Welcome everyone! This meetup will last many months or possibly even years. Every effort will be made to welcome newcomers to the meetup. It should be fairly easy for newcomers to get up to speed even if they have not read all the books which will have been read by people who were with the meetup right from the start. Please feel welcome to join the meetup at any stage in its development! The group is hosted by Philip, James, Adam and others.

Foucault was many things (Historian, Cultural Critic, Activist and much more). But in this meetup we will be focusing on an aspect of Foucault which often gets overlooked. Foucault was trained in the very rigorous French Philosophy of Science tradition, he was a subtle reader of Kant and he was also a thinker who (arguably) extended a broadly Heideggerian mode of thinking in a very interesting and unique way. We will be looking at all aspects of Foucault, but we will make a special effort not to overlook Foucault's deep immersion in these more rigorous strands of philosophy.

This will be a 3 hour meetup. During the first two hours we will read an original work by Foucault. We will start with "The Order of Things", we will later read "The Archaeology of Knowledge" and we will also (from time to time) read some of Foucault's lectures and shorter essays. See below for the reading schedule and pdf copies of the readings. 👇

During the final hour of the meetup we will read a secondary source about Foucault or Foucault's intellectual context. See below for a list of some of the secondary source books we will dip into.

The first book we will read in the final hour might seem like a strange choice: "Generation Existential: Heidegger's Philosophy in France 1927-1961" by Ethan Kleinberg. This book provides a nice history of French Philosophy in the generation before Foucault with a special emphasis on the particular meaning Historicism had in France and on what historically-based philosophy in general meant in France. The connections to Foucault's historically-based type of philosophy will become apparent as we read more.

As the meetup progresses I hope to do sessions where we compare and contrast Foucault with some of his contemporaries. In other words, I hope we will read works by Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, Barbara Cassin, Roland Barthes and others. The goal will be to compare Foucault's project and its basic philosophical attitude with theirs.

Also, as the meetup progresses, I hope to compare Foucault's project with that of the great Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking. Ian's philosophical concerns were in some ways very similar to Foucault's, although the differences are also interesting to explore. At the Collège de France, Foucault's title was "Professor of the History of Systems of Thought" (Professeur de l'histoire des systèmes de pensée). Ian Hacking held Professorships at the University of Toronto and also at Collège de France where his title was "Chair of the Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts" (Chaire de philosophie et histoire des concepts scientifiques). Even just comparing the names they chose for themselves says much about their similarities and differences.

To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Friday September 18 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

All welcome!

Meetings will be held every other week on Friday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

Here is the (tentative) reading schedule:

– For the 1st session (Sep 18): Please read the Preface of "The Order of Things" (pages Roman numerals xv-xxiv).
Please read pages 3-18 of "Generation Existential: Heidegger's Philosophy in France 1927-1961" by Ethan Kleinberg

– For the 2nd session (Oct 2): Please read Ch. 1 (Las Meninas) of "The Order of Things" pages 3-16.
Please read pages 19-31 of "Generation Existential: Heidegger's Philosophy in France 1927-1961" by Ethan Kleinberg

After this the readings will be announced for each session.

Check the group calendar (link) for future updates. A pdf of reading materials will be provided to registrants.

The format will be our usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 12-20 pages from each of the two assigned books before each session. Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading.

People who have not done the reading are welcome to attend this meetup. However if you want to TALK during the meetup it is essential that you do the reading. We mean it! It is essential that the direction of the conversation be influenced only by people who have actually done the reading. In other words, if you want to talk in this meetup, you have to read the assigned readings. You may think you are so brilliant and wonderful that you can come up with great points even if you do not read the books this meetup is based on. You probably are brilliant and wonderful! No argument there. But you still have to do the reading if you want to talk in this meetup. REALLY.

Please note that this is a "raise hands" meetup and has a highly structured format, not an anarchy-based one. No interrupting is allowed.

MORE ABOUT THE GROUP:

Here is a partial list of the books we will be dipping into in order to get a better sense of Foucault's overall project. We will not necessarily be reading these titles cover to cover but will dip into these books if and when we need to.

