What we’re about
The Symposium is a community dedicated to exploring life's questions with use of various guiding texts. Since Plato, philosophy was considered a devotional activity, emerged from the mythic age, among lovers and inspired poets, casting light into their world with the aid of reason. Let us familiarize ourselves with the wisdom tradition, uncover new shapes of thought, and find the great freedom that comes from seeing the lifeworld of our connected selves.
By sharing together we create an open space for fresh insights, whether through ourselves or from others. It is through the light of our questions that we stay connected to the true, even as the depth of our ignorance is continually revealed. Yet as we cleanse the mirror, we find unique harmony between what is thought and spoken, for wisdom to usher in, and for the spirit of philosophical friendship to take hold.
Let us honor that space together.
Upcoming events
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Plato’s Symposium: Part 1 of 2 (rsvp is full)
Kapéj Coffee, 1447 N Sedgwick St, Chicago, IL, USPlato's Symposium presents a series of speeches, each devoted to praising Eros, the Greek god of love and desire. Each account is beautiful but also deeply revealing, as each speaker interprets the nature of love through their own principled lens.
What lies at the heart of our highest praise for love? Why does Eros inspire such profound admiration across human experience?
In this two-part series, we explore the dialogue's speeches in order, beginning today with the first four.
Part 1: The Early Speeches We cover:
- Phaedrus — Love as the oldest god, inspiring courage and virtue.
- Pausanias — The distinction between Heavenly (noble, intellectual) and Common (base, bodily) love.
- Eryximachus — Love as a universal force of harmony, balancing opposites in nature, medicine, and the cosmos.
- Aristophanes — The famous myth of humans split in half, longing for wholeness and reunion.
Part 2 (forthcoming) will address the culminating speeches: Agathon's poetic praise, Socrates' account (via Diotima) of love as a ladder to the divine, and the dramatic intrusion of Alcibiades.
Required Reading For the full text, see this public-domain translation: Plato's Symposium (Project Gutenberg). There are many others online including audiobooks (I prefer the one from Ray Childs).
Optional: Leo Strauss has a helpful book on this dialogue that I definitely recommend.24 attendees
Plato’s Symposium: Part 2 of 2 (including Socrates' Speech)
Kapéj Coffee, 1447 N Sedgwick St, Chicago, IL, USPlato's Symposium presents a series of speeches, each devoted to praising Eros, the Greek god of love and desire. Each account is beautiful but also deeply revealing, as each speaker interprets the nature of love through their own principled lens.
What lies at the heart of our highest praise for love? Why does Eros inspire such profound admiration across human experience?
In the final half of this two-part series, we discuss the final speeches through to the end, including Agathon, Socrates' account (via Diotima) featuring the 'ladder of love', and the dramatic intrusion of Alcibiades.
Assigned Reading For the full text, see this public-domain translation: Plato's Symposium (Project Gutenberg but there are many others online. I prefer audiobooks (especially the one from Ray Childs).
Optional: Leo Strauss has a helpful book on this dialogue that I definitely recommend.10 attendees
"The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life"
Kapéj Coffee, 1447 N Sedgwick St, Chicago, IL, USIn 1891 William James delivered a lecture to the Yale Philosophical Club entitled "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life." It was later included as an essay in The Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy. In the essay James draws a distinction between three questions in ethics: psychological, metaphysical, and casuistic.
"The psychological question asks after the historical origin of our moral ideas and judgments; the metaphysical question asks what the very meaning of the words 'good,' 'ill,' and 'obligation' are; the casuistic question asks what is the measure of the various goods and ills which men recognize, so that the philosopher may settle the true order of human obligations.”
The essay is a little under 10,000 words and will take around 35 to 50 minutes to read. You can download *.pdfs of the essay from The University of Chicago Press Journals, Internet Archive, JSTOR (a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources) and Monadnock. I haven’t found any audio versions of the essay; if you find one feel free to post a link to it in the comments below.
If you prefer audio or video over the written word, the creator of this YouTube video [22:37] gives a thoughtful commentary on the essay. And this YouTube video search returns lots of videos if you’re curious about William James’s overall philosophy.
We look forward to seeing you.17 attendees
Past events
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