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
Movie Discussion: The Life of Oharu (1952) by Kenji Mizoguchi
Mizoguchi’s personal favourite of all his films, The Life of Oharu is in many ways a summary work, the crystallization of his vision of a woman martyred by the callous whims of men and Japan's Meiji era as a dark cauldron of the repressive, misogynistic and feudalist spirits that linger, atavistically, in his contemporary films. Tanaka reveals incredible range in her depiction of a courtesan’s vertiginous fall from grace, a trajectory whose gleaming sharp edge revealingly eviscerates the seedy underbelly of rigid Meiji social structures and mores. The expressive camera movement so celebrated in Mizoguchi’s cinema is given a sublime showcase in the film, with almost operatically soaring movements comparable to the films of Ophüls and Murnau. By garnering the International Prize at the Venice Film Festival, The Life of Oharu brought Mizoguchi to international attention, and by coming the year after Rashomon captured the Golden Lion, helped propel Japanese cinema onto the world stage.
"A work of mature mastery, sorrowful and self-possessed, The Life of Oharu introduced an international audience to the art of Kenji Mizoguchi. It is an art both attached to tradition and radically original." (Criterion)
"No male director understood and revered women like Mizoguchi did, and with Life of Oharu he likens womanhood to a perpetual state of spiritual unrest." (Slant)
"A fierce denunciation of the subjugation of women, the power of wealth, and Japan's unjust though splendid traditions." (The New Yorker)
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Let's discuss the 1952 historical drama The Life of Oharu (Japanese: 西鶴一代女) directed, written, and produced by the great Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi, and based on a 1686 Japanese novel by Ihara Saikaku. The film was recently voted the 226th greatest movie of all time in Sight & Sound's international survey of filmmakers. We've previously discussed Mizoguchi's acclaimed 1953 film Ugetsu Monogatari.
Please watch the movie in advance (136 minutes) and bring your thoughts, reactions, and queries to share with us at the meeting. You can stream it here (check the player settings for English subtitles and to adjust quality) or rent it through Criterion or other streaming platforms (for best quality).
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Check out other movie discussions in the group, currently happening about 2 or 3 times a month.
This link here is a spreadsheet of the approximately 200 movies we've watched in this group and my ratings for each. You're invited to share your ratings too if you've watched a bunch of these movies with us. (I can add your list here if you send me a link. You can make your own list on sites like Letterboxd or by copying my spreadsheet and filling in your own values. Note that my list doesn't include every movie that Yorgo hosted on cause I didn't watch them all.)
Upcoming events
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Jean-Paul Sartre on Freedom and the Other
·OnlineOnlineOver the next 3 weeks we'll be reading Sartre's account of the concrete ways a free subjectivity relates toward the Other. The readings are from Part 3, Chapter 3 of Being and Nothingness as follows.
October 10: "Our first attitude toward the Other: love, language, masochism" (pp. 529-551 in PDF)
October 17: "The second attitude toward the Other: indifference, desire, hatred, sadism" (pp. 551-591 in PDF)
October 24: "Being-with (Mitsein) and the 'we'" (pp. 591-613 in PDF)⸻ ♦ ♦ ♦ ⸻
So-called ‘enlightened societies’ seem to enter periods of crisis, war and unspeakable violence on a regular basis. Can these events simply be attributed to “the crooked timber of humanity, out of which no straight thing was ever made" (Kant), or is there a deeper, more sinister reason for their occurrence? Could it be that the Enlightenment itself – its rationality, moral outlook and existential condition – possesses a disavowed “dark underbelly” that precipitates catastrophe?We'll explore these questions through arguably the most controversial of the children of the Enlightenment, the Marquis De Sade. In particular, we'll be focusing on 20th century receptions of Sade's work by European writers and philosophers. Not only will this approach offer us possible answers to the questions above, it will allow us to survey major currents of Continental philosophy in the 20th century. See below for an overview of the writers and topics we'll be discussing.
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READING SCHEDULE
Find the up-to-date reading schedule at this link:
https://sites.google.com/view/existentialism-and-its-critics/All texts are available in the Google folder linked at the VERY BOTTOM of this description. The Google Meet link is also posted there.
