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
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•OnlineResisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence
OnlineArtificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere, yet it causes damage to society in ways that can’t be fixed. Instead of helping to address our current crises, AI causes divisions that limit people’s life chances, and even suggests fascistic solutions to social problems. In this event, Dan McQuillan will discuss his analysis of AI’s deep learning technology and its political effects and traces the ways that it resonates with contemporary political and social currents, from global austerity to the rise of the far right.
Dan McQuillan calls for us to resist A.I. as we know it and restructure it by prioritising the common good over algorithmic optimization. He sets out an anti-fascist approach to AI that replaces exclusions with caring, proposes people’s councils as a way to restructure AI through mutual aid and outlines new mechanisms that would adapt to changing times by supporting collective freedom.
Academically rigorous, yet accessible to a socially engaged readership, McQuillan's book will be of interest to all who wish to challenge the social logic of AI by reasserting the importance of the common good.
About the Speaker:
Dan McQuillan is a Senior Lecturer in Creative and Social Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has a degree in Physics from Oxford and a PhD in Experimental Particle Physics from Imperial College, London. After his PhD, Dan worked with people learning disabilities & mental health issues, created websites with asylum seekers, ran social innovation camps in Georgia, Armenia & Kyrgyzstan, led a citizen science project in Kosova, and worked in digital roles in both Amnesty International and the NHS. His book Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence was published in 2022.
The Moderator:
Andrés Saenz de Sicilia is a British-Mexican philosopher, researcher and artist. He is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London and Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He has published widely in the fields of philosophy and social and political theory, as well as carrying out socially engaged research projects and collaborations. He is author of Subsumption in Kant, Hegel in Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society (2024) and editor of Marx and the Critique of Humanism (Bloosmsbury, forthcoming 2025).
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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 zero (or whatever you wish). Donations go to The Philosopher magazine to cover our costs and expand the scope of the 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.
53 attendees
•OnlineThe Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and The Fate of Philosophy
Online“A provocative reassessment of Heidegger’s critique of German Idealism from one of the tradition’s foremost interpreters. Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy ended — failed, even — in the German Idealist tradition. In The Culmination, Robert B. Pippin (University of Chicago) explores the ramifications of this charge through a masterful survey of Western philosophy, especially Heidegger’s critiques of Hegel and Kant. Pippin argues that Heidegger’s basic concern was to determine sources of meaning for human life, particularly those that had been obscured by Western philosophy’s attention to reason. The Culmination offers a new interpretation of Heidegger, German Idealism, and the fate of Western rationalism...”
Welcome everyone to the next meetup series that David and Philip are offering, resuming May 2025. This time we will be reading the book:
- The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy (2024, University of Chicago Press) by Robert Pippin
The format will be our usual "accelerated live read". What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 15-25 pages of text before each session. 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.
Unlike the meetups Philip does on Sundays with another co-host, this meetup will be two hours. There is no "Final Hour Free For All" on Monday like there is on Sunday. Everyone is welcome to attend, even people who have not done the reading. But we need to make sure that only the people who have done the reading are the people who are guiding the direction of the conversation. So please do the reading if you intend to speak and shape the conversation that will happen in this meetup. You may not think that this applies to you... but yes! It applies to you!
Here is the reading schedule (which may change slightly as the meetup progresses). This series meets every 2 weeks on Monday. A pdf is available here.
- For August 25, please read pp. 110-119
- For Sept 8, please read pp. 120-127
- MEETING CANCEL For Sept 22nd please read pages 128- 135.
- For October 6, please read pages 128- 135.
- For October 20, please read pages 139-147.
- For November 3, please read pages 147-156.
- .....
Please note that in this meetup we will be actually doing philosophy and not merely passively absorbing the ideas of Pippin, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger. What this means is that we will be trying to find flaws in the reasoning that Pippin, Kant et al present. We will also be trying to improve the ideas in question and perhaps proposing better alternatives. That is what philosophers do after all!
It is strongly advised that participants read the writings of Kant, Hegel and Heidegger which Pippin references throughout his book "The Culmination".
Check out Philip's other series on Sundays (hosted with Jen):
20 attendees![[In-person] Curiosity Café: Shame](https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/e/0/2/1/highres_530997377.jpeg)
[In-person] Curiosity Café: Shame
Madison Avenue Pub, 14 Madison Ave, Toronto, ON, CAWhat comes to mind when you think of shame? Shame is related to other experiences such as embarrassment, humiliation, and guilt. What differentiates shame from these common experiences? Furthermore, how and when do we learn what to feel ashamed about? Most if not all of us can recall feeling ashamed as children after having done something wrong. Likely, a parent or other older adult informed us that we have broken something (a social norm, an explicit rule, or even an object). It is no surprise then that shame can play a formative role in shaping our identities during our early years.
In this café, we’ll explore the experience of shame as well as the social and cultural context in which it is experienced. We’ll discuss questions such as:
- How is shame similar to or different from embarrassment, humiliation, and guilt?
- How do we learn what to feel ashamed about?
- In what ways might shame play a role in the development of our identity?
- When can shame be helpful? When can shame be harmful? How can we tell whether shame is helping or harming us in a given situation?
- Imagine a world where shame as a social mechanism did not exist. What would this world look like? Is this a better world?"
Join us on Tuesday, November 4th for an exploration of these questions and more.
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!
An important note: We know personal experiences may naturally arise during this discussion. If so, we recommend flagging them to process at another time, ideally in a safe and supportive environment. While we are experts at facilitating philosophical exploration, we are not equipped to facilitate or support processing these experiences.
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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.
11 attendees
Past events
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