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 welcome 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 discussion and to stay in touch with other members.
(🚨🚨🚨 WARNING: FRADULENT EMAILS are circulating that IMPERSONATE organizers of this group and eventually ask you for money or personal information if you engage. IF YOU HAVE RECEIVED SUCH AN EMAIL OR IF YOU ARE UNCERTAIN about any message claiming to represent this group, PLEASE REPORT IT by contacting the main organizer Darren directly through Meetup's messaging system or email us at philosophyto [at] gmail [dot] com. Be vigilant for scams in general, which are everywhere these days and easier than ever to generate because of A.I. 🚨🚨🚨)
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 have moved 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.
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.
Featured event
Bourgeois Coldness by Henrike Kohpeiß
Bourgeois coldness refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and aesthetic forms of preserving the structure of the colonial status quo. It creates an affective shelter in the world, unencroached upon by the immediate consequences of its many catastrophes. It functions like air conditioning — a complex technology which reliably stabilises the climate until those inside consider it natural. Bourgeois spaces — institutional and affective — stay cool and pleasant. But outside it’s burning.
Canonical critical theory by Adorno and Horkheimer enters a dialogue with Black studies through Hartman and Moten.
In this conversation, Henrike Kohpeiß and Fred Moten explore coldness as an affective, political and aesthetic strategy of bourgeois self-preservation. Together, they consider what Black Study and critical theory share, and where they diverge, in revealing the work of self-preservation performed by the bourgeois subject.
"Elegant and erudite in equal measure, this book will stand as a landmark diagnosis of the practices of denial in our time." – Andreas Malm
About the Speaker:
Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher, working primarily in the fields of critical theory, philosophy of emotion, Black Studies, feminist philosophy and aesthetics. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leuphana Transformation Lab at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, studying affects of Transformation, the relationship between crises and transformation, and the notion of Transformation Literacy. She has been teaching on among other things including Sylvia Wynter, philosophy and the Shoah, and bourgeois society and its critique. Occasionally, she engages in artistic collaborations in dance and performance, mostly as a dramaturg or writer, sometimes as a performer. Henrike’s book Bourgeois Coldness was published in September 2025 by Divided Publishing.
The Moderator:
Fred Moten is Professor in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at NYU, where he teaches courses in black study, poetics and critical theory. He works with lots of social and aesthetic study groups including Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, the Black Arts Movement School Modality, Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective, the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, Moved by the Motion, the Institute of Physical Sociality and the Harris/Moten Quartet.
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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. The event is free to attend but the Zoom registration page has, by default, an optional donation amount that you can change to $0 (or whatever you wish). Donations go to The Philosopher magazine to cover our costs and expand the scope of our series.
Please send feedback or comments about our events directly to thephilosopher1923@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you!
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.
Upcoming events
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Plato’s Hippias Major, on Beauty (Live Reading)
·OnlineOnlineHippias of Elis travels throughout the Greek world practicing and teaching the art of making beautiful speeches. On a rare visit to Athens, he meets Socrates, who questions him about the nature of his art. Socrates is especially curious about how Hippias would define beauty. They agree that beauty makes all beautiful things beautiful, but when Socrates presses him to say precisely what he means, Hippias is unable to deliver such a definition. The more Socrates probes, the more absurd the responses from Hippias become.
The Hippias "Major" (aka the Greater Hippias) is one of Plato's most comedic dialogues and one of his finest efforts at posing the philosophical problem of the difference between particular things and universal qualities.
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This will be a live reading of Plato's Hippias Major (or "Greater Hippias"). Saturday September 12 will be the first session and thus the ideal time to join our group. Reference will be made to contemporary and older scholarship. Historical context will be brought up whenever necessary to illuminate the dialogue.
A translation can be found here.
This Plato group meets on Saturdays and has previously read the Symposium, Phaedo, the Apology, Philebus, Gorgias, Critias, Laches, Timaeus, Euthyphro, Crito, Protagoras, Hippias Minor, and other works, including ancient commentaries and texts for contextualisation such as Gorgias’ Praise of Helen. 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.
14 attendees
Jean-Paul Sartre on Freedom and the Other
·OnlineOnlineOver the next 3 weeks we'll be reading Sartre's account of the concrete ways a free subjectivity relates toward the Other. The readings are from Part 3, Chapter 3 of Being and Nothingness as follows.
October 10: "Our first attitude toward the Other: love, language, masochism" (pp. 529-551 in PDF)
October 17: "The second attitude toward the Other: indifference, desire, hatred, sadism" (pp. 551-591 in PDF)
October 24: "Being-with (Mitsein) and the 'we'" (pp. 591-613 in PDF)⸻ ♦ ♦ ♦ ⸻
So-called ‘enlightened societies’ seem to enter periods of crisis, war and unspeakable violence on a regular basis. Can these events simply be attributed to “the crooked timber of humanity, out of which no straight thing was ever made" (Kant), or is there a deeper, more sinister reason for their occurrence? Could it be that the Enlightenment itself – its rationality, moral outlook and existential condition – possesses a disavowed “dark underbelly” that precipitates catastrophe?