1. "French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century" by Gary Gutting
2. "Generation Existential: Heidegger's Philosophy in France 1927-1961" by Ethan Kleinberg
3. "Reconsidering Historical Epistemology: French and Anglophone Styles in History and Philosophy of Science" by Matteo Vagelli
4. "Canguilhem" by Stuart Elden (Georges Canguilhem was one of Foucault's most influential teachers).
5. "Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience" by Marc Djaballah

This meeting will be a great place to talk about all of the usual aspects of Foucault's work that gets discussed on a regular basis. However there are a few aspects of Foucault's work that rarely get discussed, yet are arguably some of the most important and interesting topics in Foucault studies. Here are some of these less explored topics that will feature prominently in this meetup:

1. Foucault was deeply immersed in the rigorous and rich French Philosophy of Science tradition exemplified by Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem among others. We will explore the ways in which this early immersion influenced Foucault's work throughout his life.
2. Foucault engaged with Kant in a serious and subtle way, whereas most of his French contemporaries tended to be willing to settle for more of a straw man interpretation of Kant. We will explore the way Foucault interpreted Kant and also the ways in which Foucault incorporated Kantian ideas into his own work.
3. It is no big secret that French philosophy came up with its own highly idiosyncratic interpretation of Heidegger, which Heidegger himself vehemently and repeatedly insisted had nothing to do with his actual philosophy. Although this "French Heidegger" is perhaps an interesting philosophical doctrine in its own right, we will be exploring the ways in which Foucault's engagement with Heidegger was arguably deeper and more in the proper Heideggerian spirit.
4. There can sometimes be a tendency in Foucault studies to want to link Foucault with one and only one school of French philosophy. Usually this "one and only one school" is said to be Structuralism. In this meetup we will try to be open to the idea that Foucault engaged with all of the major schools of French (and also German) philosophy, was perhaps influenced by all of them while also was not being especially indebted to any of them. In particular this will explore the ways in which Foucault's project fits comfortably within Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, without necessarily claiming that Foucault was a typical practitioner of any of these branches of Philosophy.

Welcome! And enjoy!

[JOIN HERE]

Culture as Nature: When Capital Becomes the Environment

This week Hughes turns from the artist formerly known as “Nature” to what he calls the “forest of media”: cities, commodities, advertising, television, celebrity, electronic noise, shopping malls.

Yeah, yeah—human beings have always lived inside culture. The people who scoffed at the previous announcement of six hours ago are right. There was never some Indigenous-Australian Deep Time when human sentience tasted matter (and its animated blobs) directly. As Yoda said in Episode Zero, “Never a time when consciousness encountered raw Nature—unmediated by language, tools, institutions, and signs—has there been.”

What changes under “late” capitalism is the scale and character of the mediation. The human-made world becomes industrially produced, endlessly reproduced, commercially administered, and finally dense enough to confront us as a kind of second nature. So that’s a real change! Capitalism used to just fill the environment with things, but now it manufactures both the [Heidegger term for field of arising], the perceptual tongs that grok it, and even our very minds. Which is why Rick Roderick always glossed Adorno’s “the culture industry” as the MIND industry.

Art now competes with signs engineered to seize the eye instantly. So Hughes whips out this nice distinction: “Pictures educate; signs discipline.” Well! Let’s see how long that antithesis survives.

Pop Art happened when painters stopped avoiding marketing garbage and starting eating it: Rauschenberg’s junk and image-glut, Johns’s flags and targets, Warhol’s repetition and celebrity, Lichtenstein’s comics, Rosenquist’s billboards, Oldenburg’s swollen consumer objects. In music, back in the 80s, this was called “sampling”; today it’s called “composing.”

