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 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 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 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
Plato – Statesman (Live Reading)
Over the last few years, we have done a close reading of Plato's Republic and the Laws. Now we turn to the Statesman.
This week we will begin reading at 259d (last week we began at 257a, the start of the dialogue).
The dramatic action is as follows: we pick up after the Eleatic Stranger has finished the discussion that takes place in the dialogue titled the Sophist (which we read several years ago). The discussion turns to the figure of the Statesman, and while the interlocutor in the Sophist was Theaetetus (who resembled Socrates), a youth named Socrates takes on the role of interlocutor (Socrates himself is present).
No particular edition is required, but we can discuss what we want to use during the meeting. Because of this, sharing some editions that are generally available digitally in the comments may be helpful. I'll also try to keep the Greek text handy (probably through a Loeb edition, but anyone can look at Perseus as well).
If you want to familiarize yourself with the text in advance, here are some different editions:
On Perseus, Fowler (HTML): https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=plat.+stat.+257a
Plato's Complete Works:
PDF: https://app.box.com/s/4v3r6gh4ys9gdrqc705ane2hxriqfqre
Upcoming events
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The Divine Comedy / Dante Reading
·OnlineOnlineTo access the group, I will ask participants to briefly show their face before admission, as we have recently experienced a high number of Zoom bombers and disruptions.
- COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES (WE ARE CURRENTLY USING THIS SITE)
- https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/
- Dante Study Documents: I have shared a folder containing all the copies and materials I have prepared for our Dante sessions. New documents will be added:
- regularly.https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YZxvnwlqRM2oKZsqRd36n55p91LSyTKS?usp=share_link
📌 The Divine Comedy is more than a story — it’s a map of the inner self.
- It teaches about choices, responsibility, and consequences.
- It shows how struggle and self‑reflection can lead to growth and spiritual awakening.
- The journey mirrors our own personal transformation — confronting flaws, repenting, and aiming for higher understanding and compassion.
***
## 🧍 Who Was Dante?
- Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was a medieval Italian poet from Florence.
- He is considered one of the greatest writers in world literature and one of the founders of the Italian language.
***
## 🔥 What Is The Divine Comedy?
- A long epic poem written in terza rima (a special rhyming scheme) in the early 1300s.
- It describes a symbolic journey through the afterlife: Hell → Purgatory → Heaven.
- 🌍 What the Three Parts Represent
### 1. ⚫ Inferno (Hell)
- Dante travels through the nine circles of Hell guided by the Roman poet Virgil.
- Each circle punishes a different kind of sin.
- Theme: Recognizing the consequences of wrongdoing and human weaknesses.
### 2. 🔺 Purgatorio (Purgatory)
- Dante and Virgil climb the mountain of Purgatory, where souls purify themselves.
- It’s full of hope and change — sinners repent and grow.
- Theme: Transformation and self‑improvement.
### 3. ☀️ Paradiso (Heaven)
- Beatrice (Dante’s ideal guide of divine love) leads him through the celestial spheres.
- Dante encounters angels and blessed souls.
- Theme: Divine love, spiritual fulfillment, and union with God.
BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS:
- John Ciardi – (I HAVE PURCHASED THIS ONE). Best for a discussion group because it’s clear, accessible, and includes notes for each canto. Helps participants understand the meaning and context without getting lost in archaic language.
- Mandelbaum (20th c.) – Modern, poetic, complete. Very readable and preserves the literary quality. Good if the group wants more literary flavor ''after understanding the basics''.
- Longfellow (1867) – Historically respected, complete, but 19th-century English can be challenging.
## 📚 Links to the Book (Public Domain)
- ***1, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES (WE ARE CURRENTLY USING THIS SITE)
- https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/
Full text - Project Gutenberg
📎 The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso – Project Gutenberg
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8800***This is another version of Project Gutenberg, but this edition also includes notes and explanations for each canto.
https://wyomingcatholic.edu/wp-content/uploads/dante-01-inferno.pdfLECTURES AND INTERESTINS WEBSITES:
A. Prof. Teodolinda Barolini is Lorenzo da Ponte Professor of Italian at Columbia University. You can listen to her AMAZING lectures. There are 54 videos and some are more than one hour. I will be listening at least one per week.
https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/the-dante-course/B. YALE UNIVERSITY LECTURE BY: GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD1450DFDA859F694C. This link has SEVERAL excellent sources:
https://carrieannebrownian.wordpress.com/2021/07/21/extratextual-sources-for-studying-the-divine-comedy/D. Canto - Audio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEDGsmkxv84&t=4s***
20 attendees
Debate: Can you be entirely in control of your Success?
·OnlineOnlineWe had our introductory discussion on what is success. From that there seemed to be a consensus that the major drivers of success were the non material things, love, contentment, how you live etc. During that discussion I developed some follow up questions on which we will have discussions/debates:
But before that, the Zoom link will be posted shortly before the event. During the discussion, if you want to raise a point please raise your hand and you will have up to 3 minutes to speak. Once a speaker talks there will be a 5 minute period where anyone can follow up with a counter point, question, or continuing thought along the same line of thought (leave such comments to 1 minute). But do not begin a new train of thought unless you raise your hand. If you find yourself dominating the conversation please relax and give others a chance to join in.
