What we’re about
SADHO is a curiosity-driven philosophy Meetup—with a critical-theoretical interest in automatic and shared ways of worldmaking—that follows the timeless wisdom of the designers of The Village:
> Questions are a burden to others; answers are a prison for oneself.
> A still tongue makes a happy life.
Just kidding. Obviously, we strive to violate both with all vehemence, just like Number You-Know-Who.
Method
- We present audiovisual surveys of Western philosophy and of the history and philosophy of science—surveys that are masterpieces of illuminating exposition—performed by the “BBC2 Four” (Bronowski, Burke, Clark, and Magee) and
- discuss them, with
- a philosophy PhD, philosophy professor, or other Guest Expert.
SADHO makes scholarship fun by serving up the greatest embodied minds of all time in bite-sized, Technicolor, beautifully arranged morsels, and by bringing bona fide experts to the table for special lectures and Q&A.
In a word, SADHO is a fun, friendly, frolicsome, fleet-footed, (non-)free-form* forum for philosophizing, fostering fellowship alongside and under the tutelage of (sometimes) famous professional and practicing philosophers.
SADHO’s First Promise
- SADHO’s First Promise — Our excursions and tangents will never stray outside the event’s topical Kuiper Belt.
Unlike other philosophy Meetup groups, whose discussions drift all over the Solar System, our high-quality discussions remain firmly within the Kuiper Belt. That’s our promise to you.
Sound impossible? It’s not. The reason is that SADHO Meetups are … not actually free-form. They are anchored and constrained by a force.
A great force.
A force more powerful than even Vader …
The all-conquering force of radical insight, expressed vividly and clearly, by a master teacher.
There is nothing better than an illuminating and meticulously lucid discourse delivered by a riveting and intensely expressive person. Add to this a great video, diagram, or model, and you have the makings of peak experience.
This force flows neither from Scott & Dave, nor from the great topics we choose, but from the the expository virtuosos that elucidate these topics—i.e., from our Guest Experts and the BBC2 Four.
SADHO’s Second Promise
- SADHO’s Second Promise — Our meetings will always include either a qualified Guest Expert or a member of the BBC2 Four.
If SADHO worships anything, it’s clear speaking. That’s it. That’s the big overarching theme and First Principle that drives all our decision making. Consequently, we spotlight the crème de la crème of English-speaking educators and dive into skillfully (or manically) curated discussions, underpinned by top-tier production values and rigorous preparation. Said educators include both (a) living professional philosophers and (b) those pedagogical giants known as the “BBC2 Four.”
Professional philosophers
Our Guest Experts are top professors from the North Americas. So far, we have hosted the likes of:
The BBC2 Four
SADHO meetings also (and almost always) revolve around recorded performances by the greatest scientific, historical, and philosophical exegetes of all time. While incarnated on the Prime Material plane, these lofty ones were known as Jacob Bronowski, James Burke, Kenneth Clark, and Bryan Magee. These pedagogical saints, these BBC2 Four (aka the British Broadcasting Bards, the Philosophical Fab Four, the BBC-M, etc.) will be our guides.
Here they are again in list view:
What can one say about the BBC2 Four that hasn't already been said? Their work is so widely acclaimed and thoroughly appreciated that finding new words of praise feels like an almost impossible task. I feel compelled to return to Shakespeare, who took great pains to describe the BBC2 Four in that memorable passage from Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1, lines 45–65 (as interpreted by Dave Thomas):
“These engrossing masters of elegant exposition; these dexterous wordsmiths of rhetorical Fabergé eggs; these benevolent ministers of restorative mind-tonics; these tireless disciples of skillful means; these master-architects of felicitous visual models, diagrams, and schemas; these altruistic wielders of knot-cutting logicks; these humble and plain-speaking sweepers of cobwebs; these irreverent deflators of metaphysical extravagance; these fortresses of excellence, built by Oxford for England against intellectual infection; these view-transforming founts of illuminating metaphor; these poetic alchemists of feeling and idea; these massively multi-channel pedagogical improvisors; these fascinating bards of scientific and philosophical history; this happy breed of men; this little world; this precious stone set in the TV-static sea, which serves it in the office of a wall or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier programmes; this nurse; this teaming womb of royal elocutionists, feared by their breed and famous by their birth, renownèd for their deeds as far from home; this blessèd plot, this earth, THIS REALM, THIS BBC2 FOUR!!!”
Even when exalted by the Sweet Swan of Avon himself, mere words seem insufficient to capture the full essence of the BBC2 Four. Now, with the sad passing of three of its luminaries, we realize the depth of our loss. It is, indeed, the second-greatest blessing to humanity that they devoted their talents to the world through BBC2 in the 70s, leaving us with a treasure trove of audiovisual records of their magnificent performances.