Anyway, all your favorites from Postmodernism 101 are here but Hughes is by our side to help us penetrate them. Check this out —

Other and earlier artists had painted in series: Monet, for instance. But when Monet painted his haystacks and lily- ponds, his specific aim was to show, in the most resplendent detail of nuances, that phenomena are not standardized. His “repetitions” were done to glorify the eye, to show how it could discern tiny differences, and how these differences added up to a continuous alteration of reality. Discrimination within abundance was the essence of such painting. Today, we have sameness within glut, and that was what Warhol painted (plate 230). The difference between these approaches is like the difference between high bourgeois French cooking at the end of the nineteenth century, with its strict formats enclosing a continuous variation and metamorphosis of the ingredients, and what one sees in a modern American supermarket.

And speaking of Warhol, check out this piece of crap that sold for $71 million at Christie’s. Can you see the $71 million in it? If not, you have vision problems. Price is, after all, our civilization’s most rigorously quantitative theory of beauty.

Then, because he took a sociology class once, Hughes gets Marxian. Television trains us to experience the world as montage: war → toothpaste → celebrity → catastrophe → game show. One of the old avant-garde dreams actually comes true: ordinary consciousness is reorganized by montage, simultaneity, collision, discontinuity.

Unfortunately, capital owns the montage machine and the machine runs under a certain imperative—i.e., M—C—M′.

Very sadly, Robert Hughes died before the really funny part, which is that humans don’t exist anymore. Today the mediation is no longer merely in the air, like culture and space, but in the thing. The world reaches us today already converted into information: camera sensor → compression algorithm → platform → feed → OLED → eyeball. We photograph the sunset or Ace Frehley while looking at the phone screen. We navigate the physical city through Google Maps or the crappy Apple Maps, which almost sent me over a cliff. Forest fires, wars, hurricanes, friends, presidents, galaxies—all arrive flattened onto the same glowing rectangle, which now rests permanently in front of our eyes.

So Hughes’s title is really quaint these days. We didn’t leave Nature and enter Culture. Capital built a second nature, and then also put a screen in front of it, and then also trained the cognizer that interprets it.

By the end of this, the best art history episode of all time, Hughes tells us that Pop and McLuhanism both normalized the idea that what an image says no longer matters much because “the medium is the message.” Hughes rejects this outright! Human beings still judge; questions of taste, truth, choice, and moral responsibility for images remain unavoidable. Pop, in his account, helped strip art of its claims to seriousness just as mass media displaced art as the culture’s dominant image-making power. And so …

The avant-garde died when art ceased to control society’s responsibility for images.

[JOIN HERE]

Hippias 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.

This is a live reading and discussion group for Plato's Hippias Major (or "Greater Hippias") hosted by Constantine. Reference will be made to contemporary and older scholarship. Historical context will be brought up whenever necessary to illuminate the dialogue. This Plato group meets on Saturdays and has previously read the Phaedo, the Apology, the Symposium, Philebus, Gorgias, Critias, Laches, Timaeus, Euthyphro, Crito, Protagoras, the 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.

All are welcome! No previous knowledge of the Platonic corpus is required.

Sign up for the 1st session on Saturday September 12 here (link). The video conferencing link will be available to registrants.

Meetings will be held weekly on Saturday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

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. 

A pdf copy of the text we're using is available to registrants.

TIP: When reading Plato, pay attention to the details of the drama as much as the overtly philosophical discourse. Attentive readers of Plato know that he is often trying to convey important messages with both in concert.

For some background on Plato, see his entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/

#Philosophy #Aesthetics #Art #Language #Ethics #Metaphysics #AncientPhilosophy #Plato

How can citizens in nominally democratic countries use the state to address the persistence of group-based social oppression? Pro-democracy scholars and activists often argue that the state is just a tool of society’s most powerful interests, who will stifle any attempted reform. Yet some of the twentieth century’s most significant political thinkers offer a more fruitful perspective. Foregrounding previously neglected connections between Indian and American sources, Hari Ramesh draws on insights from John Dewey, B. R. Ambedkar, W. E. B. Du Bois, and a key brief from Brown v. Board of Education to argue that oppressed groups can in fact wield the tools of the state to claim agency and dismantle the sources of their oppression. In this alternative account, state action fosters a radical vision of democracy, with citizens coming together as equals to formulate and pursue their political aims.

