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 discussion and to stay in touch with other members.
(🚨🚨🚨 WARNING: FRADULENT EMAILS are circulating that IMPERSONATE organizers of this group and ask you for money or personal information if you engage. IF YOU HAVE RECEIVED SUCH AN EMAIL OR IF YOU ARE UNCERTAIN about any message claiming to represent this group, PLEASE REPORT IT by contacting the main organizer Darren directly through Meetup's messaging system or other known channels. Watch out for scams in general, which are everywhere these days and easy to generate because of A.I. 🚨🚨🚨)
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.
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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.
Featured event
![Nietzsche: The Gay Science [Session 83]](https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/b/e/b/a/highres_521988826.jpeg)
Nietzsche: The Gay Science [Session 83]
While the Walter Kaufmann translation is preferred, a link to the free Cambridge translation is here. For this Meetup, we will read aphorisms 331-342, and discuss them one at a time and get as far as we get, carrying forward any undiscussed aphorisms to the following week.
It’s 1882, and a friend has just given you a copy and recommendation of a book by a former professor of philology named Friedrich Nietzsche. Your friend says that he seems to be a philosopher of some sort, even though he doesn’t write like one, and in this book he argues, among a lot of other provocative things, that God Is dead!
This Is the beginner’s mind that this Meetup will take with this book. You may know his contemporaries and antecedents, but you’re here to share YOUR thoughts, not those of subsequent critics.
Recordings and AI summaries of previous sessions are available here.
Suggested texts: The Portable Neitzsche, edited by Walter Kaufmann and The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, edited by Walter Kaufmann
Syllabus (titles are linked to free PDF’s, most of which require a free academia.edu account)
The Gay Science (academia.edu)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Beyond Good and Evil (academia.edu)*
On The Genealogy of Morals (academia.edu)*
The Case of Wagner*
Twilight of the Idols** (academia.edu)
The Antichrist**
Ecce Homo*
Nietzsche Contra Wagner**
*The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, edited by Walter Kaufmann
**Walter Kaufmann’s, The Portable Nietzsche
Upcoming events
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The Philosopher & the News: The A.I. Backlash
·OnlineOnlineIf you are about to give a commencement speech at a university this summer, don’t mention A.I. Or at least don’t say nice things about it, or that it’s going to change the world whether people like it or not, or that it’s the next industrial revolution. If you do, graduating students — who are notoriously heavy A.I. users — will boo you. Who can blame them? LLMs have turned expensive university education into a charade and students are graduating into a less-than-ideal job market. And it’s not just students who aren’t so hot on the future our AI overlords are predicting.
So how can people resist the onslaught of AI, and the narratives of inevitability that are being pushed by Silicon Valley’s AI leaders? Obama’s famous quip “don’t boo, vote!” comes to mind. Indeed, influential AI researcher and author Garry Markus has predicted that anti-AI sentiment will be a major driving force of the 2028 US Presidential election. But so far, most political parties seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid of inevitable technological progress, it might be too late by the time they catch on to how voters think. Is there anything ordinary citizens can do in the meantime? Are narratives of AI inevitability thinly disguised self-fulfilling and self-serving prophecies? And is there a way of reimagining what AI can mean for us all?
About the Speaker:
Ismael Kheroubi Garcia has been working in the AI ethics space since 2020, when he worked on establishing the Alan Turing Institute’s research ethics committee. Since 2022, Ismael has been offering AI ethics and research governance consulting at Kairoi, helping organisations identify crucial tech decisions, anticipate their consequences and implement safeguards to guide decision-making processes. Since 2023, Ismael also leads the Fellow-led AI Interest Group at the RSA (Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). He is also an associate director of We and AI, a diverse community of volunteers working at the intersection of social justice and AI. He is the co-author of “Resisting, Refusing, Reclaiming, Reimagining: Charting Challenges to Narratives of AI Inevitability”.
The Moderator:
Alexis Papazoglou is Managing Editor of the LSE British Politics and Policy blog. He was previously senior editor for the Institute of Arts and Ideas, and a philosophy lecturer at Cambridge and Royal Holloway. His research interests lie broadly in the post-Kantian tradition, including Hegel, Nietzsche, as well as Husserl and Heidegger. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New Republic, WIRED, The Independent, The Conversation, The New European, as well as Greek publications, including Kathimerini.
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This is an online conversation and audience Q&A presented by the UK-based journal The Philosopher. It is open to the public and held on Zoom. The event is free to attend but the Zoom registration page has, by default, an optional donation amount that you can change to $0 (or whatever you wish). Donations go to The Philosopher magazine to cover our costs and expand the scope of our series.
Please send feedback or comments about our events directly to thephilosopher1923@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you!
About The Philosopher (https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/):
The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. As of 2018, The Philosopher is edited by Newcastle-based philosopher Anthony Morgan and is published quarterly, both in print and digitally.
The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.
15 attendees![[In-person] Curiosity Café – Meaning in the Mundane](https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/2/0/2/2/highres_534428226.jpeg)
[In-person] Curiosity Café – Meaning in the Mundane
Madison Avenue Pub, 14 Madison Ave, Toronto, ON, CAMost of life is routine. We each have a set of actions we perform in roughly the same sequence every single day: brushing our teeth, putting on the kettle, and taking the TTC (for instance). In contrast, we sometimes have experiences we deem extraordinary or profound. Vacationing somewhere new. Viewing a work of art that moves us. Going to see our favourite band live. Noticing the intricate details of a flower (for instance). These experiences seem significant. Yet we don’t seem to ascribe the same significance to the “mundane” parts of life, despite them making up a majority of our everyday experience.
In this Curiosity Café, we will explore why there appears to be a distinction between the mundane and the profound. Are these useful categories? Is there something uniquely meaningful about experiences that happen infrequently or are considered ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ events? Can the mundane parts of life be made profound through a change of perspective or attitude?
Join co-moderators Jaber Abedin and Sofia Panasiuk as we explore these questions and more at our next Curiosity Café:
- What makes a day mundane? What makes a day extraordinary?
- Which ordinary rituals and routines feel meaningful to you?
- Can a meaningful life exist without extraordinary experiences?
- Why do we seem to have a liking for extraordinary experiences as opposed to mundane ones?
- Should we strive to appreciate the mundane more?
Space is limited! Please obtain a “Pay-What-You-Can” ticket from Curiosity Café at this link (click here) to attend this event. You need a ticket to be admitted. See the above link for more info about tickets and other options including a limited number of free tickets. Come and hang out with us, grab food, and read through our handout from 6-6:30pm. Our structured discussion will run from 6:30-8:30pm with a 10 minute break in the middle.
Hope to see you there!
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This event is brought to you by Being and Becoming, a Toronto based non-profit. We aim to create community around exploring everyday concepts and experiences so that we may live more intentional, thoughtful, and meaningful lives. We use philosophy as a tool with which we can come to a richer understanding of the world around us.
By offering activities, spaces, and other opportunities for conversation and co-exploration, we hope to enable the meeting and fusion of individuals and their ideas. Everyone is welcome, regardless of background: indeed, we believe the journey is best undertaken alongside explorers from a variety of disciplines, cultures, backgrounds, and experiences.
Find out more about Being and Becoming here.
About the Curiosity Café Series:
For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to join us at our Curiosity Cafés and are wondering what they’re all about: every two weeks, we invite members of our community to come out to the Madison Avenue Pub to engage in a collaborative exploration of our chosen topic. Through these events, we aim to build our community of people who like to think deeply about life’s big questions, and provide each other with some philosophical tools to dig deeper into whatever it is we are most curious about.
10 attendees
Past events
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