Surely, it is these performances, and not the writings of LRH, that should have been engraved on stainless steel tablets and encased in titanium capsules beneath Trementina Base.
Join Us
You can join us …
- Here, on Meetup.
- By wandering around our massively overproduced Notion page, here.
- By lurking around our embryonic YouTube channel. Video for our events will be uploaded here (if possible) as will videos of our events (eventually, some day, once Dave has finished composing our new theme music).
Thank-Yous
Special Thanks to Ingrid Kronenberg for the clean and readable event posters and to Mark Bernstein-Anderson for the nicely toggled-tucked interactive transcripts that let you literally unfold your way to understanding.
SADHO is organized and managed by David Sternman, with financial support provided by the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia, under SADHO COB Professor Steven Taubeneck.
Upcoming events
6
•OnlineA Very Thelma Christmas Special, with Joan Collins
OnlineOur Thelma Lavine series ended last week with her final episode “… And In Review.”
I wanted to start our next exciting series on Otherness straight away, but our next event falls on Dec 25. Normally, we would cancel a Meetup falling on Christmas. Who wants to spend hours editing videos and writing on-screen annotations for a micro audience? But my mom intervened and said, “Why not do something that light and casual. Can’t you people ever relax?”
Normally we do light and profound—courtesy of some member of the BBC2 Four (Bronowski, Magee, Clark, Burke) or of Thelma, their newly inducted American sister. But light and casual? What does that even mean?
Then it hit me—we could do something that appears light and casual but which is actually serious and profound, and feels dark and disturbing. The alternative to a philosophy lecture doesn’t have to be unstructured chit-chat time. Surely there’s a third way …
Phase I: The Sexy Joan Collins Fleur du Mal Christmas Special (10 mins)
I originally called the event “A Very Thelma Christmas Special, with Joan Collins” because I know what boys like. They do like Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—true. But they would like a Joan Collins fleur du mal Christmas story even more.
Oh no—I’ve said too much. 66% of you already know what I’m referring to; I’ve ruined the surprise. I’m sorry, I had to say something in this description. But there are others who don’t know and will be highly entertained by what they see. Please don’t ruin the surprise for them in the comment section.
Everyone in every country of the world, even in benighted lands such as Saudi Arabia and North Korea, loves and appreciates Dicken’s A Christmas Carol of 1843. It’s surely one of the planet’s greatest hits.
However, the story is so thoroughly well-known and so often performed that, for humans over 14, it has lost its morally transformative and therapeutic power. We post-teen “adults” are story-weary and can only be stimulated by the odd-ball and perverse. We’re so calloused and numb that we need a sexy-dark anti-version of A Christmas Carol in order to provoke us into moral reflection and reform.
We weary ones like it hot. For more than fifty years now, it’s been clear that numbed cynics respond best when morality tales arrive either sexy, scary, or—ideally—both. But a sexy-scary A Christmas Carol? Does such a thing even exist? And if it did, could it be good enough to Make Dickens Dangerous Again?
Mom says “Yes!” and “But wait, there’s more”—because sexy Joan is just the tip o’ the holiday iceberg. Besides the Joan Collins Fleur du Mal Christmas Special we also have …
Phase II: The Saddest Christ-Mass Story Ever (17 mins)
This is serious. We will identify with the saddest character, in the saddest story, played by England’s saddest actor. This is really serious, actually, and kind of painful. But pain is no stranger to Christ on the Cross, the reason for the season. So maybe opening our heart chakra on Christmas is a good idea.
This mini-story answers this question: What do you do when an arrogant, narcissistic sociopath provokes the kindest and most loving person in the world to suicide?
Which story am I talking about? I’ll give you a hint: The protagonist in this story is so wonderful that he was immortalized in sculpture 10 years ago by America’s greatest living sculptor.
Actually, this story is so sad and so well-acted that it might be better to skip it. But if we happen to be super miserable when the time comes, watching it might actually help us by pushing us out the other side. We can take a vote when the time comes. Yes, it’s that sad.
Phase III: A Christmas Philosophy of Mind (11 mins)
What ontological commitments does the Christmas story have with respect to consciousness and the mind–body problem?
Our next clip is one of the strangest—and cleanest—cinematic thought experiments ever smuggled into a horror anthology. A neurologist, impatient with the limits of organic life, devises a way to transfer consciousness into an artificial body: stronger, more durable, immune to pain and decay. The promise is Cartesian liberation. The result is … well, imagine if Christmas and Crucifixion occurred on the same day.
This segment—and the Asylum frame story along with it—was written by Robert Bloch, disciple and actual student of the immortal H. P. Lovecraft, and the author of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Bloch learned early that the most disturbing stories are not about monsters entering the world, but about the world ceasing to cooperate with our self-conceptions. In Lovecraft’s terms, humanity is a temporary local arrangement—a lucky island—inside something vastly indifferent and only intermittently intelligible. Our clip stages that lesson at the level of personal identity.
