[Online] The Other Socrates

This will be an online Zoom meeting. Please RSVP on this Meetup event to get access to the Zoom link. See our online meeting instructions at: https://torontooasis.org/online-meeting-instructions

Our program will run from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm. You can join the meeting starting at 10:45 am for our open social.

Featured Presentation: The Other Socrates

Most of us have heard of Socrates, and some have encountered him in philosophy classes. The version of Socrates, we've seen was shaped by his student Plato, who was advancing his own philosophical agenda. Plato’s Socrates is a relentless inquisitor, exposing inadequate thinking, and showing up other people.

We have independent accounts of Socrates’ life, particularly from his other student Xenophon, who was a more practical man. The Socrates, that he describes was more of a humane, and even joyous, figure: he asks questions of people because he's interested in understanding what makes them tick. Of course, he's interested in the big questions: what makes for a worthwhile life, and how to achieve that; and he doesn’t take what people say at face value, but he doesn't routinely humiliate people, and he cares very much about happiness.

Our featured speaker, Dr. Mark Reimers, will argue that the version of Socrates from Plato has set off western philosophy in the direction of dry argumentation and has lost sympathetic but critical understanding, and the arts of conversation, which were so integral to Socrates’ life and aims. Perhaps if we can recover Socrates’ original motivation, we can make a better philosophy.

Dr. Mark Reimers is a quantitative neuroscientist at Michigan State University, whose research aims to elucidate how dynamic brain activities give rise to thoughts and feelings in people and animals. Dr. Reimers has worked at the US National Institutes of Health, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics and at Michigan State University. His broader aim is to ground our understanding of feeling and thought in the facts of biology.

Dr. Reimers was the leader of the Richmond Humanists in Virginia for five years, and now leads the UU Forum in Lansing, and speaks frequently at humanist and science outreach events in Michigan.

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Looking forward to seeing familiar faces and perhaps some new ones!

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