What we’re about
YOU ARE A MEMBER IF YOU SAY YOU ARE. AFTER YOU RSVP, IF YOU WANT POST YOUR SUGGESTION FOR THE TOPIC ON www.JohnWren.com or here on Meetup. Then come early, we announce the topic at 6:30 p.m.
Socrates Cafes Online for now all on Google Meet (click)
Socrates Cafe: Watch one online, then start one. "We seek truth by our own lights." Chris Phillips, author of the book "Socrates Cafe."
This is a project of SBCC (Small Business Chamber of Commerce, Inc.) Our IDEA Cafe meetups on https://Meetup.com/Small-Biz-Chamber and on Twitter @IDEACafe Questions? Call (303)861-1447
SBCC Startup Method-- the Practices of Recover, Imagine, Think, and Learn; to Start, Grow, and Flourish; IDEA Business Creativity Model; and OODA Loop. We welcome you in sharing your thoughts with us in this common effort. (See Chris's letter below.)
Life's Short/ Start Now!
If you have any questions please call John Wren at (303)861-1447
ANNOUNCEMENT: All Socrates Cafes announced here are being held online until the Corona Virus has passed.
WHAT IS A SOCRATES CAFE? It is a casual and fun way to practice critical thinking. Everyone is welcome at each meeting of Online Socrates Cafe, they are free, open public meetings.
Whatever your background, we'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts. We have PhDs who attend regularly along with carpenters, painters, homemakers, barbers, etc etc.
Our first meeting in Denver, Colorado was inspired by Chris Phillips' book called Socrates Café, and Chris has been a continuing source of inspiration for us, he's visited us here in Denver several times.
By a coincidence that first meeting was scheduled for the Friday after 9/11.
Generally, we stay away from current news events or politics, but those attending at each meeting can decide to talk about anything they want. Sometimes the facilitator for the evening brings a topic, and suggestions are usually taken from those attending.
What all meetings have in common is that we search for truth by our own lights.
Most of us are interested in reading, but we don't usually talk about what's said in books unless the thoughts have become incorporated into our own thinking. Same with any religious affiliation. We each inform our own thinking, then we share those thoughts, and we listen and question others as they share their thoughts.
If you start a new Socrates Café we will list it here for you if you want us to do so, and help is available if you want it. Contact John Wren www.JohnWren.com or (303)861-1447
What Chris Phillips says about Socrates Cafe in his book by that title:
"Civil conversation isn’t enough. Formulating the right questions isn’t enough.
"What the world needs now on all sorts of levels is inquiry – methodical, egalitarian, inclusive, impassioned, unsettling, exhilarating.
"Inquiry-driven by curiosity, by a sense that the more perspectives the better.
"Inquiry that leads to the surprising, the novel, the unfamiliar — that opens portals to new possibilities to who we might be as individuals and as a society.
"Inquiry that is based on the premise that people of all ages and walks of life count and that those often left out tend to be the most uncommonly perceptive when given the opportunity.
"Inquiry that emphatically includes and values the wisdom ways of our children and youth, who have a vital and central role to play if our societies are really going to become all they can be, and deserve rights to participation and self-determination.
"Inquiry that taps into our childlike questioning lenses. Inquiry connects us, makes us feel we’re in this together.
"That as a matter of course leads us to discover the glaring gaps and contradictions (when they exist) between what we say and what we do, and what open societies profess and what they actually practice — and that inspires us to bring our promise more and more into practice.
"Inquiry that is the furthest thing from argument and debate — that is all about exploration, about discovering uncommon common ground, that leads us to realize, in a sort of epiphany or series of epiphanies, that we need each other, that whether we have multiple doctorate degrees or have never set foot in the hallowed halls of formal institutions of learning, we each have unique experiences, perspectives, stores of wisdom from which we all could benefit.
"Socratic inquiry. Or to be more precise: A version of Socratic inquiry that recognizes there are no neat divides between the individual self and the societal self, between our inner cosmos and outer cosmos.
"The Greeks of old knew this and tapped into it in a way that led, during their Golden Days, when democracy flourished in the polis, and in the agoras — the public places and spaces of the polis, or city-state.
"Inquiry that challenges the ‘common sense wisdom’ of the day, and scrutinizes whether it’s really all that wise.
"That recognizes that we humans have it within us to cultivate a democratic self — an open and connected self, a childlike self, curious, inquisitive, constructively skeptical, with a keen social conscience, autonomous, a work in progress."
Chris Phillips, author of the book "Socrates Cafe."