About us
The Chicago Philosophy Meetup is a community of groups created by and for people interested in engagements with philosophy and the history of such engagements. Our members have a wide variety of backgrounds besides philosophy, including literature, law, physics, theology, music, and more.
We host events suggested by individual members and coordinated by volunteer organizers and offer opportunities for discussion with others who share these interests. If you have an idea for a topic you'd like to discuss, especially if you are from an historically underrepresented group in academic philosophy, let us work with you to make it happen.
Whether you're new to philosophy and looking to get started, or have been doing philosophy for some time and want to dig a bit deeper, we invite you to check us out.
We have basic expectations for how we talk to each other, so:
DO...
Listen to others
Ask for clarification
Get to know people
Help other voices to be heard
Work towards understanding each other
Practice moving past your assumptions about others
DON'T...
Limit others’ performance of items on the DO list
The Chicago Philosophy Meetup opposes any force of exclusion, discrimination, and/or harassment present in its community. Such forces include, but are not limited to, racism, transphobia, misogyny, and antisemitism. The Chicago Philosophy Meetup seeks to be inclusive because only in this way can we fulfill the DOs list above. We are here to help! If you have concerns, questions about a meeting, or need assistance (e.g. accessibility), please contact either the organizers or the event host for the meeting directly.
"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
Check out our calendar
Upcoming events
129
Kant: Critique of Pure Reason (Week 4)
·OnlineOnlineNote: Meetings focus on developing a common language and friendship through studying Kant. The host will provide an interpretation of Kant; other interpretations will not be discussed until later in the meeting. Additional interpretations, topics, and questions can be addressed through the Jitsi chat feature.
In this session, we will be covering Transcendental Logic Introduction, Book I Chapter I (~25 pages)
Online meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/CPM-Kant-Wednesdays
(links to text at bottom)
Schedule for Critique of Pure Reason:
Week 1 (2):
Preface (A and B editions; ~25 pages)
pp Avii - xxii, Bvii - xliv
pp 99 - 124 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 5 - 40 (Pluhar)Week 2 (3):
Introduction (A and B editions; ~25 pages)
pp A1 - 16, B1 - 30
pp 127 - 152 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 43 - 68 (Pluhar)Week 3 (4):
Transcendental Aesthetic (A and B editions; ~37 pages)
pp A19 - 49, B33 - 73
pp 155 - 192 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 71 - 104 (Pluhar)Week 4 (5):
Transcendental Logic Introduction, Book I Chapter I (~25 pages)
pp A50 - 83, B74 - 116
pp 193 - 218 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 105 - 140 (Pluhar)Week 5 (6):
Transcendental Logic Chapter II 'Deduction' (A and B edition; **~47 pages**)
pp A84 - 130, B116 - 169
pp 219 - 266 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 141 - 203 (Pluhar)
Week 6 (7):
Transcendental Logic Book II Introduction and Chapter I on the Schematism (~10 pages)
pp A130 - 147, B169 - 187
pp 267 - 277 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 204 - 219 (Pluhar)Week 7 (8):
Transcendental Logic Book II Chapter II (~17 pages)
pp A148 - 176, B187 - 218
pp 278 - 295 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 220 - 247 (Pluhar)Week 8 (9):
Analogies of Experience up to Transcendental Logic Book II Chapter III 'Phenomena and Noumena' (**~42 pages**)
pp A176 - 235, B218 - 294
pp 295 - 337 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 247 - 302 (Pluhar)Week 9 (10):
Transcendental Logic Book II Chapter III 'Phenomena and Noumena' (A and/or B editions) (~27 pages)
pp A235 - 260, B294 - 315
pp 338 - 365 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 303 - 322 (Pluhar)Week 10 (11):
Transcendental Logic Appendix 'Amphiboly' (~17 pages)
pp A260 - 292, B316 - 349
