About us
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 welcome 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 discussion and to stay in touch with other members.
(🚨🚨🚨 WARNING: FRADULENT EMAILS are circulating that IMPERSONATE organizers of this group and eventually ask you for money or personal information if you engage. IF YOU HAVE RECEIVED SUCH AN EMAIL OR IF YOU ARE UNCERTAIN about any message claiming to represent this group, PLEASE REPORT IT by contacting the main organizer Darren directly through Meetup's messaging system or email us at philosophyto [at] gmail [dot] com. Be vigilant for scams in general, which are everywhere these days and easier than ever to generate because of A.I. 🚨🚨🚨)
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 have moved 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
Bourgeois Coldness by Henrike Kohpeiß
Bourgeois coldness refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and aesthetic forms of preserving the structure of the colonial status quo. It creates an affective shelter in the world, unencroached upon by the immediate consequences of its many catastrophes. It functions like air conditioning — a complex technology which reliably stabilises the climate until those inside consider it natural. Bourgeois spaces — institutional and affective — stay cool and pleasant. But outside it’s burning.
Canonical critical theory by Adorno and Horkheimer enters a dialogue with Black studies through Hartman and Moten.
In this conversation, Henrike Kohpeiß and Fred Moten explore coldness as an affective, political and aesthetic strategy of bourgeois self-preservation. Together, they consider what Black Study and critical theory share, and where they diverge, in revealing the work of self-preservation performed by the bourgeois subject.
"Elegant and erudite in equal measure, this book will stand as a landmark diagnosis of the practices of denial in our time." – Andreas Malm
About the Speaker:
Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher, working primarily in the fields of critical theory, philosophy of emotion, Black Studies, feminist philosophy and aesthetics. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leuphana Transformation Lab at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, studying affects of Transformation, the relationship between crises and transformation, and the notion of Transformation Literacy. She has been teaching on among other things including Sylvia Wynter, philosophy and the Shoah, and bourgeois society and its critique. Occasionally, she engages in artistic collaborations in dance and performance, mostly as a dramaturg or writer, sometimes as a performer. Henrike’s book Bourgeois Coldness was published in September 2025 by Divided Publishing.
The Moderator:
Fred Moten is Professor in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at NYU, where he teaches courses in black study, poetics and critical theory. He works with lots of social and aesthetic study groups including Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, the Black Arts Movement School Modality, Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective, the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, Moved by the Motion, the Institute of Physical Sociality and the Harris/Moten Quartet.
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This is an online conversation and audience Q&A presented by the UK-based journal The Philosopher. It is open to the public and held on Zoom. The event is free to attend but the Zoom registration page has, by default, an optional donation amount that you can change to $0 (or whatever you wish). Donations go to The Philosopher magazine to cover our costs and expand the scope of our series.
Please send feedback or comments about our events directly to thephilosopher1923@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you!
About The Philosopher (https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/):
The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. As of 2018, The Philosopher is edited by Newcastle-based philosopher Anthony Morgan and is published quarterly, both in print and digitally.
The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.
Upcoming events
548
The Return of the Moral State: Philosophy and the Good Life
Larkin Building, Room 200, 15 Devonshire Place, University of Toronto, Toronto, on, CAAcross the world, politics is returning to one of its oldest questions: should the state promote particular, substantive conceptions of the good life? Modern liberalism has approached this ambition with suspicion, seeking instead to leave individuals and communities free to pursue different visions of human flourishing. Yet from Hungary and the United States to China, India, and Israel, influential movements and governments increasingly reject this restraint, using law, education, welfare, media, and public culture to promote specific ideals of family, order, harmony, pride, sacrifice, and belonging.
This talk examines the return of what I call the “good life state.” I argue that these projects cannot be understood only through the languages of authoritarianism, populism, or democratic backsliding. They also offer substantive moral visions — sometimes attractive, sometimes dangerous — of how people ought to live. Their rise poses a difficult question for liberalism: how can it respond to rival visions of the good life without becoming a good life state itself?
Alexandre Lefebvre
https://profiles.sydney.edu.au/alex.lefebvre
Professor of Politics and Philosophy
University of SydneyAbout the Speaker:
I’m Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the University of Sydney, where I explore how political ideas shape our lives. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, I earned my PhD at Johns Hopkins University in 2007 and now call Sydney home. For more than a decade, my work has explored one central idea: politics does not just govern us. Political ideas and institutions reach deep into our lives, forming who we are, what we value, and how we understand what makes a life worth living.
My latest book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, argues that liberalism deeply informs not just our politics, but also our values, humor, morality, and so much more. It was named a Best Book of 2024 by The New Yorker, Australian Book Review, Persuasion, and The Ministry of Pop Culture, and was praised as “stirring and clarifying” by David Brooks in The New York Times and “daring and engrossing” by Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post.
