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
Plato’s Symposium, on Love (Live Reading)
The Symposium is a heavily fictionalised account of a convivial gathering supposedly taking place sometime around 416 BC and given by the young poet Agathon to celebrate his recent victory in a poetic contest. The guest roster reads like a who is who of late 5th century Athenian society. Symposium’s influence has defied the confines of philosophical discourse throughout the history of thought. It consists of series of speeches on Love (Eros) and offers an exploration of its variety from its most mundane to its most divine forms.
Love, however, is no mere code-name for the attraction between human beings but rather a primordial cosmic force that manifests itself in that attraction. Hence the use of myth is utterly justified in this context. Performativity plays an unusually substantial role in the unfolding of the dialogue. For a Platonic dialogue, there are many light-hearted moments that occasionally culminate in peaks of intensity.
Reference will be made to Xenophon’s Symposium, Ficino's Commentary on the Symposium as well variety of modern works such as Leo Strauss's seminal work bearing the same title.
This is a relatively early work by Plato probably composed, according to what the indications you can find in the work between 385 and 378 BC and thus belonging to his late early or early middle period.
The Symposium, along with the Republic and Timaeus is a major influence on the development of European thought.
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This is a live reading of Plato's Symposium. No previous knowledge of the Platonic corpus is required but a general understanding of the questions of philosophy in general and of ancient philosophy in particular is to some extent desirable but not presupposed. This Plato group meets on Saturdays and has previously read the Phaedo, the Apology, Philebus, Gorgias, Critias, Laches, Timaeus, Euthyphro, Crito and other works, including ancient commentaries and texts for contextualisation such as Gorgias’ Praise of Helen. The reading is intended for well-informed generalists even though specialists are obviously welcome. It is our aspiration to read the Platonic corpus over a long period of time.
The host is Constantine Lerounis, a distinguished Greek philologist and poet, author of Four Access Points to Shakespeare’s Works (in Greek) and Former Advisor to the President of the Hellenic Republic. November 8 is the introductory session for the Symposium and hence an ideal opportunity to join the group without having to do any catching up.
The translation we are using is by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff and can be found here.
Upcoming events
531
•OnlineClosed Worlds & The Constitutive Outsides of Artificial Intelligence
OnlineThis talk is offered as a contribution to the small but expanding movement to resist the proposition that artificial intelligence (A.I.) is the driving technology of our age. The aim is to anchor debate about the efficacy of algorithmic technologies in their politics, raising a set of questions otherwise absent from the discussion. I explore those questions in the domain on which my own research is focused, the martial epistemologies of data-driven warfighting, which is where algorithmic intensification has its most immediately lethal effects. The erasure of liveliness is central to the military programme, rendering always potentially unruly persons inside the machine as disciplined operators, while dehumanising those who are its justificatory targets.
The closed world is a trope, articulated most famously by historian of science Paul Edwards (1996), for the technopolitical imaginary of dominance and containment that underwrote the Cold War arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union at the close of the 20th century. Through a critical examination of the current U.S. project of Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2), I examine the rebirth of AI as the promissory technological fix aimed at securing militarism’s future. I read documentary sources produced by the United States Department of Defense, along with defense related media reports and analyses, against recent challenges to the technopolitical imaginary of closed world militarism based on critical scholarship, investigative journalism, and creative diplomacy. These counter-stories challenge the attempt within martial epistemologies to make clean demarcations of enmity within complex relations of affinity and difference, recovering the realities that escape datafication and opening spaces in which to consider demilitarization and the possibilities for reparative future-making.
About the Speaker:
Lucy Suchman is a professor emeritus of the anthropology of science and technology at Lancaster University. She was previously a principal scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where she spent twenty years as a researcher. During this period, she became widely recognized for her critical engagement with artificial intelligence, as well as her foundational contributions to a deeper understanding of both the essential connections and the profound differences between humans and machines. Suchman’s current research continues her long-standing critical engagement with A.I., focusing on the use of robotics in both healthcare and military contexts. Through this work, she examines how automation mediates questions of labor, humanity, and justice — and how these domains are increasingly entangled in complex, ethically charged ways.
Suchman is the author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007, CUP) and Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (1987, CUP), widely cited works that have reshaped our understanding of how people engage with intelligent systems. She was a founding member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and served on its Board of Directors from 1982–1990. In 2002, she received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Sciences, in 2010 the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Lifetime Research Award, and in 2014 the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Bernal Prize for Distinguished Contributions to the Field. In 2016, Suchman was an expert panelist at the UN’s Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, as a member of ICRAC.