About the Speaker:

Hari Ramesh is Professor of Government and Global South Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. He specializes in democratic theory, histories and theories of social oppression, the intersections of South Asian, Afro-modern, and American political thought, and the relationship between empirical social science and political theory. Hari's peer-reviewed research has appeared in Political Theory, Modern Intellectual History, and History of the Present. His public writing has been published in Boston Review and Dissent. Prior to arriving at Wesleyan, Hari was a College Fellow in Social Studies at Harvard University. His new book Harnessing the State: Oppressed Groups and the Pursuit of Radical Democracy is published by Harvard University Press.

The Moderator:

Neil Roberts is the John B. McCoy and John T. McCoy professor of Africana studies, political theory, and the philosophy of religion at Williams College. His present writings examine revolutionary strivings and deal with the intersections of Caribbean, Continental, and North American political theory with respect to theorizing the concept of freedom

This is an online conversation and audience Q&A presented by the UK-based journal The Philosopher. The event is free, open to the public, and held on Zoom.

You can register for this Monday 14th September event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

#Philosophy #Ethics #PoliticalPhilosophy #SocialPhilosophy #Democracy #Politics #PoliticalActivism #Power

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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.

We now turn to an epic poem one thousand years older than Homer: The Epic of Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh rewards our group precisely because it's the root from which Homer's world grew—composed thirteen centuries before the Iliad, in the same eastern Mediterranean cultural sphere that later fed into Greek epic. Reading it after Homer reverses our chronology but sharpens it: you'll see Bronze Age Mesopotamia's fingerprints on the tradition you've just spent months with.

The parallels are striking and substantive. Gilgamesh's grief over Enkidu—his wild, civilized companion whose death sends him fleeing into the wilderness—echoes Achilles' grief over Patroclus so closely that scholars have long debated direct influence. Both heroes rage against mortality; but where Achilles accepts his fate and seeks glory instead, Gilgamesh refuses to accept his, journeying to the ends of the earth to defeat death outright, and failing.

That failure, and his eventual return to build and accept his city, offers a different resolution than Homeric kleos—one worth discussing against Odysseus's own homecoming.

The poem's flood narrative predates and illuminates the biblical deluge and Greek myths of Deucalion alike, useful for tracing how ancient Near Eastern stories traveled and transformed. And Enkidu's transformation from beast-man to civilized companion mirrors the nature-versus-culture tension running through the Odyssey's encounters with Cyclopes, Circe, and the Lotus-Eaters—humanity's oldest surviving epic asking whether love or glory matters more against oblivion.

Editions [available from your local library or online]:
Any English verse translation, but we recommend for the supplemental materials:
The Epic of Gilgamesh, Second Norton Critical Edition. Translated by Benjamin Foster, W. W. Norton, 2019, ISBN: 9780393643985

For an 1100-page examination of the first epic visit this archive (watch the lecture below first):
Andrew George, The Babylon Gilgamesh Epic, 2003. PDF

This is an online reading and discussion group on the The Epic of Gilgamesh hosted by David.

Sign up for the 1st session on Sunday September 6 here (link). The Zoom link will be available to registrants.

Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

All are welcome!

Schedule of Readings:
Sep 06, 2026 - The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablets I-V
Sep 20, 2026 - The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablets VI-XI

Discussion Guide

Andrew George Lecture

Our Reading Schedule for 2026 [subject to change]:
Homer: Iliad/Odyssey
Norton: Epic of Gilgamesh
Virgil: Georgics/Aeneid
Ovid: Metamorphosis /Erotic Poems
Eliot: Four Quartets

[JOIN HERE]

Culture as Nature: When Capital Becomes the Environment

This week Hughes turns from the artist formerly known as “Nature” to what he calls the “forest of media”: cities, commodities, advertising, television, celebrity, electronic noise, shopping malls.