pp 366 - 383 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 323 - 345 (Pluhar)Week 11 (12):
Transcendental Dialectic Introduction, Book I (~26 pages)
pp A293 - 340, B349 - 398
pp 384 - 410 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 346 - 381 (Pluhar)Week 12 (13):
Transcendental Dialectic Paralogisms (A and B editions; **~47 pages**)
pp A341 - 405, B399 - 332
pp 411 - 458 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 382 - 441 (Pluhar)Week 13 (14):
Transcendental Dialectic Antinomies Section I - IV (**~48 pages**)
pp A405 - 484, B432 - 512
pp 459 - 507 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 442 - 501 (Pluhar)Week 14 (15):
Transcendental Dialectic Antinomies Section V - IX (**~42 pages**)
pp A485 - 567, B513 - 595
pp 508 - 550 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 502 - 559 (Pluhar)Week 15 (16):
Transcendental Dialectic Ideal of Pure Reason (**~38 pages**)
pp A567 - 642, B513 - 670
pp 551 - 589 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 560 - 616 (Pluhar)Week 16 (17):
Appendix to Transcendental Dialectic (**~33 pages**)
pp A642 - 704, B670 - 732
pp 590 - 623 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 617 - 662 (Pluhar)Week 17 (18):
Doctrine of Method Introduction, Chapter I (**~43 pages**)
pp A705 - 794, B733 - 822
pp 627 - 671 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 663 - 727 (Pluhar)Week 18 (19):
Doctrine of Method Chapter II (~18 pages)
pp A795 - 830, B823 - 858
pp 672 - 690 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 728 - 755 (Pluhar)Week 19 (20):
Doctrine of Method Chapter III and IV (~13 pages)
pp A832 - 856, B860 - 884
pp 691 - 704 (Guyer/Wood)
pp 755 - 774 (Pluhar)Two different translations are recommended - both are good:
Preserves original sentence structure: Guyer/Wood
Updates for readability: PluharLinks to the text:
PDF of Guyer/Wood translation:
https://libgen.li/edition.php?id=136607414EPUB of Guyer/Wood translation:
https://libgen.li/edition.php?id=137975974PDF of Pluhar translation:
https://libgen.li/edition.php?id=136394041Buy the book on Amazon (or find it someplace else if you don't like Amazon):
Guyer/Wood:
https://www.amazon.com/Critique-Reason-Cambridge-Works-Immanuel/dp/0521657296/ref=sr_1_3Pluhar (All three Critiques):
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Critiques-3-Set-Practical/dp/0872206297/ref=sr_1_3Pluhar hardcovers recommended (if available): https://www.amazon.com/Three-Critiques-3-Set-Practical/dp/0872206300/ref=sr_1_2
11 attendees
Kant FTΦ: Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Live Reading)
·OnlineOnlineMeeting link: https://meet.jit.si/CPM-Kant-Wednesdays
We will be starting at Letter VIII, paragraph 1.
In Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, we see vague suggestions on how aesthetic judgments contribute to culture. In Schiller's letters, we can see a more developed argument on how aesthetic education is required to promote the freedom of the individual as well as transition us between a state of nature and a state ruled by reason.
Hopefully, this reading provides an opportunity to compare Kant's interest in how aesthetic judgments (and moral judgments themselves) contribute to culture with Schiller and expand our interpretation of both.
I've linked the Penguin edition of the book here, but please feel free to use whatever edition you have or want.
PDF: https://annas-archive.org/md5/22dcd586440cfd2d7ada034ca119db79
PDF (with facing German): https://annas-archive.org/md5/005de78cf1a714cc2c155ce569f670cf
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Aesthetic-Education-Man-Friedrich-Schiller/dp/0141396962?sr=8-1
Note: Kant FTΦ (Friends Through Philosophy) is a group of individuals who have connected over reading Kant (and other philosophers).
This meeting will focus on the interests of regular attendees. We will frequently reference Kant and other philosophers. Discussions may involve shared notions that have developed over time. If you are not a regular attendee and feel lost in the conversation, it may be a byproduct of being newer to the meetings: don't hesitate to ask for clarification.
