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 – M (1931) by Fritz Lang
A simple, haunting musical phrase whistled offscreen tells us that a young girl will be killed. “Who Is the Murderer?” pleads a nearby placard as serial child-killer Hans Beckert (played by a searing Peter Lorre) closes in on little Elsie Beckmann . . . In his harrowing masterwork M, the Austrian-German filmmaker Fritz Lang merges trenchant social and political commentary with chilling suspense, creating a panorama of inner depravity and collective panic that to this day remains the blueprint for the psychological thriller.
"One of cinema’s most convincing portraits of a sick society, in which the hapless Beckert is less an aberration, more the inevitable, even pitiable, end product. One can only imagine the ripples of unease it must have caused in an economically-ravaged nation teetering on the brink of totalitarian meltdown." (Time Out)
"M's urgency hasn't aged a day." (Slant)
"This astonishing movie represents an unsurpassed grand synthesis of storytelling... a masterpiece structured with the kind of perfection that calls to mind both poetry and architecture and that makes even his disciples' classics seem minor by comparison." (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader)
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Join the Toronto Philosophy Meetup to discuss the German classic M (1931) written and directed by Fritz Lang, recently voted the 36th greatest movie of all time in Sight & Sound's international survey of film critics and scholars and generally regarded as Lang's greatest movie. We previously discussed Lang's 1927 silent film masterpiece Metropolis.
Please watch the movie in advance (117 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/314696970/
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 150+ 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 all of them.)
Upcoming events
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Georges Bataille on Eros and Thanatos
·OnlineOnlineAfter an interlude with Foucault and Deleuze, we continue our reading of Part Two of George Bataille's Erotism: Death & Sensuality, published in 1957*.* The plan is to finish this book over 5 weeks or so. See below for the weekly schedule, overview of this reading group project and group rules.
Reading schedule
See the updated weekly reading schedule at this link:
https://sites.google.com/view/existentialism-and-its-critics/You can find all texts 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 👇ABOUT THE BATAILLE GROUP
This is a comprehensive reading group focusing on the works of French writer Georges Bataille. We are reading key texts from Bataille himself, as well as tracing his relationship with other major thinkers such as Hegel, Nietzsche, André Breton/Surrealism, Blanchot, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc.Some familiarity with Bataille's mode and style of thought is helpful but not necessary. You're welcome to join the group in medias res at any time. See, however, the group rules below.
Please take the time to read and reflect on the reading prior to each meeting. Everyone is welcome to attend, but speaking priority will be given to people who have read the text.
Topics to be discussed in the future:
- Return to the 2nd part of Erotism
- Bataille's critique of Hegel: the negative and general economy
- Derrida's reading of Bataille in "From Restricted to General Economy"
Past topics included:
- Foucault on transgression, power and the history of sexuality
- The philosophical friendship and later rift between Deleuze and Foucault
- Bataille's Erotism, Part 1 & the logic of transgression
- Bataillean transgression and Deleuzian line of flight: reading Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up"
- Bataille's aesthetics: the rift with Surrealism
- Susan Sontag on avant-guarde literature
- Bataille's novel Blue of Noon
- Inner Experience and a-theological mysticism
- Bataille's reading of Nietzsche and critique of fascism
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MORE ABOUT BATAILLE
Georges Bataille stands out as an eclectic, fascinating and controversial figure in the world of French letters. A contemporary of Sartre and Lacan, he combined ideas from diverse disciplines to create a unique position that he called 'base materialism'. In the early 20s, Bataille abandoned Catholicism, embraced psychoanalysis and Marxism and initiated an unorthodox search for the sacred in late modernity. His obsessive pursuit of ecstatic liminal experiences took him across the boundaries of philosophy, sociology, political economy, mythology, poetry, literature and mystical theology. His works develop a libidinal economy of unconditioned expenditure, offer a critique of fascism and embrace marginal experiences in the style of the French poets. Though he remained largely outside the academic mainstream and worked as a librarian, Bataille is a formative precursor to the post-structuralist philosophers of the '60s -- and may well be more relevant to our time than ever.In this group we look at a significant cross-section of Bataille's texts. Our aim is to understand his thought on its own terms as well as place him in the context of his predecessors and the French thinkers who followed his lead. In view of Bataille's early relationship with Surrealism, the referenced artworks will spotlight this movement.
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GROUP RULES
- Please spend 1-2 hours per week reading and preparing for the discussion.
- 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: let's not interrupt each other and keep mics muted when not speaking.
- We'll focus the discussion with key passages and discussion questions. Be sure to bring your favorite passages, questions, comments, criticisms, etc.
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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: To join the meeting 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).
Art: Le Rêve / The Dream by Pablo Picasso (1932)
1 attendee
Calgary Stoics Club - Stoic Meditations (In-Person event)
Memorial Park Library, 1221 2 St SW, Calgary, AB, CAAt Calgary Stoics Club, we host weekly meetups for anyone interested in learning about and applying Stoicism in everyday life. Flexible format intended to encourage discussion. 12 noon, Meeting Room 1, Memorial Park Library. If you are already a member of our WhatsApp group, please RSVP in the chat. If you are new to Calgary Stoics Club (newbies welcome) please RSVP here on MeetUp.
1 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.2 attendees
Egora Academy: writing, publishing, presenting, and implementing your philosophy
·OnlineOnlineAbout Egora Academy:
This event is a continuing series of workshops based around using the Egora networking platform to write, publish, present, improve, and implement your political, economic, social, and existential philosophy. During this event the participants will have the opportunity to present one or more of their ideas previously written and published in Egora. Then we will analyze each idea for its merits and flaws, and against other ideas, possibly leading to the development of new and better ideas. If an idea succeeds in gaining support from other philosophers in Egora, it might ultimately become implemented through our governing structures.I most highly recommend that before your first event you take some time to learn about Egora, register for it, and begin developing your Ideological Profile in Egora with at least a few different ideas (original or copied). If you do not have an Ideological Profile in Egora, then this event will mostly be preparation for the next event.
This is my Ideological Profile:
http://egora-ilp.org/philosopher/Cezary_Jurewicz
Everyone is invited to examine it to prepare themself regarding my positions on different issues.Levels of participation:
My preference is to do 1-on-1 events in front of an audience because this allows the two participants to thoroughly develop their positions on very complex topics. This is also to the benefit of the audience because each audience member is encouraged to come back to be the speaking participant next time (everyone is also encouraged to host their own events, and i would love to come to listen). For this reason, you can RSVP to be the main participant for this event through my Calendly, which is available in my Ideological Profile in Egora.If no one RSVPs as the main participant, we will just have a group session.
1 attendee
Past events
2025