My current project, The Good Life State, examines a global return to one of politics’ oldest ambitions: using state power to shape citizens’ conceptions of the good life.
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This is a talk with audience Q&A presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics that is free to attend and open to the public. Free refreshments will be provided at the event. The talk will also be streamed online with live chat here [to be posted].
About the Centre for Ethics (http://ethics.utoronto.ca):
The Centre for Ethics is an interdisciplinary centre aimed at advancing research and teaching in the field of ethics, broadly defined. The Centre seeks to bring together the theoretical and practical knowledge of diverse scholars, students, public servants and social leaders in order to increase understanding of the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life.
In pursuit of its interdisciplinary mission, the Centre fosters lines of inquiry such as (1) foundations of ethics, which encompasses the history of ethics and core concepts in the philosophical study of ethics; (2) ethics in action, which relates theory to practice in key domains of social life, including bioethics, business ethics, and ethics in the public sphere; and (3) ethics in translation, which draws upon the rich multiculturalism of the City of Toronto and addresses the ethics of multicultural societies, ethical discourse across religious and cultural boundaries, and the ethics of international society.
The Ethics of A.I. Lab at the Centre For Ethics recently appeared on a list of 10 organizations leading the way in ethical A.I.: https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/10-organizations-leading-the-way-in-ethical-ai
23 attendees
Debate: Meta best vs. Micro best, are these always Aligned?
·OnlineOnlineReddy and I are hosting the following series on Success:
We had our introductory discussion on what is success. From that there seemed to be a consensus that the major drivers of success were the non material things, love, contentment, how you live etc. During that discussion I developed some follow up questions on which we will have discussions/debates:
But before that, the Zoom link will be posted shortly before the event. During the discussion, if you want to raise a point please raise your hand and you will have up to 3 minutes to speak. Once a speaker talks there will be a 5 minute period where anyone can follow up with a counter point, question, or continuing thought along the same line of thought (leave such comments to 1 minute). But do not begin a new train of thought unless you raise your hand. If you find yourself dominating the conversation please relax and give others a chance to join in.
6/4 Discussion: Is being successful a good thing to strive for? (Or is it better to just live and enjoy your life?) We decided that a drive for success is innate like the desire of a salmon to swim upstream to reproduce. Allowing that drive to take on societies version of success is probably wrong, but developing an individual form of success is more nuanced and may be good or bad, depending if you have an adequate understanding of yourself.
6/11/26 week: What is our greatest drive as humans? To optimize our lives
6/18/26 week: What is our view on what success is as a society? Money, Continuation of Society/Species, Community
6/25/26 week: Is success inside or outside us? It is a mix, usually for younger people more outside as you get older more internally driven. But ultimately, if it is determined by happiness and contentment it has to be internal.
7/2/26 Week: What does it mean to be yourself? The statement "be yourself" has implicit assumptions including: there is a yourself to be and that it is best to be yourself. This is in comparison to the imperative to "know yourself" which implies that you need to evaluate yourself and correct any character flaws you may have. I think the best was a yin and yang relationship between "be yourself" and "know yourself" proposed by Sonny where you perform the self analysis to know yourself and then you go about being yourself in everyday life allowing you to do further analysis taking into account direct experience. But in direct answer to the question, being yourself seems to be the ability to both know what your values are and act in accordance with them.
7-9 Discussion: Is an individual’s view of success more legitimate than that of the group or vice versa? We thought that the group has a large effect on what success ultimately is and your options to move etc. to put yourself in different scenarios are there, but may be limited. So it is situation dependent but is likely the groups view.
7-16 Discussion: How are success, what is good and happiness related? Happiness is often an essential ingredient in being successful as you need to be engaged to be successful at something. And happiness often comes from doing what is good.
7-24 Discussion: Is success how you live or what you accomplish while living or both? A common theme we found was that a feeling of gratification/meaning comes from accomplishing a goal, solving a problem or overcoming a constraint. These are "how you live" subjective feelings and are the main intrinsically valuable things we experience in life. Whereby material things like say a large house does not have any intrinsic value. Therefore, we believe it is "how you live" that determines whether you lived a successful life
7-30 Discussion: Constant Craving- Can we ever be satisfied? We will listen to and discuss the following youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vao9HN_FqOE The video considered all non presentism to be bad as it believes the only place you can be happy and really successful is in the present. But the group was mixed as to whether or not they agreed with that. Some believed that planning and striving for success was inherent in our biology while others believed that being in the now was the best way to spend the majority of ones life. These two views are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
8-6 Discussion: Can you be entirely in control of your own success? Aristotle and Plato believed that the most important aspects of success were internal soul related aspects that individuals were entirely in control of. Yet they still believed that certain prerequisites were necessary to achieve it, such as being in the right environment to receive an education in moral philosophy. Similarly, we thought that even if you take this view of success (internal character development) the prerequisites like having adequate intelligence and self-awareness that set one on such a path, are largely genetic characteristics, which one is not in control of. Then if you take the outward version of success like material things, then it becomes -more clear that you cant be entirely in control of it. So it depends on what we mean by "you" (is this you before or after birth) and "success".
