Drunken Philosophy @ The College Inn Pub

This is an every-other-Saturday-night get together for people who want to have inappropriately serious conversations with strangers. All are welcome, and no a priori knowledge of philosophy, or anything else, is required or expected. There are no fixed topics or rules, other than the categorical imperative to not be assholes to one another.

Come meet cranks, fanatics, weirdos and friendly people who actually know a lot about philosophy and other stuff. Melt a hole in the dreaded Seattle Freeze with the power of Big Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUbjpwyesk0

This week we'll be back in winter quarters at The College Inn Pub.

* * *

WHAT ARE YOU READING?
I feel like I always show up wanting to talk about whatever I'm reading at the moment, which is hard to do satisfyingly unless someone else has read it too, so I'm going to try to start including a list of interesting things I've read recently that I would recommend and would enjoy arguing about. I'd also love to include other people's suggestions if you've got 'em.

The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, by Alfred D. Chandler Jr. (A really fantastic book which chronicles the origins and development of a radical new form of social organization: the big corporation.)

Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850, by Sean Wilentz (How did the relatively small number of industrial workers in pre-Civil War NYC conceive of themselves and attempt to organize themselves politically?)

An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and Its Search for Survival, by Jamie Miller (A very interesting revisionist account of apartheid-era South Africa's foreign policy based on new sources. The philosophical angle lies in its exploration of the very peculiar ideological and discursive world of Afrikaner nationalism.)

A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China, by Philip E. Lilienthal (What did the people who wrote, administered, and took the Chinese imperial examinations think and feel about them?)

Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, by Anne Mcclintock (To what extent was imperialism a kind of fetish? And why do servants never appear in Freud's theories about the family?)