Fun fact: John Carpenter lifted the name “Sam Loomis” directly from Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1960). In Halloween (1978), Loomis is played by Donald Pleasence, and is the hero guarding Jamie Lee Curtis—the real-life daughter of Psycho’s Marion Crane actress, Janet Leigh. And, as it happens, Pleasence will appear again later this evening in our final—and considerably more refreshing—episode …
Phase IV: Erotic Christian Love (24 mins)
Remember the brief cultural stir when Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw both publicly affirmed KISS frontman Paul Stanley as a formative erotic ideal? Well, the next episode delivers a unisexual avatar of devotion even more sensational than the Star Child!
This will be a clip that you’ll never forget, and it will haunt you (in a good way) for the rest of your life. It stars the great Donald Pleasence and his stunning daughter Angela Pleasence in her most famous and erotically iconic film role. The story begins with gratitude, obligation, and generosity—Christian virtues in their most ordinary register—and then slowly reveals what those virtues may cost when taken seriously.
Angela Pleasence’s performance is the axis on which the episode turns. It is seductive without being theatrical, intimate without being reassuring. The attraction she exerts is beyond beyond. She offers herself as something to be believed in, followed, and ultimately submitted to. Marlon Brando famously described the effect of her performance as inducing (in him) “erotic ecstasy of the religious kind.”
When Chuck Klosterman wrote about “every man's inherent obsession with attractive, psychologically damaged women,” he focused mainly on Kim Novak’s character in Vertigo (1958). That was before the CSO of Samsung showed him this Amicus chapter! Angela Pleasence blows Kim Novak away. The attractor inside Angela seems like pathology at first, but then you realize it’s really her absolute availability—a form of love that asks, finally, for everything. As a Christmas story, it is perfect: generosity, incarnation, and sacrifice, stripped of comfort and returned to their disturbing core.
Special Presentation: Ode to the Heideggerian Dickens (20 mins)
Finally, our own co-host David Sternman will close the evening with a short meditation on A Christmas Carol read through Heidegger. Expect reflections on thrownness, temporality, and the sudden disclosure of a life as already over. Scrooge’s redemption will be treated less as moral improvement than as a …
Good grief! I’m not going to ruin any more surprises.
So join us on Christmas. The Babadook will be with us. Bring him wine, good cheer, and your shadow. And gang way by for a Christmas miracle of deep comfort and joy, via the Underdark.
METHOD
Please don't watch anything before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion.
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE
Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.
She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.
View all of our coming episodes here.16 attendees
•OnlineJewish Thinkers of Otherness ⟩ Martin Buber
OnlineOur lovely family gatherings with Thelma have now concluded. The prospect of leaving her warm yellow room behind fills me with dread; I suspect many of you feel the same way. We are fledgling birds leaving the nest—and, as such birds do, flailing not only outward but downward.
What better way to steel ourselves for the coming year’s horrors than by increasing our powers of confrontation? Trump and his self-benefiting cronies have turned otherizing schadenfreude into the feel-good drug of the decade. What philosophical topic could possibly help us train as warriors for the light side of the Force in such a crucial, absurdly evil-celebrating time?
I sought counsel from my friends Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Steven Taubeneck, and they offered three stark injunctions:
- Don’t slack off now. Stay strong.
- Don’t escape into opioid entertainments. If you want to recharge, do it by immersing yourself in the pain of rigor and clarity about ultimate concerns. Feel deeply—but keep the critical-intelligence lights on.
- Where possible, shift from Thelma’s panoramic history of Western philosophy to a cohort of Otherness Specialists—researchers who placed otherness at the center of their philosophical work.
Hearing these admonitions set the standard alchemical Great Work process in motion. Recognizing the immensity of the task induced the Nigredo. Digesting it and discovering the common hub brought on the Albedo. Now, as I write, I find myself entering Citrinitas.
In the coming weeks, if fortune smiles, I will reach the Rubedo—together with all of you.
Behold our interim four-part miniseries:
Jewish Thinkers of Otherness: Buber – Arendt – Levinas – Derrida
This series will examine four distinct ways whereby the Other becomes a decisive philosophical event: as presence, as plurality, as ethical asymmetry, and as structural difference.
Each session focuses on one thinker and one conceptual pathway, presented by a brave member of our community—currently experiencing performance anxiety about presenting to a group of critical Others. But they have no need to worry, because Jedi Master Professor Steven Taubeneck will be on hand to answer the hard hard questions and prevent us from cheating, lying, fabricating, speculating, and bluffing.
This generic placeholder description will be updated once our courageous presenters send in their outlines. For now, mark your calendars, join the discussion, and prepare for a series that explores how twentieth-century thought reconceived relation, responsibility, and alterity at the deepest and most disquieting levels.
