What we’re about
Welcome to the Toronto Philosophy Meetup! This is a community (online and in-person) for anyone interested in philosophy, including newcomers to the subject. We host discussions, talks, reading groups, pub nights, debates, and other events on an inclusive range of topics and perspectives in philosophy, drawing from an array of materials (e.g. philosophical writings, for the most part, but also movies, literature, history, science, art, podcasts, poetry, current events, ethnographies, and whatever else seems good.)
Anyone is welcomed to host philosophy-related events here. We also welcome speakers and collaborations with other groups.
Join us at an event soon for friendship, cooperative discourse, and mental exercise!
You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter or Bluesky and join our new Discord for extended discussion and to stay in touch with other members.
Feel free to propose meetup topics (you can do this on the Message Boards), and please contact us if you would like to be a speaker or host an event.
(NOTE: Most of our events are currently online because of the pandemic.)
"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
See here for an extensive list of podcasts and resources on the internet about philosophy.
See here for the standards of conduct that our members are expected to abide by. Members should also familiarize themselves with Meetup's Terms of Service Agreement, especially the section on Usage and Content Policies.
See here for a list of other philosophy-related groups to check out in the Toronto area.
Please note that no advertising of external events, products, businesses, or organizations is allowed on this site without permission from the main organizer.
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Make a Donation
Since 2016, the Toronto Philosophy Meetup has been holding regular events that are free, open to the public, and help to foster community and a culture of philosophy in Toronto and beyond. To help us continue to do so into the future, please consider supporting us with a donation! Any amount is most welcome.
You can make a donation here.
See here for more information and to meet our donors.
Supporters will be listed on our donors page unless they wish to remain anonymous. We thank them for their generosity!
If you would like to help out or support us in other ways (such as with any skills or expertise you may have), please contact us.
Note: You can also use the donation link to tip individual hosts. Let us know who you want to tip in the notes section. You can also contact hosts directly for ways to tip them.
Featured event
Halloween Special: Heidegger, H.P. Lovecraft, and Weird Realism
Hello Everyone, welcome to this Halloween philosophy meetup which will last one night only. But what a night! I honestly do not know if this meetup will be mostly fun like a Halloween party, or mostly serious. I am fine with either direction.
Feel free to wear a costume or (equally acceptable) to describe yourself as wearing a costume. I (as you all expected) will be dressed up as "The night in which all cows are black".
This meetup is based around the book:
- Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (2012) by Graham Harman (a pdf is available here.)
This is a serious book which is also a lot of fun, and perhaps our meetup will be both as well.
If you just want to listen and engage in party chit chat, you do not have to read the book. However if you want to make actual philosophy points during the meetup, you have to read the book (or at least parts of the book).
- The first part (up to page 52) is Graham Harman's rather Heideggarian account of why Lovecraft matters to philosophy.
- The second part (pages 53 to 229) contain 100 short excerpts from Lovecraft's writings and brief comments by Harman.
- The third part (pages 231 to 269) returns to Graham Harman's Heideggarian account of why Lovecraft matters to philosophy, and deepens this account in the light of the excerpts in part 2).
If you want to make philosophy points in this meetup, you have to read parts 1) and 3). You do not have to read all of part 2) but you do have to read some of it in order to get the flavour of what Harman is doing. This meetup was posted more than a month before Halloween, so there is plenty of time to get the reading done.
I will read the whole book, but then again, I want to get an A+ in meetup (and I am a notoriously hard marker). So I have almost no chance of getting an A+ ... but I will try!
The format will be a variation on my usual "accelerated live read" format. I will start by giving a basic overview of what Harman is up to in his book. We will then read and discuss two passages from part 1) of the book (selected by participants who have read the book). We will then read and discuss a few of the excerpts from part 2) of the book. After that we will try to get a handle on what is going on in part 3) of the book.
Then we will go back to part 2) and continue to read and discuss the excerpts until we all die from a malady to which Germans are especially prone called "Toddurchphilosophiediskussion" and return as Undead remnants of ourselves. We will then continue to discuss the book ad infinitum, this time as Undead Immortals.
