[In-person] Curiosity Café – Interpretation

“Well, that’s just your interpretation”. How do we know that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is not in fact about nuclear warfare, or One Thousand and One Nights not about modern dating culture? These questions might seem absurd, but maybe not so in the case of Fight Club, where audiences seem to be split about the main message of the film. At our next Curiosity Café, we will discuss the thing at the crux of these kinds of disagreements: hermeneutics or the act of interpretation.

Join co-moderators Reshma Aser and Sofia Panasiuk to dive into topics at the heart of our experience of subjectivity, and the nature of reality as we come to know it (if we can come to know it, that is). We’ll start off by discussing what it means to have a point-of-view and how it shapes and is itself shaped by our interpretations of things and experiences. From here, we will investigate the nature of these interpretations and how they relate to our search for objective truth. Is there such a thing as Truth (with a capital T), i.e., something universally and eternally true? If so, how can we come to approximate it? How much does context matter for understanding? Do all our attempts to reach understanding require every single piece of context accessible to us, or is it better off to bracket some areas off and take some things as given?

Hermeneutics has significant downstream implications for art, science, and communication, to name a few. As we draw on examples from these different realms, we will come to understand why it is important to discuss the nature of our interpretations.

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!

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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.