METHOD
TBA
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK
Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.
View all of our coming episodes here.5 attendees
•OnlineJewish Thinkers of Otherness ⟩ The Next Episode
OnlineOur lovely family gatherings with Thelma have now concluded. The prospect of leaving her warm yellow room behind fills me with dread; I suspect many of you feel the same way. We are fledgling birds leaving the nest—and, as such birds do, flailing not only outward but downward.
What better way to steel ourselves for the coming year’s horrors than by increasing our powers of confrontation? Trump and his self-benefiting cronies have turned otherizing schadenfreude into the feel-good drug of the decade. What philosophical topic could possibly help us train as warriors for the light side of the Force in such a crucial, absurdly evil-celebrating time?
I sought counsel from my friends Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Steven Taubeneck, and they offered three stark injunctions:
- Don’t slack off now. Stay strong.
- Don’t escape into opioid entertainments. If you want to recharge, do it by immersing yourself in the pain of rigor and clarity about ultimate concerns. Feel deeply—but keep the critical-intelligence lights on.
- Where possible, shift from Thelma’s panoramic history of Western philosophy to a cohort of Otherness Specialists—researchers who placed otherness at the center of their philosophical work.
Hearing these admonitions set the standard alchemical Great Work process in motion. Recognizing the immensity of the task induced the Nigredo. Digesting it and discovering the common hub brought on the Albedo. Now, as I write, I find myself entering Citrinitas.
In the coming weeks, if fortune smiles, I will reach the Rubedo—together with all of you.
Behold our interim four-part miniseries:
Jewish Thinkers of Otherness: Buber – Arendt – Levinas – Derrida
This series will examine four distinct ways whereby the Other becomes a decisive philosophical event: as presence, as plurality, as ethical asymmetry, and as structural difference.
Each session focuses on one thinker and one conceptual pathway, presented by a brave member of our community—currently experiencing performance anxiety about presenting to a group of critical Others. But they have no need to worry, because Jedi Master Professor Steven Taubeneck will be on hand to answer the hard hard questions and prevent us from cheating, lying, fabricating, speculating, and bluffing.
This generic placeholder description will be updated once our courageous presenters send in their outlines. For now, mark your calendars, join the discussion, and prepare for a series that explores how twentieth-century thought reconceived relation, responsibility, and alterity at the deepest and most disquieting levels.
METHOD
TBA
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK
Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.
View all of our coming episodes here.5 attendees- •Online
Jewish Thinkers of Otherness ⟩ The Next Episode
OnlineOur lovely family gatherings with Thelma have now concluded. The prospect of leaving her warm yellow room behind fills me with dread; I suspect many of you feel the same way. We are fledgling birds leaving the nest—and, as such birds do, flailing not only outward but downward.
What better way to steel ourselves for the coming year’s horrors than by increasing our powers of confrontation? Trump and his self-benefiting cronies have turned otherizing schadenfreude into the feel-good drug of the decade. What philosophical topic could possibly help us train as warriors for the light side of the Force in such a crucial, absurdly evil-celebrating time?
I sought counsel from my friends Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Steven Taubeneck, and they offered three stark injunctions:
- Don’t slack off now. Stay strong.
- Don’t escape into opioid entertainments. If you want to recharge, do it by immersing yourself in the pain of rigor and clarity about ultimate concerns. Feel deeply—but keep the critical-intelligence lights on.
- Where possible, shift from Thelma’s panoramic history of Western philosophy to a cohort of Otherness Specialists—researchers who placed otherness at the center of their philosophical work.
Hearing these admonitions set the standard alchemical Great Work process in motion. Recognizing the immensity of the task induced the Nigredo. Digesting it and discovering the common hub brought on the Albedo. Now, as I write, I find myself entering Citrinitas.
In the coming weeks, if fortune smiles, I will reach the Rubedo—together with all of you.
Behold our interim four-part miniseries:
Jewish Thinkers of Otherness: Buber – Arendt – Levinas – Derrida
This series will examine four distinct ways whereby the Other becomes a decisive philosophical event: as presence, as plurality, as ethical asymmetry, and as structural difference.
Each session focuses on one thinker and one conceptual pathway, presented by a brave member of our community—currently experiencing performance anxiety about presenting to a group of critical Others. But they have no need to worry, because Jedi Master Professor Steven Taubeneck will be on hand to answer the hard hard questions and prevent us from cheating, lying, fabricating, speculating, and bluffing.
This generic placeholder description will be updated once our courageous presenters send in their outlines. For now, mark your calendars, join the discussion, and prepare for a series that explores how twentieth-century thought reconceived relation, responsibility, and alterity at the deepest and most disquieting levels.
METHOD
TBA
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK
Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.
View all of our coming episodes here.5 attendees
Past events
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