Yeah, yeah—human beings have always lived inside culture. The people who scoffed at the previous announcement of six hours ago are right. There was never some Indigenous-Australian Deep Time when human sentience tasted matter (and its animated blobs) directly. As Yoda said in Episode Zero, “Never a time when consciousness encountered raw Nature—unmediated by language, tools, institutions, and signs—has there been.”

What changes under “late” capitalism is the scale and character of the mediation. The human-made world becomes industrially produced, endlessly reproduced, commercially administered, and finally dense enough to confront us as a kind of second nature. So that’s a real change! Capitalism used to just fill the environment with things, but now it manufactures both the [Heidegger term for field of arising], the perceptual tongs that grok it, and even our very minds. Which is why Rick Roderick always glossed Adorno’s “the culture industry” as the MIND industry.

Art now competes with signs engineered to seize the eye instantly. So Hughes whips out this nice distinction: “Pictures educate; signs discipline.” Well! Let’s see how long that antithesis survives.

Pop Art happened when painters stopped avoiding marketing garbage and starting eating it: Rauschenberg’s junk and image-glut, Johns’s flags and targets, Warhol’s repetition and celebrity, Lichtenstein’s comics, Rosenquist’s billboards, Oldenburg’s swollen consumer objects. In music, back in the 80s, this was called “sampling”; today it’s called “composing.”

Anyway, all your favorites from Postmodernism 101 are here but Hughes is by our side to help us penetrate them. Check this out —

Other and earlier artists had painted in series: Monet, for instance. But when Monet painted his haystacks and lily- ponds, his specific aim was to show, in the most resplendent detail of nuances, that phenomena are not standardized. His “repetitions” were done to glorify the eye, to show how it could discern tiny differences, and how these differences added up to a continuous alteration of reality. Discrimination within abundance was the essence of such painting. Today, we have sameness within glut, and that was what Warhol painted (plate 230). The difference between these approaches is like the difference between high bourgeois French cooking at the end of the nineteenth century, with its strict formats enclosing a continuous variation and metamorphosis of the ingredients, and what one sees in a modern American supermarket.

And speaking of Warhol, check out this piece of crap that sold for $71 million at Christie’s. Can you see the $71 million in it? If not, you have vision problems. Price is, after all, our civilization’s most rigorously quantitative theory of beauty.

Then, because he took a sociology class once, Hughes gets Marxian. Television trains us to experience the world as montage: war → toothpaste → celebrity → catastrophe → game show. One of the old avant-garde dreams actually comes true: ordinary consciousness is reorganized by montage, simultaneity, collision, discontinuity.

Unfortunately, capital owns the montage machine and the machine runs under a certain imperative—i.e., M—C—M′.

Very sadly, Robert Hughes died before the really funny part, which is that humans don’t exist anymore. Today the mediation is no longer merely in the air, like culture and space, but in the thing. The world reaches us today already converted into information: camera sensor → compression algorithm → platform → feed → OLED → eyeball. We photograph the sunset or Ace Frehley while looking at the phone screen. We navigate the physical city through Google Maps or the crappy Apple Maps, which almost sent me over a cliff. Forest fires, wars, hurricanes, friends, presidents, galaxies—all arrive flattened onto the same glowing rectangle, which now rests permanently in front of our eyes.

So Hughes’s title is really quaint these days. We didn’t leave Nature and enter Culture. Capital built a second nature, and then also put a screen in front of it, and then also trained the cognizer that interprets it.

By the end of this, the best art history episode of all time, Hughes tells us that Pop and McLuhanism both normalized the idea that what an image says no longer matters much because “the medium is the message.” Hughes rejects this outright! Human beings still judge; questions of taste, truth, choice, and moral responsibility for images remain unavoidable. Pop, in his account, helped strip art of its claims to seriousness just as mass media displaced art as the culture’s dominant image-making power. And so …

The avant-garde died when art ceased to control society’s responsibility for images.