6/4 Discussion: Is being successful a good thing to strive for? (Or is it better to just live and enjoy your life?) We decided that a drive for success is innate like the desire of a salmon to swim upstream to reproduce. Allowing that drive to take on societies version of success is probably wrong, but developing an individual form of success is more nuanced and may be good or bad, depending if you have an adequate understanding of yourself.
6/11/26 week: What is our greatest drive as humans? To optimize our lives
6/18/26 week: What is our view on what success is as a society? Money, Continuation of Society/Species, Community
6/25/26 week: Is success inside or outside us? It is a mix, usually for younger people more outside as you get older more internally driven. But ultimately, if it is determined by happiness and contentment it has to be internal.
7/2/26 Week: What does it mean to be yourself? The statement "be yourself" has implicit assumptions including: there is a yourself to be and that it is best to be yourself. This is in comparison to the imperative to "know yourself" which implies that you need to evaluate yourself and correct any character flaws you may have. I think the best was a yin and yang relationship between "be yourself" and "know yourself" proposed by Sonny where you perform the self analysis to know yourself and then you go about being yourself in everyday life allowing you to do further analysis taking into account direct experience. But in direct answer to the question, being yourself seems to be the ability to both know what your values are and act in accordance with them.
7-9 Discussion: Is an individual’s view of success more legitimate than that of the group or vice versa? We thought that the group has a large effect on what success ultimately is and your options to move etc. to put yourself in different scenarios are there, but may be limited. So it is situation dependent but is likely the groups view.
7-16 Discussion: How are success, what is good and happiness related? Happiness is often an essential ingredient in being successful as you need to be engaged to be successful at something. And happiness often comes from doing what is good.
7-24 Discussion: Is success how you live or what you accomplish while living or both? A common theme we found was that a feeling of gratification/meaning comes from accomplishing a goal, solving a problem or overcoming a constraint. These are "how you live" subjective feelings and are the main intrinsically valuable things we experience in life. Whereby material things like say a large house does not have any intrinsic value. Therefore, we believe it is "how you live" that determines whether you lived a successful life
7-30 Discussion: Constant Craving- Can we ever be satisfied? We will listen to and discuss the following youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vao9HN_FqOE The video considered all non presentism to be bad as it believes the only place you can be happy and really successful is in the present. But the group was mixed as to whether or not they agreed with that. Some believed that planning and striving for success was inherent in our biology while others believed that being in the now was the best way to spend the majority of ones life. These two views are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
This Week: Can you be entirely in control of your own success?
Which philosophy provides the best path to success: Hedonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, or Aristotelianism?
How can you go into something knowing you are going to get out of it what you intended?
How can you do the best you can in life?
(Meta best vs. micro best, are these always aligned?)
Can you be successful without spirituality?
Does your success in life only matter if there is some kind of an afterlife?
What role does Love play in success?
Are there lessons we are sent to earth to learn?This discussion is deliberately open ended, so please don't come on to the meeting and start saying we need to have definitions like what is success etc. That being said I don't mind you saying to me success is blah blah, therefore I think a successful life is so and so. But I want to encourage different perspectives.
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16 attendees
Modernism Ep05 ⟩ “The Threshold of Liberty”
·OnlineOnlineWhat is Modernism?
The Threshold of Liberty: Surrealism and the Haunted Space of the SelfThis episode is so good that I have come out the opposite side of infinity and no longer wish to persuade anyone to attend. In fact, I hope nobody comes. Avoid the most inspiring forty-eight minutes Robert Hughes ever made, because inspiration here comes by way of bona fide demonic possession.
Especially avoid this episode it if you worship the dream-spaces of Mario Bava and Dario Argento: the artificial skies, impossible corridors, saturated colors, theatrical ruins, and malign geometries of Lisa and the Devil, Black Sabbath, Suspiria, and Inferno. Avoid it if you were formed by the folk-occult dread of Tigon, Amicus, Hammer, the BBC, and American occult television—Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, all those BBC witchcraft documentaries, Midnight Offerings, the Shatner-Borgnine masterpiece The Devil’s Rain, Evilspeak (the most accurate Lacanian depiction of the Christian revelation ever made), Umberto Ecco’s occult novels, and most of all Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.
Friends, there is a stratum of recently antique horror that wounds more deeply than monsters do. Its talisman is the bottomless spider-bite smile of Anthony James as the silent chauffeur in Burnt Offerings—the face of two generations ago that only now admits what it is. Daddy’s boot has been in your face all this time.
This week’s episode gives us the art-historical genealogy of that seductive horrific smile.
It’s the Surrealism Episode!