BTW I just made up the word "Toddurchphilosophiediskussion" - German is cool that way.
Enjoy!
UPDATE:
Here is a link to by far the best edition of Lovecraft's selected work (published by Library of America): https://www.amazon.ca/H-P-Lovecraft-Tales-LOA/dp/1931082723/
And here is the link to a truly magnificent complete edition of Lovecraft in audiobook form. The blooper reels are hilarious: https://www.audible.ca/pd/The-Complete-Fiction-of-H-P-Lovecraft-Audiobook/B07NRSYGDV
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Blurb about Weird Realism from the publisher:
As Hölderlin was to Martin Heidegger and Mallarmé to Jacques Derrida, so is H.P. Lovecraft to the Speculative Realist philosophers. Lovecraft was one of the brightest stars of the horror and science fiction magazines, but died in poverty and relative obscurity in the 1930s. In 2005 he was finally elevated from pulp status to the classical literary canon with the release of a Library of America volume dedicated to his work. The impact of Lovecraft on philosophy has been building for more than a decade. Initially championed by shadowy guru Nick Land at Warwick during the 1990s, he was later discovered to be an object of private fascination for all four original members of the twenty-first century Speculative Realist movement. In this book, Graham Harman extracts the basic philosophical concepts underlying the work of Lovecraft, yielding a weird realism capable of freeing continental philosophy from its current soul-crushing impasse. Abandoning pious references by Heidegger to Hölderlin and the Greeks, Harman develops a new philosophical mythology centered in such Lovecraftian figures as Cthulhu, Wilbur Whately, and the rat-like monstrosity Brown Jenkin. The Miskatonic River replaces the Rhine and the Ister, while Hölderlin's Caucasus gives way to Lovecraft's Antarctic mountains of madness.
Upcoming events
522
![[In-person] Curiosity Café: Personal Identity and Transformation](https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/e/4/6/9/highres_530878473.jpeg)
[In-person] Curiosity Café: Personal Identity and Transformation
Madison Avenue Pub, 14 Madison Ave, Toronto, ON, CALooking for Halloween plans? Well, we heard CHANGE is scary, and arguing with a vampire might be too. Come and talk about it. In this café, we will be exploring what makes us who we are, with reference to a few philosophical thought experiments. That is: Who are we, really? What is at the core of our identity? Is it our preferences? Our values? Our life narrative? Whom or what we love? Or something else entirely?
Beyond exploring what makes up our essence (or whether a fundamental essence even exists), we will also explore the implications of incremental personal change and transformative experiences. To help us navigate these questions, we’ll discuss the following thought experiments:
- The Ship of Theseus (a boat slowly gets all of its parts replaced. Is it still the same boat? If not, when does it stop being the same boat?)
- Arguing with the Vampire (you’ve been presented with the opportunity to become a vampire…)
- Advanced Directives and Dementia (someone has Alzheimer’s but it doesn’t go like she predicted it would. Should we respect her advanced directive?)
Join moderator Sophia Whicher on Wednesday, October 29th for a spooky, collaborative exploration of these questions and more. Absolutely no pre-reading is required, but if you’re curious about the vampire, we recommend you check out Paul Bloom’s Arguing with the Vampire (~10 minute read).
Space is limited! Please obtain a “Pay-What-You-Can” ticket from Curiosity Café at this link (click here) to attend this event. You need a ticket to be admitted. See the above link for more info about tickets and other options including a limited number of free tickets. Come and hang out with us, grab food, and read through our handout from 6-6:30pm. Our structured discussion will run from 6:30-8:30pm with a 10 minute break in the middle.
Hope to see you there!
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This event is brought to you by Being and Becoming, a Toronto based non-profit. We aim to create community around exploring everyday concepts and experiences so that we may live more intentional, thoughtful, and meaningful lives. We use philosophy as a tool with which we can come to a richer understanding of the world around us.
By offering activities, spaces, and other opportunities for conversation and co-exploration, we hope to enable the meeting and fusion of individuals and their ideas. Everyone is welcome, regardless of background: indeed, we believe the journey is best undertaken alongside explorers from a variety of disciplines, cultures, backgrounds, and experiences.