5 attendees
Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human (Week 3)
Oak Park Public Library - Main Library, 834 Lake St, Oak Park, IL, USThree texts by Nietzsche, published separately between 1878 and 1880, comprise the work we will read as 'Human, All Too Human':
- "Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits",
- "Assorted Opinions and Maxims”, and
- "The Wanderer and his Shadow”.
These works mark the beginning of Nietzsche's aphoristic style, and a shift in his focus to (what he calls) psychology and human fallibility, frailty—a shift in focus towards what moves us, what we value or esteem in life.
Whether you're new to discussing philosophical texts or can synthesize disparate aphorisms across Nietzsche's corpus, we'd be happy to have you!
**Reading schedule:
Human All Too Human:- "Preface" & "Of the First and Last Things", §§1–34
- "On the History of Moral Sensations", §§35–107
- "The Religious Life", "From the Souls of Artists and Writers", §§108–223
- "Signs of Higher and Lower Culture", §§224–292
- "In Relations with Others", "Woman and Child", §§293–437
- "A Glance at the State", "By Oneself Alone", "Among Friends", §§438–epilogue.
Assorted Opinions and Maxims:
- "Preface", §§1–7, and §§1–70
- §§71–181
- §§182–408
The Wanderer and his Shadow:
- Untitled prologue and §§1–61
- §§62–169
- §§169–257
- §§258–350, and untitled epilogue.
For a translation, we're recommending Handwerk's: first vol. and second.
8 attendees
Jewish Thinkers of Otherness ⟩ Martin Buber
·OnlineOnlineFor the first time in SADHO history, we present something not written in the usual hilarious and eager-to-please house voice. Here you will find something refreshing and new. A voice of one crying in the Interwilds … and in the vulnerable first person. Here is the voice of Harpocrates, Lord of Silence, Babe in the Egg of Blue, guardian of the heart’s secret center, which is freedom in its most terrifying Meetup aspect: the taking on of full responsibility for a reading.
Hear the voice of the finite human heart, bound by the conditions of its existence: by labor and necessity, by a work-made world that must be built and maintained, by plurality among irreducibly distinct others, by natality as the power to begin, and by mortality as the limit that gives judgment its weight. Give ear to a fragile speech that arises only after silence has cleared away automatic discourse and ready-made systems—and that appears exposed to judgment before mortal, plural others.
Ladies and gents, after many years of circling Arendt as a monument at the Hannah Arendt Center, please welcome the decidedly non-monumental, fully answerable, fully human voice of our very own Jeff Glaza.
Introduction
Over the next two hours, somehow I will introduce you—or re-introduce you—to a thinker who was “Othered” and knewit, accepted that state of affairs, and resolved herself to understand the state of “otherness,” no doubt in hopes of making the world a better place to live in. I don’t maintain she completely succeeded, but she may well have been one of the few European intellectuals to really try. Her main asset in that endeavor was her vaunted fearlessness, often mistaken for arrogance; her main defect, perhaps, unshakeable loyalties to her “tribes”: the Jews, the intellectuals, the Europeans [and maybe more]. What she got right was the centrality of judging—not coincidentally the title of what was to be the capstone third volume of her “groundbreaking investigation on how we think.” What she got wrong was to address The Life of the Mind to academic philosophers, instead of the garden-variety thinking person who tends to offload the often arduous task to these curious servants. I will “remix” Arendt’s ideas so as to demonstrate what a little less “loyalty”—a not-so-loyal opposition—might have led her to. As I take her unfailing opposition to philosophical “systems” to heart, I believe that she would be intrigued, even pleased, with the result.
An Intellectual Biography
This talk is organized into the four “decades” of Arendt’s working life: roughly, the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. Each decade of her life exhibits a concrete form of “otherness”; each decade of her work illustrates specific aspects of her signature concepts, Action and Plurality; to an unusual degree, perhaps, her life and work affected each other, resulting in a liveliness in both that might have been hard to live down.
