The Toronto Philosophy Meetup

Michaele L. Ferguson is Associate Professor of Political Science and a President’s Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of Sharing Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2012), co-editor of W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender (Duke University Press, 2007), and co-editor of Iris Marion Young: Gender, Justice, and the Politics of Difference (Routledge, 2022). She has written numerous articles on feminist and democratic theory, including most recently “Dead Dogma and the Limits of Feminist Political Imagination: Thinking #Metoo as Consciousness-Raising," in Theory & Event (2022), and with Alisa Kessel the satirical “Correspondence in re: Brotherhood is Powerful,” in Political Theory (2023).

She is currently finishing a book on feminist political theory, Bandita: Iris Marion Young and the Politics of Writing, Reading, and Citation (Oxford University Press), and developing a role-playing game on the Paris Commune. She is the Co-President of the Association for Political Theory, a Consulting Editor for Contemporary Political Theory, and the Special Envoy for the Reacting Consortium.

The Moderator:

Isabelle Laurenzi holds a Ph.D. in political theory from Yale University. Her dissertation draws on theories of political consciousness and action, as well as feminist critiques of domination and power. As of September 2026, she is a Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow in Liberal Studies at New York University. Currently she is at work on two books: one about the ethics and politics of ending intimate relationships, and another on the political and religious thought of the early modern English poet John Milton. More broadly, she is interested in how thinkers and writers across contexts have attempted to describe the possibilities (and difficulties!) of transforming the social and political conditions in which they live. As a coordinator for a online event series by The Philosopher, she occasionally hosts book talks on recent work in religious ethics, political theory, feminist philosophy, and black studies.

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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 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. Our managing directors are Andrés Saenz de Sicilia and Tara Needham, and they are supported by our managing editors and editorial board. For a full overview of our team, see here. We currently publish two print issues per year, as well as a “third publication” (generally an edited collection).

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.

Join us on Zoom for a fun, informal philosophical chat with members of The Philosopher's Editorial Team. Bring your philosophical questions*, and we will try our best to offer some engaging responses. This session, we will be joined by panelists Michael Bavidge, Kate Warlow-Corcoran, and Paul North, chaired by Sandra Teresa Florencia García.

If you are attending, you are invited and encouraged to submit a question in advance to this Google form.

This will be a fun, informal conversation. No experience of philosophy is required!

The guests:

• Paul North is Maurice Natanson Professor of German and Philosophy at Yale. He works in post-Kantian philosophy, Jewish thought, and critical theory, with recent focus on Karl Marx. He has written four books. The Standpoint of Marx’s Capital (forthcoming 2027). Bizarre Privileged Items in the Universe: The Logic of Likeness (Zone 2021), The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation (Stanford 2015). And The Problem of Distraction (Stanford 2012). He is co-editor of a new edition of Marx’s Capital, three volumes, with Princeton University Press.
• Kate Warlow-Corcoran is a Managing Editor at The Philosopher and is currently running our Philosophy of Hope reading group. She co-edited the December 2025 issue of our publication, Crossing the Floods. Her interests include moral psychology and the philosophy of emotion. She has a particular interest in the work of 20th century German philosopher Theodor Adorno.
• Michael Bavidge is the president of The Philosophical Society of England (PSE), the charity which sponsors The Philosopher. A former lecturer at Newcastle University, he worked at the Centre for Lifelong Learning and then the university's Philosophical Studies Programme. He wrote on psychopathy and the law, pain and suffering, and animal minds.
• Sandra Teresa Florencia García studied philosophy at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and is part of The Philosopher's editorial board. Her interests focus on Philosophy of Science, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Language, specifically on the works of Clément Rosset, Henri Bergson, and Henri Poincaré.

Note that this 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.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

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. Our managing directors are Andrés Saenz de Sicilia and Tara Needham, and they are supported by our managing editors and editorial board. For a full overview of our team, see here. We currently publish two print issues per year, as well as a “third publication” (generally an edited collection).

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.

In order that we are literally on the same page, the only version that will be allowed is the Adrian del Caro translation published by Cambridge University in 2006, available as a free PDF here. Download it and save it somewhere for reading on a digital device. If you insist on a physical copy, try libraries, Amazon, Bookfinders, Bookshop, or a local used bookstore (if there are any left) .

Session 8 - On Reading and Writing + On the Tree on the Mountain

What is the spirit of gravity?

What does the tree symbolize?

What is Zarathustra trying to tell the young man?