What we’re about
Welcome to the Toronto Philosophy Meetup! This is a community 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, 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 Twitter and join our Discord.
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: https://www.meetup.com/The-Toronto-Philosophy-Meetup/pages/30522966/Other_Philosophy_Groups_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.
“Gertrud is a film that I made with my heart” — the Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer’s last film neatly crowns his career: a meditation on happiness, individual will, and the refusal to compromise. A woman leaves her unfulfilling marriage and embarks on a search for ideal love — but neither a passionate affair with a younger man nor the return of an old romance can provide the answer she seeks. Always the stylistic innovator, Dreyer employs intricate camera movements, long takes, and theatrical staging to concentrate on Nina Pens Rode’s sublime portrayal of the proud and courageous Gertrud.
"An enigmatically modern film with the deceptive air of a staidly old fashioned one." (The Spectator)
"As richly mysterious and inscrutable as it is earthy and wry." (Slant)
"I would imagine that many would find it unwatchable, or would incorrectly deem it uncinematic, but it understands the language of cinema better than nearly any film that I've seen. Every cut, every pan, every zoom matters." (Rotten Tomatoes)
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Let's discuss the 1964 film Gertrud directed and written by the great Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer, recently voted the 136th greatest movie of all time in Sight & Sound's international survey of film critics and scholars, and the 140th greatest movie of all time in the related poll of filmmakers. The film opened to divided responses but is now considered one of Dreyer's best works.
We previously discussed Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Ordet (1955), and Vampyr (1932) in this group.
Please watch the movie in advance 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 on Criterion or other platforms online.
Check out other movie discussions in the group every Friday and occasionally other days.
Upcoming events (4+)
See all- From Socrates to Sartre EP15 ⟩ “Hume IV: Reason: ‘Slave of the Passions’”Link visible for attendees
These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.
Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.
Hume Part IV; or, After the Storm, Animal Faith
If you’ve ever found yourself returning, again and again, to the refreshing astringent witch hazel of Hume’s work—not out of “hope” but in recognition of its unsparing clarity—welcome to the pleasure dome.
In the fourth and final episode of Thelma Lavine’s treatment of Hume, we meet the philosopher not only at the end of his system but at the end of his life: urbane, witty, and unflinching even in the face of death, cracking atheism jokes to horrified (because guilt-ridden) deists from his death bed.
It is from this Heideggerian vantage point that Lavine guides us through Hume’s final philosophical demolitions—of the self, of God, of miracles, and—most explosively—of reason itself as a guide in moral life.
We’ll follow Thelma through Hume’s Buddhist “bundle theory” of the self, which Hume claims (rightly) that any sane and serious-minded person ought to favor over the fantasy of a substantial self having continuous personal identity. The former passes his empiricist test; the latter can’t. Playing by the Copy Principle, we must conclude: since no impression of a constant self can be found, the idea collapses. There is not a single mote of evidence for a perduring “I” beneath the passing confetti of sense-consciousnesses, only a conditioned belief induced by the associative operations of memory.
Next, Thelma explores Hume’s surgical dismantling of theistic metaphysics. She does a fabulous job targeting (in order) Descartes’ causal proofs, Anselm’s ontological argument, or the deist design inference from Newtonian order. It’s really cleansing to run through all three flavors at once, and Hume’s empiricism nails them all. Where there is no impression, there is no idea; and where there is no idea, belief is fiction—in this case, a fiction born of fear, not reason. Religion is not knowledge—it’s anthropology.
Here, she shows us how Hume anticipates Nietzsche: the impulse toward religious belief is not the conclusion of rational demonstration but the symptom of psychological need—a projection rooted in fear, dependency, and the human refusal to face an indifferent universe without illusion.
From there, Thelma leads us into Hume’s infamous account of moral judgment: reason, he declares, is “and ought ever to be, the slave of the passions.” Don’t let your mom hear you saying that.
Far from being governed by rational principles, moral conduct emerges from sentiment and sympathy—those contingent, animal impulses which cannot be logically justified, only felt and described. The rationalist’s dream of deducing ethics from first principles is revealed to be, like belief in substance or God, another pious illusion.
Is Hume, then, a nihilist?
No! In a dazzling dialectical reversal, Hume appeals to something beneath reason: instinct. Though philosophy cannot justify our belief in an external world or a continuous self, we nonetheless continue to walk around objects and expect the sun to rise. It is nature, not reason, that governs belief. What remains after reason’s auto-deconstruction is what Hume calls animal faith—a nonrational, unavoidable trust in the givenness of experience.
Once again, Thelma shows us Hume’s link to the contemporary. In this, he anticipates the later “critical philosophy” of Wittgenstein and Hubert Dreyfus—one that exposes the limits of representationalist reason and turns back to pre-reflective, embodied coping as the true foundation of our relation to the world. Our engagement with outer existence is not inferential but animal, instinctive, and unarticulated: not unconscious in the Freudian sense of hidden psychic mechanisms, but background in the Wittgensteinian-Heideggerian sense—a form of life that shows itself in action rather than in propositional form.
Finally, we get to the hard problem of Hume: What survives Hume’s philosophical purge? What becomes of science, of religion, of ethics, after he has taken the torch to all unjustified metaphysical claims? And is Hume’s own mitigated skepticism coherent, or merely a performative contradiction? As Jack Torrence said to Wendy through the pantry door—Go check it out!
This episode forms the hinge on which the entire modern theory of knowledge will turn. If Descartes sought indubitable foundations, Hume dissolves them. What Kant will famously call his own “Copernican revolution” begins here, in the rubble.
Join us as we examine the most devastating—and strangely liberating—chapter of Hume’s thought. It is from here that Thelma will next launch us … into Hegel!
METHOD
Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE
Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.
She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.
View all of our coming episodes here.