The 1940s includes everything from her habilitation on the socialite Jewess Rahel Varnhagen, her many articles compiled in The Jewish Writings, up to and including her breakthrough historical study, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). We glean from these her personal experience with being an outsider, mostly as a Jew in European society, until she had to flee first Germany and then France, as a stateless person, this period culminating in US citizenship. If, as Nietzsche posits, a philosopher’s life experiences inform their views, hers explain her firm commitments to freedom, representative democracy, and friendship.
The 1950s featured many difficult, incisive essays but we’ll focus on her most popular work, The Human Condition(1958), in which she discusses her signature concepts of Action and Plurality in depth, which depend on the controversial notion of a “public realm.” Her mediation of social relations through manufactured products—her slippery category of Work—might be useful (in the remix) in modeling social effects that operate “at a distance.” We do well to bear in mind the conditions under which this most theoretical work appeared—the Cold War of socialism vs. capitalism, the McCarthy hearings, the advent of busing—for these highlight the drawbacks of social embeddedness Arendt and her formerly-Communist husband faced. Once stateless, it stands to reason that one might be “othered” again.
The 1960s are pivotal: despite works such as On Revolution achieving new heights of relevance and clarity, Arendt will forever be associated for many with her most journalistic work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil(1963). Had she sought to create a sensation? Or did she simply misjudge people’s reaction to her inclusion of testimony that Jewish leaders “cooperated” with Eichmann? Couldn’t she have foreseen that her picture of an unthinking Eichmann, incapable of moral reflection, would deeply offend people in search of a worthy villain? Add to this the anti-intellectual turn of the Sixties: Arendt was telling people precisely what they didn’t want to hear (such as that politicians are meant to lie), but it seems as though it was they who changed, not her (her silence on feminism might be seen as “blatant” nonconformity). Regardless, it was she who became “other” again—and not just “unfeeling” to the public, but even traitorous to many of her Jewish friends.
The 1970s began with the loss of her husband to a heart attack, and a turn inward that lasted until heart attacks killed her. Like any rockstar, she sometimes revived her greatest hits by applying them to current events (eg, the Pentagon Papers), but she also seemed to be trying to understand “what happened.” Life of the Mind, Volume 1—Thinking—supplies what might be a belated behind-the-scenes look at how her mind worked—or, it might be a record of how she was seeking to reinvent herself. To escape the pain of the Eichmann stigma, was she trying—by, say, mining Kant’s work for a political philosophy—to retreat into the safe, because worldless, domain of philosophy, or had that chapter become itself a challenge to her belief that the whole purpose of Denken was not to find Truth, but to create Meaning? The title of the second chapter of the Willing volume of Life of the Mind, returning to Saint Augustine, subject of her dissertation, seems indirectly to admit the latter: “I have become a question for myself”. If rockstars can reach new heights by plumbing their emotional depths, why can’t a political thinker after forty years of being reminded how close she was to social exile—for being a Jew [bound to raise eyebrows, as it did mine, but I think I meant the Jewish reverence for the Word in general, and promises in particular], for thinking that put her loyalties in question, for reporting events that raised doubts about the loyalty of Jews to one another, and perhaps even the fidelity of all to humanitarian ideals—why wouldn’t she fix her sights on “understanding,” in order to at least love the world for what it is?
Outline
- Part 0 — Introduction. Intellectual biography.
- Part 1 — Centrality of judgment. Origin of otherness. 1940s. Q&A.
- Part 2 — The public realm. The social. Action, Work, Labor. 1950s. Q&A.
- Part 3 — 1960s. Q&A.
- Part 4 — 1970s. Thank yous. Q&A.
METHOD
Do as little or as much prep as you like. But please check out the truly massive trove of materials we’ve spent way to many hours assembling for the current episode:
Among them are two amazing Hanna Arendt videos, both of which are gripping and essence conveying. Here’s a link that will take you straight to those videos:
As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs from all our episodes can be found in THORR:
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.
9 attendees
Past events
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