We'll explore these questions through arguably the most controversial of the children of the Enlightenment, the Marquis De Sade. In particular, we'll be focusing on 20th century receptions of Sade's work by European writers and philosophers. Not only will this approach offer us possible answers to the questions above, it will allow us to survey major currents of Continental philosophy in the 20th century. See below for an overview of the writers and topics we'll be discussing.
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READING SCHEDULE
Find the up-to-date reading schedule at this link:
https://sites.google.com/view/existentialism-and-its-critics/All texts are available in the Google folder linked at the VERY BOTTOM of this description. The Google Meet link is also posted there.
👇 scroll all the way down for the links 👇
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READINGS OVERVIEW
Barthes extends the structuralist approach developed by Levi-Strauss and Lacan (whom we read previously) to literary theory. In his reading, Sade emerges as a logothete, a founder of a language and a paradigmatic writer of "texts of bliss", whose jouissance derives from the very wounding they precipitate.Foucault redirects the analytical focus away from Barthean semiotics of jouissance and towards what we might call the Sadean episteme. The criterion of the Sadean world emerges as a certain kind of truth: anti-metaphysical, anti-theological, anti-moral. In bracketing away reality, this truth elevates desire to a sovereign status within human experience.
De Beauvoir argues that we must not burn Sade, though we must approach him with caution. Sade exemplifies the existentialist credos of choosing one's freedom and confronting existence without illusions. He is also one of the first to confront the problem of the Other head-on. Yet his glaring fault is to have succumbed to radical solipsism – a brutal compulsion to efface the Other rather than engage existentially with the singularity of Difference.
Klossowski and Bataille offer a quasi-theological interpretation of Sade, linking his texts to the subterranean persistence of the sacred in modernity. Bataille develops his central notion of heterology with reference to Sade's work.
For Blanchot, the Sadean paradox consists in apathy: the most radical and extreme actions are not done out of passion but out of detached rational reflection. Such a state of indifference amounts to an absolute sovereignty, the complete separation of the ego from its relations to the world.
Adorno and Horkheimer find in Sade a prime illustration of their thesis that the calculative rationality of the Enlightenment is cold, objectifying and founded on domination. They regard him as a diabolical truth-teller whose works pre-figure the horrors of totalitarian bureaucracy.
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ABOUT THIS READING GROUP
This is a comprehensive reading group focusing on 20th century French philosophy. Our current project was stimulated by our recent reading of George Bataille's Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Other writers we have discussed include Sartre, de Beauvoir, Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, Kristeva, etc.GROUP RULES
- Please spend 1-2 hours per week reading and preparing for the discussion. Speaking priority will be given to those who have done the readings.
- Keep your comments concise and relevant to the text.
- Please limit each comment to a maximum of 2-3 minutes. You're welcome to speak as many times as you wish.
- Virtual meeting courtesy applies: let's not interrupt each other, keep mics muted when not speaking, and maintain a respectable dress code.
- We'll focus the discussion with key passages and discussion questions. Be sure to bring your favorite passages, questions, comments, criticisms, etc. to the meeting.
LINKS AND RESOURCES
Join the Facebook group for more resources and discussion:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/755460079505498If you have attended previous meetings, please fill out a brief survey at this link: https://forms.gle/tEMJ4tw2yVgnTsQD6
All readings can be found in this Google folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VPRdvZYmUKBY3cSxD8xC8sTYtSEKBXDs
Google Meet link to join the meeting:
https://meet.google.com/uho-cdks-dcbNote: If you prefer to join the Google Meet anonymously, first log out of your Google account and then open the link. Alternatively you can open the link in an Incognito window (Chrome) or Private Browsing (Safari).
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Art: The Gray Forest (1927) by Max Ernst12 attendees
International Relations, Geopolitics, and Current Events Discussion
·OnlineOnlineThis will mostly be a discussion around major recent and ongoing events in international relations, while applying as much IR concepts and frameworks as possible.
Tentative Topics:
- Venezuela
- Iran
- Greenland / NATO
- Middle East Peace Deal
- Ukraine / Russia
- Cuba
- Tariffs, US-China trade war, and geopolitical competition
- Multipolarity
- Nuclear weapons proliferation
- A.I. race and chips
- Sudan
- Taiwan
- South China Sea
- North Korea
- .....
Links from event on Venezuela:
- Vibes-based grand strategy and foreign policy
- Regime change for democracy? Or more pliable former government (Max Blumenthal)
- Not about drugs or fentanyl (Daniel Davis), Narco-trafficking elites to run Venezuela (Chris Hedges)
- Good move because free oil - Not so simple or easy,
- Monroe Doctrine 2.0 - Iran, Columbia, Cuba, Greenland (Daniel Davis),
Links from prior/ongoing series on basic IR Theories:
Theory
- Quick Overview of Structural Realism, Liberalism, etc.; Another
- Offensive vs. Defensive Realism; 2
- Constructivism
- Diplomacy: Stapleton Roy, George Schultz, Bilahari Kausikan
- Power: Joseph Nye, Jack Matlock
Talks, applications, and discussions
- Rise and Fall of Liberal Intl Order
- John Mearsheimer discusses his book "The Great Delusion"
- Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer (2015)
- Why John Mearsheimer is wrong about realism, great power politics and history
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AjiSqp5Ddw
Additional Info and References
- [Placeholder]
35 attendees
Past events
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