Hughes’s subject is Surrealism, the 20-cent’s most sustained attempt to free human life from logic, morality, usefulness, and the police supervision of the conscious ego. Its leader, André Breton, was Pope and the world-historical Zeitgeist Magus that Crowley only dreamed of being. Surrealism had dogmas, saints, rituals, baptisms, heresies, expulsions, sacred places, holy objects, and an invisible kingdom whose entrance lay somewhere beneath waking consciousness.
No one attending a Meetup disagrees with the occult metaphysics of Surrealism, which is “the conscious self is late, flimsy, and mostly decorative.” All philosophy readers hanker to insight behind the curtain, under the skin. We all know the truth: our innards are run by dream, desire, repression, memory, coincidence, sexual terror, inherited image, collective fantasy, and the Demon King who thinks us before we arise and pretend to be auto-nomous.
The Most Fun Art
Dream is insight; the pure form of the dream, deepest insight. Madness is evidence. Possession is revelation. Automatic writing, free association, found objects, Tarot, Rorschach blots, chance encounters, trance states, collage, and visual metamorphosis yield core samples from the unconscious, aka the True Self.
And when the occult tries to become real—when it tries to acquire an objective world instead of remaining a private belief—it produces Giorgio de Chirico’s space.
His paintings give the unconscious its perfect expression: immense plazas, hard skies, deep arcades, impossible perspectives, tiny human figures, statues, mannequins, towers, railway smoke, and shadows arriving from objects outside the frame. Everything is geometrically lucid. The perspective is didactically Apollonian. De Chirico is onto-industrial style—the exposed timber framing behind a theatrical flat, the stage-set support structure of reality. It is physical space qua metaphysical evidence.
And yet the scene has been abandoned by ordinary causality-grade reality.
That’s it! De Chirico the true father of all contemporary-pomo understanding of the optimal use-value of art.
Here is our central puzzle:
Why does psychic depth appear as external space?
Why does the supposedly interior unconscious arrive as plaza, desert, horizon, corridor, tower, empty sky, or infinite perspective grid? Why do Dalí’s beaches and de Chirico’s piazzas feel more inward than a face? Why does the dark underbelly of the self become spatial—and why does that space look almost exactly like the clear, public, Apollonian world of ordinary perception, except that it is haunted?
Hughes follows this problem through an extraordinary succession of artists and objects:
Böcklin’s islands of death; Max Ernst’s collage-terrorism; Henri Rousseau’s impossible jungles; Ferdinand Cheval’s Palais Idéal; Miró’s polymorphous bestiary; Gaudí’s liquefied architecture; Dalí’s poisoned miniatures; Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup; Man Ray’s mutilated household objects; Magritte’s warfare between word, image, and thing; Bellmer’s violated dolls; Cornell’s sealed memory-theatres; Gorky’s biomorphic landscapes; and the early Abstract Expressionists’ attempt to paint the “tragic and timeless.”
Nature barely matters to the Surrealists. Their jungle is culture: arcades, wax museums, advertisements, shop windows, discarded photographs, mannequins, broken machines, cheap souvenirs, erotic commodities, and the Paris Flea Market—Hughes’s magnificent “unconscious mind of Capitalism itself,” where the commodity world deposits everything it has rejected, forgotten, or failed to sell.
Other Stuff After Surrealism
Hughes crosses the Atlantic and shows us Joseph Cornell turning cultural debris into private cosmologies. Arshile Gorky converting anatomy, landscape, memory, and trauma into fluent biomorphic space. Behold Pollock, Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, and Robert Motherwell inheriting psychic automatism, stripping away Surrealism’s theatrical dream-images, and using chance itself (anti-causality, anti-robot) as a “plastic weapon” for inventing form.
Free at last! On acid; in twilight/hypnogogic consciousness; the infant brain with every neuron connected to every other is most intimate with bottommost reality.
After 1945, the old dream of liberation mutates again. It passes through Art Brut, happenings, Christo, Chris Burden, body art, psychedelic self-expression, May 1968, Vietnam, the cult of youth, and the belief that exposing the self automatically produces truth.
Hughes then ends this question: Is all confession inherently interesting?
Or does private discharge become art only when it acquires form, structure, discrimination, and intelligible pressure? The Surrealist liberation of the unconscious produced masterpieces. It also produced the still-popular psychic laundry lists, therapeutic pap, documented gesture suites, cultivated derangement performances, and every bourgeois child demanding that his hallucinations receive institutional funding. Hughes is great here.
Bonus Practical Gift
For your immense entertainment value, we will descend the self-hypnotic stairway by means of Ouija boards, Tarot cards, Rorschachs, automatic writing, automatic drawing. We have at least two human guinea pigs willing to conduct low-budget traffic with the Dark Flows … live during the event! If you’ve never witnesses actual channeling before, you’re gonna love this.
All the paintings covered in the episode are collected here: The mighty painting PDF
METHOD
- Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.
- As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)
ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK
Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.
View all of our coming episodes here.
11 attendees
Past events
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