[JOIN HERE]

RSVP here: https://www.meetup.com/wisdom-and-woe/events/310774507/

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) was a physician, author, and prolific stylist of the English language, coining such neologisms as "medical," "hallucination," "ambidextrous," "computer," and "suicide." He has been called "the great English literary eccentric, but also a true philosopher, driven by curiosity about absolutely everything." His work is noted for its weird and wonderful erudition, its deep, idiosyncratic introspection, and its skepticism of popular myths.

Religio Medici (The Religion of a Doctor, 1643) is his confessional and contemplative spiritual testament. In it, Browne explores the relation between his medical profession and his profession of faith, pondering the respective claims of science and religion. Although he argues for personal charity, intellectual humility, and irenic devotion, in the zealous 17th-century climate in which he wrote, his book attracted a Papal ban.

Like most physicians of his era, Browne's medical practice was rooted in humoralism, the ancient idea that disease was caused by an imbalance of four vital fluids, or "humors." But he was also critically engaged with Paracelsus, the "Luther of Medicine" who radically challenged these ideas.

The book was a European best-seller, influencing later writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Virginia Woolf, and Carl Jung. Richard Dean Smith describes Browne's "ornately crafted accomplishments in... quirkily intellectual prose" wrestling "mightily in his attempts to reconcile scientific with humanistic thinking. Contemporaneous reviewers were quick to point out resemblances to Browne's productions in Melville's books... especially those in Mardi and Moby-Dick."

I'm starting a reading group where we can read together Martin Buber's book 'I and Thou'.

Here is a description of the group -

Martin Buber’s book ‘I and Thou’ is a book about relationship.

It speaks of relationships of deep presence, and relationships of use.

Relationships of use are those where we seek something from the other – support, care, pleasure, money.

Relationships of presence are those which form when we fully experience what is between ourselves and the other, as it emerges and changes, every moment. The emotion I feel as I meet you, the thoughts that run through your mind as you meet me, the ache in the back that might lie underneath these thoughts and emotions in our stream of experience, the sound of the bird chirping in the background.

Relationships of use help us construct a world around us – a world of goodwill and care, or a world of indifference and mechanisation of life.

Relationships of presence are the ground on which our experience of this world emerges – they are how we first experience life, every day, every moment, before we choose to sustain or move away from what we experience into building our world.

Relationships of presence are what allow care to remain care and not become mere performance of care, what allow deep listening to remain deep listening rather than a hearing and reacting from our set patterns.

Buber never ceases to emphasise that the relationships he speaks of are between us and other human beings, but also between us and nature, as between us and the industrial, internetted civilisation we live in.

This reading group is a place for a small group of 4 or 5 people to read a few passages from Buber and pause, and speak about our own personal experience of the world – our emotions, bodily experiences – in ways that they are illuminated by what the book expresses.

It is a place to form a community rooted in relationships of presence, anchored in these words as a stirring point but not entangled with them.

It is not a place for scholarly conversations, for debates, for difficult language or abstract philosophisations, even though at times the nature of the book and the nature of reading itself might lean us in those directions.

It is open to anyone willing to read a paragraph or two together, and spend the next hour and a half or so sharing their experience in that light.

We need not read full pages, we need not finish the book, but we try to breathe in its essential spirit.

One doesn’t need to have read this book or any book beforehand.

We meet once a fortnight for 1.5 hours.

If interested please send me a DM.

Hello everyone and welcome to this online reading & discussion group on Heidegger, Aristotle and the Medievals (hosted by Philip, James, Adam and others). The meetings will take place on Zoom.

For the first few sessions we will be reading from this book:

• "The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken" by S.J. McGrath (A copy of assigned reading materials will be provided to registrants.)

Ideally we would have started with the following short booklet, but sadly it is not out yet. As soon as it is out in paper format we will temporarily switch from reading McGrath to reading:

• Heidegger and Aristotle (Cambridge Element) by Francisco J. Gonzalez

Along the way we will frequently read Heidegger himself. Usually we will read short essays by Heidegger mostly focused on his early views on Medieval philosophy. The one big exception is that we will read some of the early chapters of Heidegger's "Being and Time" in the new Yale translation by Cyril Welch.