👇 scroll all the way down for the links 👇
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READINGS OVERVIEW
Barthes extends the structuralist approach developed by Levi-Strauss and Lacan (whom we read previously) to literary theory. In his reading, Sade emerges as a logothete, a founder of a language and a paradigmatic writer of "texts of bliss", whose jouissance derives from the very wounding they precipitate.Foucault redirects the analytical focus away from Barthean semiotics of jouissance and towards what we might call the Sadean episteme. The criterion of the Sadean world emerges as a certain kind of truth: anti-metaphysical, anti-theological, anti-moral. In bracketing away reality, this truth elevates desire to a sovereign status within human experience.
De Beauvoir argues that we must not burn Sade, though we must approach him with caution. Sade exemplifies the existentialist credos of choosing one's freedom and confronting existence without illusions. He is also one of the first to confront the problem of the Other head-on. Yet his glaring fault is to have succumbed to radical solipsism – a brutal compulsion to efface the Other rather than engage existentially with the singularity of Difference.
Klossowski and Bataille offer a quasi-theological interpretation of Sade, linking his texts to the subterranean persistence of the sacred in modernity. Bataille develops his central notion of heterology with reference to Sade's work.
For Blanchot, the Sadean paradox consists in apathy: the most radical and extreme actions are not done out of passion but out of detached rational reflection. Such a state of indifference amounts to an absolute sovereignty, the complete separation of the ego from its relations to the world.
Adorno and Horkheimer find in Sade a prime illustration of their thesis that the calculative rationality of the Enlightenment is cold, objectifying and founded on domination. They regard him as a diabolical truth-teller whose works pre-figure the horrors of totalitarian bureaucracy.
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ABOUT THIS READING GROUP
This is a comprehensive reading group focusing on 20th century French philosophy. Our current project was stimulated by our recent reading of George Bataille's Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Other writers we have discussed include Sartre, de Beauvoir, Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, Kristeva, etc.GROUP RULES
- Please spend 1-2 hours per week reading and preparing for the discussion. Speaking priority will be given to those who have done the readings.
- Keep your comments concise and relevant to the text.
- Please limit each comment to a maximum of 2-3 minutes. You're welcome to speak as many times as you wish.
- Virtual meeting courtesy applies: let's not interrupt each other, keep mics muted when not speaking, and maintain a respectable dress code.
- We'll focus the discussion with key passages and discussion questions. Be sure to bring your favorite passages, questions, comments, criticisms, etc. to the meeting.
LINKS AND RESOURCES
Join the Facebook group for more resources and discussion:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/755460079505498If you have attended previous meetings, please fill out a brief survey at this link: https://forms.gle/tEMJ4tw2yVgnTsQD6
All readings can be found in this Google folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VPRdvZYmUKBY3cSxD8xC8sTYtSEKBXDs
Google Meet link to join the meeting:
https://meet.google.com/uho-cdks-dcbNote: If you prefer to join the Google Meet anonymously, first log out of your Google account and then open the link. Alternatively you can open the link in an Incognito window (Chrome) or Private Browsing (Safari).
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Art: The Gray Forest (1927) by Max Ernst17 attendees
The Christian Imagination and the Question of Autonomous Art
Northrop Frye Hall (University of Toronto) Room NF003, 73 Queen’s Park Cres. E, Toronto, ON, CATheopolis is excited to present the inaugural Gaudí Lecture, featuring renowned liturgical artist, writer, and speaker Jonathan Pageau.
The notion of “art for art’s sake” continues to pervade contemporary thinking and practice in the arts. Art is understood as autonomous, liberated from its connection to worship, culture, morality, truth, or beauty, or reduced to a commodity valued primarily for its price and prestige. In either case, art risks becoming detached from the larger human story.
In this lecture, Pageau will argue that the response of the Christian imagination is not simply to reunite art with religious content by depicting biblical scenes or communicating moral messages. Rather, liturgy and sacramentality must be recovered as the internal and coherent driving force of the arts themselves, shaping their forms and their application within the Body of Christ.
Please note this is a ticketed event. YOU NEED TO PURCHASE A TICKET IN ADVANCE through this link HERE to be admitted. Theopolis has generously offered a package of 10 discounted (25% off) tickets for members of the Toronto Philosophy Meetup — RSVP here to receive the discount code.
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ABOUT JONATHAN PAGEAU
Jonathan Pageau is a renowned liturgical artist, writer, and public speaker whose work explores symbolism, religion, art, literature, and culture.
Through his carvings, writing, lectures, and The Symbolic World, Pageau has helped a wide audience recover a symbolic vision of the world, one in which spiritual meaning is revealed through images, stories, rituals, and the patterns of everyday life. Drawing deeply from the Christian tradition, his work offers a compelling way of engaging many of the central questions facing contemporary culture.
