What we’re about
In this group, we read specific works by philosophers, and discuss them.
Take the time to read a selection and attend one of our meetings — it's a lively experience!
At present, we are reading short articles and essays for the Winter and Spring periods.
While members are responsible for acquiring the texts themselves, we quite often find an online version of the text, the link to which will be listed in the event description or in the comments below it. Please inquire if you're having difficulty.
In past sessions, we've read:
- 2024
- "Pregnant Embodiment" by I. M. Young
- "Self-Reliance" by R. W. Emerson
- "Two Concepts of Liberty" by Isaiah Berlin
- "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" by W. V. O. Quine
- "Mad Pain and Martian Pain" by David Lewis
- Lament for a Nation by George Grant
- 2023
- "The Counter-Enlightenment" by Isaiah Berlin
- "The Use of Knowledge in Society" by Friedrich Hayek
- What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill
- 2022
- Modernism as a Philosophical Problem by Robert Pippin
- 2021
- "Why it's good to be wrong" by David Deutsch
- We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour
- Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
- On Violence by Hannah Arendt
- "What is it like to be a bat?" by Thomas Nagel
- "Absolutes and Particulars" by Sophie-Grace Chappell
- 2020
- "Driven by Compression Progress" by Juergen Schmidhuber
- "Nostalgia for the Absolute" by George Steiner
- "The Fixation of Belief" by C. S. Peirce
- "The Conservative" by R. W. Emerson
- A selection from Medieval philosophers, ed. Bosley & Tweedale
- 2019
- Beyond Good & Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
- Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
- 2018
- The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
- Considerations on France by Joseph de Maistre
- Sincerity and Authenticity by Lionel Trilling
- 2017
- Selected essays on ordinary language philosophy by Stanley Cavell and J. L. Austin
- "Divinity School Address" by R. W. Emerson
- The Present Age by Søren Kierkegaard
- Selections from The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton & James Madison
- The "Preface" and "Introduction" to Phenomenology of Spirit by G. W. F. Hegel
- Parmenides by Plato
- 2016
- Essays from Critical Theory Since Plato, compiled by H. Adams
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith
- 2015
- Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