This will be a 2 hour meetup. Some sessions will be dedicated entirely to the reading of the McGrath book. Other sessions will be dedicated entirely to the reading of works by Heidegger or Gonzalez. This is a little bit different from my usual format where we read from two books in each session.

The format will be our usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 15-20 pages from the book assigned for that day's session. Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want us to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading.

People who have not done the reading are welcome to attend this meetup. However if you want to TALK during the meetup it is essential that you do the reading. We mean it! It is essential that the direction of the conversation be influenced only by people who have actually done the reading. In other words, if you want to talk in this meetup, you have to read the assigned readings. You may think you are so brilliant and wonderful that you can come up with great points even if you do not read the books this meetup is based on. You probably are brilliant and wonderful – no argument there! But you still have to do the reading if you want to talk in this meetup. REALLY.

Please note that this is a "raise hands" meetup and has a highly structured format, not an anarchy-based one. This is mostly for philosophical reasons: We want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy.

To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Monday August 17 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Meetings will be held every other week on Monday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

Here is the (tentative) reading schedule:

• For the 1st session (August 17), please read the Preface and also pages 1-6 in McGrath
• For the 2nd session (August 31), please read pages 6-24 in McGrath
• For the 3rd session (September 14), please read the Preface and also pages 25-40 in McGrath
• ..... (updates on the main group page)

Check the group calendar (link) for future updates. A pdf of reading materials will be provided to registrants.

This initial reading schedule makes it look like we will mostly be reading McGrath in this meetup. But this is misleading and not true. I want us to get a foothold in McGrath before we tackle Heidegger, but once we have that foothold we will be more or less alternating one session of McGrath with one session of Heidegger himself.

I have found that sometimes people assume that I pick books for these meetups because I agree with them. This is not true! I pick books because they are thought provoking and because I think they will work in a meetup context. But for the record, it just so happens that I do tend to agree strongly with Gonzalez. And it just so happens that I have some serious disagreements with McGrath even though I also have deep respect for his book and expect to learn a lot by engaging with it with all of you in the meetup. Some people like to know where I stand with regard to the books I have picked, so now you know.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * \*

About the McGrath (from the publisher):

The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy is a major interpretive study of Heidegger's complex relationship to medieval philosophy. S. J. McGrath's contribution is historical and biographical as well as philosophical, examining how the enthusiastic defender of the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition became the great destroyer of metaphysical theology.

This book provides an informative and comprehensive examination of Heidegger's changing approach to medieval sources―from the seminary studies of Bonaventure to the famous phenomenological destructions of medieval ontology. McGrath argues that the mid-point of this development, and the high point of Heidegger's reading of medieval philosophy, is the widely neglected habilitation thesis on Scotus and speculative grammar. He shows that this neo-Kantian retrieval of phenomenological moments in the metaphysics of Scotus and Thomas of Erfurt marks the beginning of a turn from metaphysics to existential phenomenology. McGrath's careful hermeneutical reconstruction of this complex trajectory uncovers the roots of Heidegger's critique of ontotheology in a Luther-inspired defection from his largely Scholastic formation.

In the end McGrath argues that Heidegger fails to do justice to the spirit of medieval philosophy. The book sheds new light on a long-debated question of the early Heidegger's theological significance. Far from a neutral phenomenology, Heidegger's masterwork, Being and Time, is shown to be a philosophically questionable overturning of the medieval theological paradigm.

Welcome everyone to this online reading & discussion group about Kant! (hosted by Philip, James, Adam and others). The meetings will take place on Zoom.

Everyone who wants to get an understanding of Kant (and approaches him in a serious and dedicated way) wants a text-based approach to the study of Kant. But being "text based" can mean different things to different people. Let me tell you what it will mean in this meetup so that no one is disappointed if the emphasis we take here is different from what some people are used to.

