About us
Welcome to the Toronto Philosophy Meetup! This is a community (online and in-person) for anyone interested in philosophy, including newcomers to the subject. We host discussions, talks, reading groups, pub nights, debates, and other events on an inclusive range of topics and perspectives in philosophy, drawing from an array of materials (e.g. philosophical writings, for the most part, but also movies, literature, history, science, art, podcasts, poetry, current events, ethnographies, and whatever else seems good.)
Anyone is welcomed to host philosophy-related events here. We also welcome speakers and collaborations with other groups.
Join us at an event soon for friendship, cooperative discourse, and mental exercise!
You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter or Bluesky and join our new Discord for extended discussion and to stay in touch with other members.
Feel free to propose meetup topics (you can do this on the Message Boards), and please contact us if you would like to be a speaker or host an event.
(NOTE: Most of our events are currently online because of the pandemic.)
"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
See here for an extensive list of podcasts and resources on the internet about philosophy.
See here for the standards of conduct that our members are expected to abide by. Members should also familiarize themselves with Meetup's Terms of Service Agreement, especially the section on Usage and Content Policies.
See here for a list of other philosophy-related groups to check out in the Toronto area.
Please note that no advertising of external events, products, businesses, or organizations is allowed on this site without permission from the main organizer.
* * * * *
Make a Donation
Since 2016, the Toronto Philosophy Meetup has been holding regular events that are free, open to the public, and help to foster community and a culture of philosophy in Toronto and beyond. To help us continue to do so into the future, please consider supporting us with a donation! Any amount is most welcome.
You can make a donation here.
See here for more information and to meet our donors.
Supporters will be listed on our donors page unless they wish to remain anonymous. We thank them for their generosity!
If you would like to help out or support us in other ways (such as with any skills or expertise you may have), please contact us.
Note: You can also use the donation link to tip individual hosts. Let us know who you want to tip in the notes section. You can also contact hosts directly for ways to tip them.
Upcoming events
557
Live-Reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics – North 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.3 attendees
Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975) — Movie Discussion
·OnlineOnlineA subtly ravishing passage through the halls of time and memory, this sublime reflection on twentieth-century Russian history by Andrei Tarkovsky is as much a poem composed in images, or a hypnagogic hallucination, as it is a work of cinema. In a richly textured collage of varying film stocks and newsreel footage, the recollections of a dying poet flash before our eyes, his dreams mingling with scenes of childhood, wartime, and marriage, all imbued with the mystical power of a trance. Largely dismissed by Soviet critics on its release because of its elusive narrative structure, Mirror has since taken its place as one of the director’s most renowned and influential works, a stunning personal statement from an artist transmitting his innermost thoughts and feelings directly from psyche to screen.
"Tarkovsky goes for the great white whale of politicised art — no less than a history of his country in this century seen in terms of the personal — and succeeds." (Time Out)
“You’d think Mirror might be a heavy, intellectual film, but it is direct, even basic: remembering, childhood, loss, speculation… It talks to people not through words, but through images and emotions." (Sight and Sound)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let's discuss Andrei Tarkovsky's magnum opus Mirror (1975), which was recently voted the 8th greatest movie of all time in Sight & Sound's international survey of filmmakers and the 31st greatest movie of all time in the related poll of film critics and scholars. We've previously discussed 6 other films by Tarkovsky in this group: Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983), Ivan's Childhood (1962), and The Steamroller and the Violin (1961).
Please watch the movie in advance (106 minutes) and bring your thoughts, reactions, and queries to share with us at the meeting. You can stream it here (check the player settings for English subtitles and to adjust quality) or rent it through Criterion or other streaming platforms (for best quality).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check out other movie discussions in the group, currently happening about once or twice a month.
This link here is a spreadsheet of the 150+ movies we've watched in this group and my ratings for each (titles in bold are my personal favourites). You're invited to share your list as well if you've watched a bunch of these movies with us. (I can add it 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 all the movies that Yorgo hosted on cause I didn't watch all of them.)
34 attendees
Past events
7432