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This is an online talk and audience Q&A presented by the University of Toronto's Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. It is open to the public and held on Zoom.
The featured speaker will present for 45 minutes, followed by an open discussion with participants.
About the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society:
The Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society is a research institute at the University of Toronto that explores the ethical and societal implications of technology. Our mission is to deepen our understanding of technologies, societies, and what it means to be human by integrating research across traditional boundaries and building practical, human-centred solutions that really make a difference.
We believe humanity still has the power to shape the technological revolution in positive ways, and we’re here to connect and collaborate with the brightest minds in the world to make that belief a reality. The integrative research we conduct rethinks technology’s role in society, the contemporary needs of human communities, and the systems that govern them. We’re investigating how best to align technology with human values and deploy it accordingly.
The human-centred solutions we build are actionable and practical, highlighting the potential of emerging technologies to serve the public good while protecting citizens and societies from their misuse.
The institute will be housed in the new $100 million Schwartz Reisman Innovation Centre currently under construction at the University of Toronto.
28 attendees
On Being Equal as Friends
Larkin Building, Room 200, 15 Devonshire Place, University of Toronto, Toronto, on, CAMany people consider friendship to be the paradigm of egalitarian relationships. We relate to our friends as equals, unlike how we relate to our parents, children, mentors, etc. However, little has been said about what this friendship equality exactly amounts to. In my project, "Equal as Friends", I discuss exactly how we should understand this equality. According to my account, friendship equality should be analyzed as equal bargaining power with respect to making decisions in the context of the friendship.
In my discussion of this account, I explain why the voluntary nature of friendship requires a minimal equality in bargaining power. I also discuss some interesting normative implications on relationship ethics that are natural extensions of my account.
Yiran Hua
https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/philosophy/person/yiran-hua
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Instructor
Centre for Ethics
University of TorontoAbout the Speaker:
Yiran works on ethics and aesthetics. Before coming to Toronto, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good. She received her doctorate from Brown University with a dissertation on "Ordinary Friendship". When doing philosophy, Yiran thinks about intimacy, love and beauty, and social/political relationships. She also has research interests in tech ethics, feminist philosophy, and Chinese philosophy. When not doing philosophy, Yiran is a creative writer.
Her paper "On being good friends with a bad person" was published in Philosophical Studies in 2025.
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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 pizza and refreshments will be served at the event. Sometimes we look for each other after the talk for further discussion about the topic.
The talk will also be streamed online with live chat here.
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
19 attendees![Nietzsche: The Gay Science [Session 61]](https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/b/e/b/a/highres_521988826.jpeg)
•OnlineNietzsche: The Gay Science [Session 61]
OnlineWhile the Walter Kaufmann translation is preferred, a link to the free Cambridge translation is here. For this Meetup, we will read aphorisms 232-242, and discuss them one at a time and get as far as we get, carrying forward any undiscussed aphorisms to the following week.
It’s 1882, and a friend has just given you a copy and recommendation of a book by a former professor of philology named Friedrich Nietzsche. Your friend says that he seems to be a philosopher of some sort, even though he doesn’t write like one, and in this book he argues, among a lot of other provocative things, that God Is dead!
This Is the beginner’s mind that this Meetup will take with this book. You may know his contemporaries and antecedents, but you’re here to share YOUR thoughts, not those of subsequent critics.
Recordings and AI summaries of previous sessions are available here.
Suggested texts: The Portable Neitzsche, edited by Walter Kaufmann and The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, edited by Walter KaufmannSyllabus (titles are linked to free PDF’s, most of which require a free academia.edu account)
The Gay Science (academia.edu)
Beyond Good and Evil (academia.edu)*
On The Genealogy of Morals (academia.edu)*
The Case of Wagner*
Twilight of the Idols** (academia.edu)
The Antichrist**
Ecce Homo*
Nietzsche Contra Wagner***The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, edited by Walter Kaufmann
**Walter Kaufmann’s, The Portable Nietzsche11 attendees
•OnlineKant: Critique of Judgment (Week 6 – On Art and Genius)
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 §43 - 55 (182 - 212, 30 pages)
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)10 attendees
Past events
6994