Three part Mini Series: Practical Philosophy for Life:
8-13 Discussion : What is it?
8-20 Discussion: How to Apply it? We decided that the best way to apply a practical philosophy is to first understand it and then understand your own situation, which will allow you to develop goals and then use science as an aide in implementing those goals.
8-27 Discussion: Can you Form Your Own? Yes, it is best if it is based on the reasoning section of the brain as opposed to the unconsious/nonreasoning part. A practical philosophy should be tested against reality and modified as needed.
9-3: Which philosophy provides the best path to success: Hedonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, or Aristotelianism? Stoic concepts have helped people achieve success in modernity through things like CBT. Aristotelianism is good becuase it is practical and analytical. Epicureanism is good because it is realistic. All these philosophies have their positives overall taking a mosiac of them might work well as long as you can retain necessary parts of their underlying themes.
9-10: How can you go into something knowing you are going to get out of it what you intended? You first want to know what your desires are, part of that is knowing what your values are. Then once you know your desires you can set goals in alignment with those desires. You want to utilize empirical evidence in setting goals and once implemented obtain feedback to make sure you are still accomplishing the goal and it is in alignment with your desires.
9-17-26: How can you do the best you can in life? Doing your best is not just a matter of trying your hardest, you also need to have the right tools at your disposal and need favorable guidance from those who influence you throughout your life. Knowing your values & desires, setting goals in accordance with those desires as well as being happy/enjoying life through developing positive relationships, having freedom to act how you choose all the while living in accordance with virtue is a way to live that may bring one close to doing their best. Not only does doing your best consist of organizing your life in a rational way, but also certain practices you can engage in such as meditation and self reflection. System 1 of the brain is automatic and several times faster than system 2, which is the more logical consious section of the brain. One key to self determination in your mental state is in using system 2 to override the automatic responses developed by system 1.
9-24: Can you be successful without spirituality? We decided that Spirituality used in moderation and properly can be an aid in both material and may be essential to non-material success. It seems to be inherent in the human condition to a certain degree.
10-1: Does your success in life only matter if there is some kind of an afterlife? We determined that a finite world is necessary in order to develop some kind of morality while alive, then the infinite afterlife, if it exists, may continue the trajectory set while alive.
This Week: Meta best vs. micro best, are these always aligned?
What role does Love play in success?
Are there lessons we are sent to earth to learn?This discussion is deliberately open ended, so please don't come on to the meeting and start saying we need to have definitions like what is success etc. That being said I don't mind you saying to me success is blah blah, therefore I think a successful life is so and so. But I want to encourage different perspectives.
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13 attendees
Hegel's Science of Logic (Book 2: Quantum)
·OnlineOnlineAt this meeting we'll be reading from Section Two: (Quantum), Kant's Synthetic a priori Propositions: Remark 1, on page 204 of the Miller translation. During the meetings we'll be using the Miller translation. The pdf of the Miller can be found here.
At the end of the meeting we may be talking about Stephen Houlgate's On Being: Quality and the Birth of Quantity in Hegel's 'Science of Logic' , Vol. 2. The book is available here.Hegel's Science of Logic (1812–1816) is a landmark in German idealism and a radical rethinking of logic as the living structure of reality itself. Rather than treating logic as a neutral tool or set of rules, Hegel presents it as the dynamic structure of reality and self-consciousness. He develops a system of dialectical reasoning in which concepts evolve through contradictions and their resolutions. In contrast to his early collaborator and philosophical rival Friedrich Schelling, who emphasized the role of intuition and nature in the Absolute, Hegel insists that pure thought — developed immanently from itself — is the true foundation of metaphysics. The work is divided into three major parts: Being, Essence, and Concept (or Notion), each tracing the development of increasingly complex categories of thought. For Hegel, logic is not abstract or static; it is the unfolding of the Absolute, the rational core of existence.
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This is a discussion group for Hegel's Science of Logic. We have read several of Friedrich Schelling's works, including Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809), Ages of the World (c. 1815), and the Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology (1845), Anyone with an interest in philosophy is free to join in the meetings.
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12 attendees
Past events
8280
