What we’re about
Welcome to the Toronto Philosophy Meetup! This is a community 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, 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 Twitter and join our Discord.
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: https://www.meetup.com/The-Toronto-Philosophy-Meetup/pages/30522966/Other_Philosophy_Groups_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.
One of the most revered comedies of the silent era, The General finds hapless Confederate railroad engineer Johnny Gray (Buster Keaton) facing off against Union soldiers during the American Civil War. When Johnny's fiancée, Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack), is accidentally taken away while on a train stolen by Northern forces, Gray pursues the soldiers, using various modes of transportation in comic action scenes that highlight Keaton's boundless wit and dexterity. The Southern engineer who must single-handedly foil the enemy is a classic Keaton character: stoical, determined, and preternaturally straight-faced as chaos reigns around him.
“Keaton’s films have such a graceful perfection, such a meshing of story, character and episode, that they unfold like music.” (Roger Ebert)
“Arguably the greatest screen comedy ever made.” (Time Out)
"A shining example of brilliantly inventive but never flashy film direction. Great art, but also ageless entertainment." (Sight and Sound)
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Let's discuss the century-old silent film classic The General (1926), directed, produced, edited, and written by Buster Keaton (who also starred in the film), and recently voted the 95th greatest movie of all time in Sight & Sound's international survey of film critics and scholars. The film was inspired by a real American Civil War incident when Union soldiers hijacked a Confederate train, recounted in the 1889 memoir The Great Locomotive Chase by William Pittenger.
Please watch the movie in advance and bring your thoughts, reactions, and queries to share with us at the meeting.
You can stream a high quality version here (you can adjust quality in the player settings) or rent it on various platforms online.
Check out other movie discussions in the group every Friday and occasionally other days.
Upcoming events (4+)
See all- Democracy and Beauty: The Political Aesthetics of W. E. B. Du BoisLink visible for attendees
What is beauty, and what is its political function? In what ways might it help undermine white supremacy and cultivate a more democratic political culture? Robert Gooding-Williams’ new book Democracy and Beauty: The Political Aesthetics of W. E. B. Du Bois shines a light on W. E. B. Du Bois’ attempts to answer these questions during the decade surrounding the First World War and, in so doing, offers a groundbreaking account of the philosopher’s aesthetics.
In this event, Gooding-Williams will reconstruct Du Bois’ defense of the political potential of beauty to challenge oppressive systems and foster an inclusive democracy. White supremacy is a powerful force that defies rational revision, Du Bois argued, because it is rooted in the entrenched routines of its adherents. Beauty, however, has a distinctive role to play in the struggle against white supremacy. It can strengthen resolve and ward off despair by showing the oppressed that they can alter their social world, and it can unsettle and even transform the pernicious habits that perpetuate white supremacy.
Gooding-Williams will also explore Du Bois’ account of the interplay among white supremacy, Christianity, capitalism, and imperialism as well as key tensions in his work. A rich engagement with Du Bois’s philosophy of beauty, Gooding-Williams' book demonstrates the relevance of his social thought and aesthetics to present-day arguments about Black pessimism, Black optimism, and the aesthetic turn in Black studies.
About the Speaker:
Robert Gooding-Williams is Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. His area of research includes social and political philosophy, the history of African-American political thought, 19th century European philosophy, existentialism, and aesthetics. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. His last book, Democracy and Beauty: The Political Aesthetics of W. E. B. Dubois is to be published in June by Columbia University Press.
The Moderator:
Brandon Terry is Associate Professor of Social Science at Harvard University and the co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. His forthcoming book The Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement: Political Theory and the Historical Imagination is to be published by Harvard University Press. He is also the editor, with Tommie Shelby, of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
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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.
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.
- Greek 101: Learning Ancient Greek by Speaking ItLink visible for attendees
This will be a meetup series unlike any that David and Philip have done before. Starting in October, we will be learning Ancient Greek by speaking it (as well as writing it and reading it). In other words, we will be learning ancient Greek just like we would learn a living language.
We will not exactly be using a book but will instead be using this video series by Prof. Hans-Friedrich Mueller, Greek 101:
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/greek-101-learning-an-ancient-language
The video course does come with a booklet, so in that sense there will be a book that people will consult during the meetup.
Please note that Hans-Friedrich Mueller's covers both Classical Greek and Biblical Greek.
Accessing Materials
Many of you will have access to this course for free through your public library (if your library provides a service called Kanopy). For example if you live in Toronto or Ottawa you can access this course for free. (Links to the Toronto Public Library and the Ottawa Public Library.)
If not, perhaps you have friends whose public library does have Kanopy and who will share their public library access with you.
Lastly, the course does go on sale for roughly $50 USD quite frequently. Check the link above every few weeks to see if it goes on sale.
About the Meetings
Please note that neither Philip nor David currently know Ancient Greek. So this meetup will be a language course without a teacher. Philip and David will guide the flow of the meetup as hosts typically do, but the only teacher we will have is Hans-Friedrich Mueller who did the video lecture series that will be our text. And of course we will all be teachers to each other.
Each time we get together we will cover one lesson from the video course. The video series has 36 lectures, so the meetup will last for 36 get-togethers (however long that takes). If that pace proves to be too quick, we will consider slowing things down a little bit and spending two sessions on some of the harder video lessons.
If we still have a few (dedicated!) people left in the meetup by the time we are finished with the video course, we will think about reading an ancient Greek work together (possibly Plato's Republic in the original Greek). Wouldn't it be wonderful to read Plato's Republic in the original Greek!
We are sure this is abundantly obvious to everyone, but each participant will have to do a lot of learning on their own. Please be realistic about this. Languages do not learn themselves; you have to work at it.
When we get together, we will be practicing what we have learned on our own throughout the week. Many philosophers end up learning a lot of Ancient Greek words, and for many purposes this might be all you need. We mention this so that no one is misled: This will not be a meetup where we just learn a bunch of ancient Greek words. If that is what you want, Philip would be happy to recommend some excellent books that list and describe a lot of Greek words that philosophers need to know.
Learning some philosophically significant Greek words is a great goal to have, but it is not our only goal in this meetup. In this meetup we will be learning ancient Greek as a language we will speak and read and write. And that means learning all aspects of the language (including the grammar) well enough that we can read Greek without a handy translation by our side and speak Greek without too much hesitation.
Please note that the schedule is a little bit different from what you have come to expect from David and Philip's meetups.
- Starting in October, this meetup will happen once per week, every week.....except
- Frequently we will not meet on the last Monday of the month.
There are a lot of opinions and debates about how ancient Greek was actually pronounced. We will not be engaging in any of these debates in this meetup. In this meetup we will simply adopt Hans-Friedrich Mueller's way of pronouncing Greek.
Lastly, learning a language with other people is enormously fun and we expect that this meetup will be a huge amount of fun!