Find out more about Being and Becoming here.
About the Curiosity Café Series:
For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to join us at our Curiosity Cafés and are wondering what they’re all about: every two weeks, we invite members of our community to come out to the Madison Avenue Pub to engage in a collaborative exploration of our chosen topic. Through these events, we aim to build our community of people who like to think deeply about life’s big questions, and provide each other with some philosophical tools to dig deeper into whatever it is we are most curious about.
12 attendees
•OnlineKant: Critique of Judgment (Week 5 – Deduction of Judgments of Taste)
OnlineWe continue with Kant's Critiques, now onto the third which examines the beautiful, sublime, and teleology as occasions where our senses are originally related to our understanding (judgment of taste), as well as how the understanding originally relates to reason (teleological judgment).
We'll be covering sections §30 - 43 (160 - 182, 22 pages) at this meeting.
Note: Meetings focus on developing a common language and fostering friendship through the study of 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.
No prior knowledge of Kant is necessary!
Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/Critique-Power-Judgment-Cambridge-Immanuel/dp/0521348927/ref=sr_1_1
PDF: https://nuevasteoriasdeljuiciopolitico.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/5343412b-47fd-4122-b7e9-b57cbddc1555.pdf
Reading Schedule
(Note - page numbers are from Cambridge edition)
Week 1:
First Introduction (3 - 51, 48 pages)
(NOTE: this is not an editor or translator introduction, it is by Kant. It is sometimes at the end of the book.)Week 2:
Preface and Introduction (55 - 83, 28 pages)Week 3:
Book I - Analytic of the Beautiful (§1 - 23) (89 - 127, 38 pages)Week 4:
Book II - Analytic of the Sublime (§23 - 30) (128 - 159, 31 pages)Week 5:
§30 - 43 (160 - 182, 22 pages)Week 6:
§43 - 55 (182 - 212, 30 pages)Week 7:
The Dialectic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment (§55 - 61) (213 - 230, 17 pages)Week 8:
Analytic of the Teleological Power of Judgment (§61 - 69) (233 - 255, 22 pages)Week 9:
Dialectic of the Teleological Power of Judgment (§69 - 79) (257 - 284, 27 pages)Week 10:
Appendix §79 - 87 (285 - 313, 28 pages)Week 11:
Appendix §87 - END (313 - 346, 33 pages)14 attendees
•OnlineFoucault: The Genesis of The History of Sexuality (Ch 5 – Confession)
OnlineOn 26 August 1974, Michel Foucault completed work on Discipline and Punish, and on that very same day began writing the first volume of The History of Sexuality. A little under ten years later, on 25 June 1984, shortly after the second and third volumes were published, he was dead.
This decade is one of the most fascinating of his career. It begins with the initiation of the sexuality project, and ends with its enforced and premature closure. Yet in 1974 he had something very different in mind for The History of Sexuality than the way things were left in 1984. Foucault originally planned a thematically organised series of six volumes, but wrote little of what he promised and published none of them. Instead over the course of the next decade he took his work in very different directions, studying, lecturing and writing about historical periods stretching back to antiquity.
This book offers a detailed intellectual history of both the abandoned thematic project and the more properly historical version left incomplete at his death. It draws on all Foucault’s writings in this period, his courses at the Collège de France and lectures elsewhere, as well as material archived in France and California to provide a comprehensive overview and synthetic account of Foucault’s last decade.
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Hello everyone and welcome to this series on Foucault. Please note that there is a technology related issue that you should know about. Please be sure to read to the end of this blurb for details.
In this series, we will read the four volume biography of Foucault written by Stuart Elden. The first volume on the genesis of The History of Sexuality is called Foucault's Last Decade (2016, Polity Press).
Elden wrote the biography in reverse chronological order, so Volume One actually covers Foucault's later years. The description from the back of this book is reproduced at the bottom of this page. 👇👇👇
When we are finished with Volume One, we will read something short by Foucault himself, starting with his essay "What Is Enlightenment"? Then we will move on to reading Volume Two of the biography and so on until we have finished all four volumes of the biography and read three short writings by Foucault himself.
