrill with joy as Dr. Lavine plunges her urethral sound into the spinal fluid of that claim’s notochordal canal, and recreates it all proper-like and from scratch.
She starts with Sartre’s phenomenological method, then [patented series of steps here], and then finally brings us to the existential vertigo that (studies show) reliably follows once the victim has lost every external anchor—God, essence, history, even her self’s own private interior biography. After this, what’s left?
Freedom as Power to Nihilate
One of Sartre’s great moves was to fork Husserlian phenomenology into its currently fashionable Buddhist core. Consciousness is not a thing, he shows us. It is neither a container of thoughts nor a Cartesian substance. It is instead a no-thing—a transparent clearing through which the world appears. Also, this transparency isn’t passive but active—an active universal solvent.
When Sartre looks for Pierre in the café and finds only Pierre’s absence, the solid café dissolves into a mere background for a non-being. Consciousness inserts a gap, a nothingness, between itself and things. It nihilates being.
This is Sartre’s still popular metaphysics of human freedom. Our freedom just is this capacity to separate, negate, suspend, and imagine alternatives. Freedom is not just one tool in our toolbox of capacities, wielded by a positive, perduring protagonist; it is the ontological structure of consciousness itself!
Freedom Cuts Both Ways
Hello Abyss. Goodbye psychological drives, social structures, Marxian base, Freudian past. Sartre’s bitter pill of NO EXCUSES means I cannot in good faith blame outer reasons for what I am or will be. Between me and any such fact there is always a gap—nothingness—in which choice takes place. We are free to choose a totally novel self-path, self-story, self-acting—right where we are sitting now.
A gambler’s past resolution, an addict’s promise, a writer’s aspiration: none determines the present act. In each new situation, freedom is ex nihilo, spontaneous, ungrounded. This is Sartre’s refusal of every deterministic account of the human condition. “Reason is a lie; for there is a factor infinite & unknown. Enough of Because! Be he damned for a dog!”
Fractal Responsibility
Everyone loves freedom these days. Freedom fries still exist, and Republicans love “freedom” so much that they inverted its meaning. Freedom is the great American distinction. We love it!™
But Sartre’s freedom is a nightmare. Freedom seeps into places it shouldn’t. Like into responsibility for meaning-making, and responsibility for world-making. No God, no Platonic form, no universal science can step in to tell us what our choices mean. We alone confer meaning on the brute facts of our existence.
Freedom is a life sentence to total responsibility and self-making.
Our Beloved Flight into Bad Faith
The good news is that the dread of such naked responsibility is so intense that it drives us into bad faith, Sartre’s improved version of the topic formerly known as self-deception. So it’s not really good news.
Sample situations:
- The woman on the date pretends her hand is “just a thing.”
- The waiter performs his role as though it were his essence.
- The anti-Semite hardens himself into a rocklike “French identity” to escape contingency.
Bad faith is the human temptation to become a thing—to pretend that freedom can be escaped. The trick rebuttal is that even this evasion is itself a free act, and thus reveals the very freedom it denies.
Is Sartre’s vision just a historical artifact of an abnormal, temporary, unhappy wartime consciousness? Maybe, but that doesn’t matter because the upshot is not only true but inescapable —
- We do not get to choose whether to be free.
- We only choose what we make of that freedom, or whether to disavow it.
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.
3 attendees
Past events
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