The Toronto Philosophy Meetup

Hippias of Elis travels throughout the Greek world practicing and teaching the art of making beautiful speeches. On a rare visit to Athens, he meets Socrates, who questions him about the nature of his art. Socrates is especially curious about how Hippias would define beauty. They agree that beauty makes all beautiful things beautiful, but when Socrates presses him to say precisely what he means, Hippias is unable to deliver such a definition. The more Socrates probes, the more absurd the responses from Hippias become.

The Hippias "Major" (aka the Greater Hippias) is one of Plato's most comedic dialogues and one of his finest efforts at posing the philosophical problem of the difference between particular things and universal qualities.

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This will be a live reading of Plato's Hippias Major (or "Greater Hippias"). Saturday September 12 will be the first session and thus the ideal time to join our group. Reference will be made to contemporary and older scholarship. Historical context will be brought up whenever necessary to illuminate the dialogue.

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.

This will mostly be a discussion around major recent and ongoing events in international relations, while applying as much IR concepts and frameworks as possible.

Tentative Topics:

• Venezuela
• Iran
• Greenland / NATO
• Middle East Peace Deal
• Ukraine / Russia
• Cuba
• Tariffs, US-China trade war, and geopolitical competition
• Multipolarity
• Nuclear weapons proliferation
• A.I. race and chips
• Sudan
• Taiwan
• South China Sea
• North Korea
• .....

Links from event on Venezuela:

Over the last few years, we have done a close reading of Plato's Republic and the Laws. Now we turn to the Statesman.

This week we will begin reading at 277d (last week we began at 272b).

The dramatic action is as follows: we pick up after the Eleatic Stranger has finished the discussion that takes place in the dialogue titled the Sophist (which we read several years ago). The discussion turns to the figure of the Statesman, and while the interlocutor in the Sophist was Theaetetus (who resembled Socrates), a youth named Socrates takes on the role of interlocutor (Socrates himself is present).

No particular edition is required, but we can discuss what we want to use during the meeting. Because of this, sharing some editions that are generally available digitally in the comments may be helpful. I'll also try to keep the Greek text handy (probably through a Loeb edition, but anyone can look at Perseus as well).

If you want to familiarize yourself with the text in advance, here are some different editions: