What we’re about
Profs and Pints (https://www.profsandpints.com) brings professors and other college instructors into bars, cafes, and other venues to give fascinating talks or to conduct instructive workshops. They cover a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, popular culture, horticulture, literature, creative writing, and personal finance. Anyone interested in learning and in meeting people with similar interests should join. Lectures are structured to allow at least a half hour for questions and an additional hour for audience members to meet each other. Admission to Profs and Pints events requires the purchase of tickets, either in advance (through the ticket link provided in event descriptions) or at the door to the venue. Many events sell out in advance. Your indication on Meetup of your intent to attend an event constitutes neither a reservation nor payment for that event.
Although Profs and Pints has a social mission--expanding access to higher learning while offering college instructors a new income source--it is NOT a 501c3. It was established as a for-profit company in hopes that, by developing a profitable business model, it would be able to spread to other communities much more quickly than a nonprofit dependent on philanthropic support. That said, it is welcoming partners and collaborators as it seeks to build up audiences and spread to new cities. For more information email profsandpints@hotmail.com.
Thank you for your interest in Profs and Pints.
Regards,
Peter Schmidt
Upcoming events
1
Profs & Pints Philadelphia: Tolkien’s Fight Against Futurism
Black Squirrel Club, 1049 Sarah St, Philadelphia, PA, USProfs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “Tolkien’s Fight Against Futurism,” a look at a beloved fantasy author as fundamentally engaged in a battle to preserve beauty, with Graham McAleer, professor of philosophy at Loyola University Maryland and teacher of a course on the morals and politics of Lord of the Rings.
[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profs-and-pints-black-squirrel/tolkien-futurism .]
As a young man in the early 20th century J.R.R. Tolkien watched an avant-garde art form known as Futurism become all the rage. Shaped by industrialization and by admiration for new machinery, Futurism celebrated speed, acceleration, and the whirl of technical innovation, earning it another name, Vorticism, in Tolkien’s England.
Although remembered mainly as a writer, Tolkien also was an accomplished pen-and-ink artist who kept abreast of the art movements of his time. He developed a distaste for Futurism and what it signified that only grew stronger as he experienced the horrors of modern warfare as a soldier at the 1916 Battle of the Somme. He regarded what Futurism celebrated as “the Machine,” representing fascist politics and apocalyptic war, and his opposition to it deeply influenced not just his art but his written works.
Gain insights into how Tolkien’s sensibilities as a visual artist shaped his worldview and writing with Graham McAleer, a scholar of philosophy who has closely studied Tolkien’s work.
Professor McAleer will look at how Tolkien’s lore can be seen as one long meditation on beauty and its problematic twin, vanity, with what separated them most in Tolkien’s mind being their respective approaches to time: Beauty is patient, vanity is not.
We’ll look at Tolkien’s argument that that impatience mars beauty and corrupts our standing in a cosmos, and we’ll consider his characterization of his own work as “cosmogonical drama” dealing with the universe’s origins. You’ll learn how his tales of Dark Lords squaring off against elven queens and genial Hobbits reflect his view that war is always a dispute about beauty.
You’ll come to see Tolkien as having grappled with a profound philosophical question that dates back to Plato, and you’ll emerge from the talk with a much deeper understanding and appreciation of Tolkien’s works. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 3:30 pm. Talk starts at 4:30.)
Image: A bust of Tolkien at Oxford. From a photo by Julian Nyča / Wikimedia Commons.
6 attendees
Past events
225