The format will be my (Philip's) usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 25-30 pages before each session. (This is a biography after all so it should not be too onerous to read that many pages). Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading. When you are choosing your passages, please try to lean in the direction of picking passages with philosophical content rather than mere historical interest. But I can be flexible about this.
People who have not done the reading are welcome to attend this meetup. However if you want to TALK during the meetup it is essential that you do the reading. I mean it! It is essential that the direction of the conversation be influenced only by people who have actually done the reading. You may think you are so brilliant and wonderful that you can come up with great points even if you do not do the reading. You probably are brilliant and wonderful — no argument there. But you still have to do the reading if you want to talk in this meetup. REALLY.
Please note that this is a "raise hands" meetup and has a highly structured format, not an anarchy-based one. This is partly for philosophical reasons: I want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy. But our highly structured format is also for disability related reasons that I can explain if required.
THE READING SCHEDULE (pdf here)
- Sept 10: Read up to page 26
- Sept 17: Read up to page 44
- Sept 24: Meeting cancelled
- Oct 1: Read up to page 81
- Oct 15: Ch. 4 (read up to page 111)
- Oct 29: Ch. 5 (read up to page 133)
- Session after that: Ch. 6 (read up to page 163)
- Session after that: Ch. 7 (read up to page 190)
- Session after that: Ch. 8 (read up to page 209 and the footnotes)
After that the group will read Foucault's essay "What is Enlightenment".
It is a shame it has to come to this, but:
I am Canadian and like many Canadians my relationship with America has changed drastically in the last 10 months or so. In this meetup, no discussion of the current US political situation will be allowed. This is unfortunate, but that is how it must be. When talking about Foucault there will no doubt be a strong desire to talk about politics. No problem! It is a big old world and the political situations of literally every other country on planet earth (including their right wing populist movements) are fair game for discussion in this meetup. Just not that of the US. The political situation in the USA is now a topic for Canadians to think about in a very practical, strategic manner as we fight to prevent our democracy from being destroyed, and our land and resources stolen. The time may come when a Canadian like me can talk about this topic in an abstract philosophical way, but I suspect that time is at least 6 years away.
Now the technology point: Scott will be in the meetup for a few minutes at the start to set things up. But then he will leave. (He's not into Foucault! Unfathomable!) Someone in the meetup will have to volunteer to tell me who has their hand up and whose turn it is to speak. I am disabled in a way that makes it impossible for me to both manage the philosophy content and also monitor whose turn it is to speak. With any luck one or more regulars in the meetup will make it a habit to step up and volunteer each time.
21 attendees
•OnlineDocumentary Screening & Discussion: The Ethics Bowl (2025)
OnlineIt’s philosophy movie night! This is a free online screening and discussion of Eli Yetter-Bowman’s new short documentary The Bowl, which follows a team of six North Carolina high school girls and their teacher as they prepare for and compete in the National High School Ethics Bowl. The team takes on some of the toughest questions facing society — the global prison complex, artificial intelligence, sex education, drug policy, and more. It explores the bonds we form when we reason together about what matters. You can find out more about the movie and check out the trailer here.
The discussion will be led by Caroline Munsell, a student featured in the documentary, and Kyle Robertson, founder and director of the Northern California High School Ethics Bowl and organizer of San Quentin State Prison’s Ethics Bowl program.
All are welcome!
Hosted by the Public Philosophy Network and thanks to the University of Lethbridge’s Critical Thinking and Civic Engagement Lab and the Jarislowsky Network for their support!
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About the Film:
This documentary follows a team of six North Carolina high school girls and their teacher as they prepare for and compete in the National High School Ethics Bowl (NHSEB). This program challenges students to think about some of the toughest questions facing society – the global prison complex, dangers and rules on artificial intelligence, policies on sex education, redesigning drug policies, and more. The film begins with the team’s journey leading up to the competition, capturing their intense preparation and deep engagement with ethical cases. Through interviews and classroom footage, we see the students’ excitement, nerves, and the bonds they form while grappling with complex moral issues.
24 attendees
Past events
6965
![Nietzsche: The Gay Science [Session 60]](https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/b/e/b/a/highres_521988826.jpeg)
