About us
A book club with no books – technically... and no one forcing you to read a fixed amount. Made in cooperation with "Socrates Cafe Riga: Philosophy Club".
Despite the name, we do read books – probably quite a lot of them. The “No Book” refers instead to rejecting the book as the necessary unit of a book club: there does not have to be one book, read by everyone, from beginning to end, before every meeting.
Instead, we adopt a broader object of study – a text, understood as a structured system of signs that can be read and interpreted. A text can therefore be a book, but it can also take the form of an article, an excerpt, cinema, architecture, an advertisement, a photograph, or something else that can meaningfully be subjected to interpretation. You have great flexibility in what and how much you want to read. Of course, the more you read, the more nuanced you can be when sharing your interpretations with us.
So what do we read? As appropriate to the style of Socrates Café, we focus on philosophy and related disciplines which have much to give to and receive from philosophy – anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, psychology, and others. Each meeting has a different format, with a varying amount to read and varying degrees of flexibility in choosing the texts. The particular text, discipline, and method may change; the invariant is engaging critically with ideas through interpretation and discussion.
We meet every three weeks to share our interpretations of the texts we have read and, with the help of others, think critically about them. Afterwards, we agree on the format of the next meeting and outline what we are planning to read.
The book is optional. The reading isn't.
Upcoming events
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