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 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.
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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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Jewish Thinkers of Otherness ⟩ Emmanuel Levinas
·OnlineOnlineThis, the fifth episode in our series on Jewish Thinkers of Otherness, turns to the dark and mysterious philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.
Rather than attempting a panoramic survey, I will dissect just one decisive organ: escape.
In his 1935 essay De l’évasion, Levinas asks why finite beings feel compelled to take leave of themselves.
A familiar scenario:
- We hurt. We brace. We harden. We push back against what presses in on us—facticity, embodiment, mortality.
- Yet the very act of bracing becomes another form of enclosure.
- Existence can feel heavy, surrounding, inescapable.
- What is this recurring impulse to break out of oneself?
From this early meditation on escape, we can glimpse the later Levinas. Transcendence will no longer mean securing myself against my limits. It will mean interruption. The other person—the face—will emerge not as an object in my field, nor as a concept to be subsumed, but as a demand that precedes my projects.
Our guiding question will be: When we try to escape our finitude, what are we really fleeing—and what would it mean not to flee?
But before that, we will review the history of phenomenology from Kant through Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger.
Jewish Thinkers of Otherness: Buber – Arendt – Levinas – Derrida
This series will examine four distinct ways whereby the Other becomes a decisive philosophical event: as presence, as plurality, as ethical asymmetry, and as structural difference.
Each session focuses on one thinker and one conceptual pathway, presented by a brave member of our community—currently experiencing performance anxiety about presenting to a group of critical Others. But they have no need to worry, because Jedi Master Professor Steven Taubeneck will be on hand to answer the hard hard questions and prevent us from cheating, lying, fabricating, speculating, and bluffing.
METHOD
TBA
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK
Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.
View all of our coming episodes here.
13 attendees
Hegel's Science of Logic (Book 1: The Doctrine of Being)
·OnlineOnlineAt this meeting we'll pick up where we left off, at section (y), the Transition of the Finite into the Infinite, on page 136 in the Miller edition.
And, again, at the end of the meeting we'll be talking about Chapter 10, Limit and Finitude, in Stephen Houlgate's On Being: Quality and the Birth of Quantity in Hegel's 'Science of Logic' , Vol. 1.
A good essay which addresses the most important questions that arise in the first chapter of the Logic can be found here:
Another good essay, by Dieter Henrich, entitled Beginning and Method of (the) Logic, is available here (link).
During the meetings we'll be using the Miller translation. The pdf of the Miller can be found here (link).At the end of the meeting we'll be talking about Stephen Houlgate's On Being: Quality and the Birth of Quantity in Hegel's 'Science of Logic' , Vol. 1, but I don't know what part of we should look at. It is available here (link).
Also, a good essay which addresses the most important questions that arise in the first chapter of the Logic can be found here:
Another good essay, by Dieter Henrich, entitled Beginning and Method of (the) Logic, is available here.
During the meetings we'll be using the Miller translation. The pdf of the Miller can be found here (link).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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23 attendees
Labour and the Philosophy of Skill
Larkin Building, Room 200, 15 Devonshire Place, University of Toronto, Toronto, on, CAThere is a rich philosophical literature on skills (e.g., chess, ballet, cricket) which focuses both on the mental states of performers (e.g., what is the phenomenology of doing something well?) and on the evaluative dimension of skill and talent (e.g., what makes skilled achievements valuable?). Within this literature, there is a glaring omission of any discussion of skills acquired and expressed in standard workplace contexts, from cafés to warehouses. This talk considers the significance of that omission, both for our philosophical conception of skill and our understanding of action in the workplace. I argue that the phenomenology of workplace skill (which should account for feelings like boredom and fear) complicates our evaluative notions about skill and talent, mainly because it elucidates and reveals as untenable certain assumptions within the philosophy of skill about the evaluative implications of phenomenological states.
Zara Anwarzai
https://www.sfu.ca/philosophy/people/profiles/zanwarza/
Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy
Simon Fraser UniversityAbout the Speaker:
I received my PhD from Indiana University in Philosophy and in Cognitive Science in 2024. My current work focuses on the social dimension of skill and expertise. Specifically, I'm interested in how to apply traditional inquiry into the cognitive and epistemological mechanisms involved in skill (which mainly focuses on individual skilled performers) to skills acquired and expressed by pairs or groups, like team sports or ensemble performances. I have done empirical work on the evolution of human tool use and manufacture. I also have broad interests in social ontology (e.g., the nature of collectives, shared agency, and group dynamics) and the philosophy of work (e.g., the phenomenology of automaticity in the workplace, the structure of skilled action at work, the relationship between standards of expertise and capital). I am co-organizing the upcoming workshop, "Can Social Ontology Change the World?" in October 2026.
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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. 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
11 attendees
Past events
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