Theopolis is honoured to welcome Jonathan Pageau to Toronto to deliver the inaugural Gaudí Lecture.
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ABOUT THEOPOLIS
Catholic art has the power to renew culture and share the faith through beauty, but in Ontario, it’s too often absent from public life. Theopolis exists to change that. We’re empowering a rising generation of Catholic artists and creating a space for encounter between the secular and sacred.
We believe that art plays a vital role in shaping how we understand the world, and that beauty can serve as an avenue for the Holy Spirit — sparking an encounter with the sacred. By bringing works of Catholic art into dialogue with contemporary Canadian culture, Theopolis ensures that the Catholic imagination remains part of the public conversation, creating spaces where culture and faith meet.
More info about Theopolis here: https://www.theopolis.ca/about/
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ABOUT THE GAUDÍ LECTURE
The Gaudí Lecture is an annual public lecture exploring the importance, influence, and enduring relevance of the Christian imagination. Each year, Theopolis will invite a distinguished creative figure to reflect on the role of the Christian imagination in shaping culture, artistic practice, and daily life.
The lecture is named for Venerable Antoni Gaudí, whose architecture reflects an imagination formed by faith, nature, craftsmanship, and a profound sense of the sacred. His work reveals how artistic practice can become a form of contemplation and how beauty can prepare the soul for faith.
Through this series, Theopolis hopes to create a lasting forum for serious and accessible public conversation, bringing artists, students, professionals, clergy, patrons, academics, and members of the wider community into a shared exploration of art, faith, and culture.
13 attendees
International Relations, Geopolitics, and Current Events Discussion
·OnlineOnlineThis will mostly be a discussion around major recent and ongoing events in international relations, while applying as much IR concepts and frameworks as possible.
Tentative Topics:
- Venezuela
- Iran
- Greenland / NATO
- Middle East Peace Deal
- Ukraine / Russia
- Cuba
- Tariffs, US-China trade war, and geopolitical competition
- Multipolarity
- Nuclear weapons proliferation
- A.I. race and chips
- Sudan
- Taiwan
- South China Sea
- North Korea
- .....
Links from event on Venezuela:
- Vibes-based grand strategy and foreign policy
- Regime change for democracy? Or more pliable former government (Max Blumenthal)
- Not about drugs or fentanyl (Daniel Davis), Narco-trafficking elites to run Venezuela (Chris Hedges)
- Good move because free oil - Not so simple or easy,
- Monroe Doctrine 2.0 - Iran, Columbia, Cuba, Greenland (Daniel Davis),
Links from prior/ongoing series on basic IR Theories:
Theory
- Quick Overview of Structural Realism, Liberalism, etc.; Another
- Offensive vs. Defensive Realism; 2
- Constructivism
- Diplomacy: Stapleton Roy, George Schultz, Bilahari Kausikan
- Power: Joseph Nye, Jack Matlock
Talks, applications, and discussions
- Rise and Fall of Liberal Intl Order
- John Mearsheimer discusses his book "The Great Delusion"
- Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer (2015)
- Why John Mearsheimer is wrong about realism, great power politics and history
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AjiSqp5Ddw
Additional Info and References
- [Placeholder]
30 attendees
Plato – Statesman (Live Reading)
·OnlineOnlineOver the last few years, we have done a close reading of Plato's Republic and the Laws. Now we turn to the Statesman.
This week we will begin reading at 301a (last week we began at 296d).
The dramatic action is as follows: we pick up after the Eleatic Stranger has finished the discussion that takes place in the dialogue titled the Sophist (which we read several years ago). The discussion turns to the figure of the Statesman, and while the interlocutor in the Sophist was Theaetetus (who resembled Socrates), a youth named Socrates takes on the role of interlocutor (Socrates himself is present).
No particular edition is required, but we can discuss what we want to use during the meeting. Because of this, sharing some editions that are generally available digitally in the comments may be helpful. I'll also try to keep the Greek text handy (probably through a Loeb edition, but anyone can look at Perseus as well).
If you want to familiarize yourself with the text in advance, here are some different editions:
On Perseus, Fowler (HTML): https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=plat.+stat.+257a
Plato's Complete Works:
PDF: https://app.box.com/s/4v3r6gh4ys9gdrqc705ane2hxriqfqre
12 attendees
Past events
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