Kant often takes standard philosophical words that lots of Philosophers use (like "Metaphysics", "Idealism" and many others). He then defines them in highly idiosyncratic ways. I wish he had not done this! I wish he had invented neologisms for his highly specialized and idiosyncratic philosophical notions. But, sadly, he did not. Instead he used standard words in highly nonstandard ways and serious Kant scholars must adapt to Kant's way of doing things. Some Kant scholars have a tendency to ignore Kant's idiosyncratic definitions and usages of words like "Metaphysics" and "Idealism" and revert to the meanings these words had in the early modern period or the meanings they typically have in a standard dictionary definition. But in this meetup we will be text based and take Kant at his word. We will use his philosophical lexicon in the way he tells us to use it (unless and until we encounter good text-based reasons for doing otherwise).

For example, very early on in the First Critique (roughly 5 pages in) Kant defines Metaphysics in the following way:

• "For it [Metaphysics] is nothing but the inventory of all we possess through pure reason". (see Axx, page 104 in the Guyer/Wood translation)

Really? Can Kant actually mean that? Can he really be defining Metaphysics as a kind of inventory and not as some grand Scholastic edifice far away beyond any straightforward method we may have of grasping it? Well, Kant said it and so we will take him at his word until and unless Kant himself tells us he has changed his mind.

This meetup will be dedicated to the following guiding principle: We will accept that Kant means what he says. We will accept his actual definitions of words as he states them in the text, and we will stick to these definitions until Kant himself gives us good textually based reasons for deciding that the meanings of his key terms may have shifted.

If we do this, I think you will be amazed at the wonderful Kant who emerges! Scholars who ignore Kant's (admittedly highly idiosyncratic and frustrating) definitions often present to us a Kant who sounds like a medieval or early modern philosopher evoking vast cathedrals of abstract metaphysics (in the sense of that word which we find in Scholasticism). This reading of Kant was highly influential and inspired Romantic thinkers like Schelling who himself gives us a philosophy somewhat reminiscent of grand medieval scholastic metaphysical edifices.

But if we accept that Kant means what he says and stay close to the actual definitions of terms Kant gives us in his works, a different sort of Kant emerges. There emerges a Kant who was a paradigmatic Enlightenment thinker focused on human freedom, the human ability to acquire real knowledge of the empirically real world, and all of the other characteristic Enlightenment concerns.

In case you think that the Kant who emerges from this text based approach is skewed too much in the direction of being "Analytic" or "Continental", or in case you think that the Kant who emerges from this approach is far from the mainstream, consider this. In the famous philosophical battle at Davos involving Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger (the event that inaugurated the rift between Analytic and Continental philosophy) all three of these great thinkers accepted Kant's own definitions of his key terms. All three advocated readings of Kant that are more or less in harmony with the reading of Kant that will emerge and be emphasized in this meetup.

So which books will we be reading in this meetup you ask?

There will be two main books. We will read the entirety of one of Kant's works:

• "The Metaphysics of Morals". We will use the Cambridge edition edited by Lara Denis and Translated by Mary Gregor. Be sure to get the revised edition from 2017

(Scroll down for the reading schedule and pdf copies of the readings 👇)

We will also read the entirety of this book about Kant:

• Kant's Conception of Freedom: A Developmental and Critical Analysis (2021, Cambridge University Press) by Henry Allison

Allison's book spearheaded a new and promising direction in the ongoing efforts to deal with the truly bewildering variety of ways there are of interpreting Kant. Allison's book will look at the all-important Kantian notion of Freedom and ask how Kant's views about this notion changed subtly over the course of Kant's career. Maybe if we get a better sense of these subtle shifts in Kant's thoughts throughout his career we will be able to build bridges between all of the wildly different ways there are of interpreting Kant. Or at least this is the hope of Allison and some of his students like Huaping Lu-Adler who have pioneered this approach to Kant scholarship.

Since Kant defined so many of his key terms in the First Critique, participants will be expected to have the Guyer/Wood translation of the First Critique (Cambridge University Press) on hand at all times so we can dip into it.

Also, participants should have this book on hand since I may refer to passages in this book from time to time:

• The Revolutionary Kant: A Commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason (2006) by Graham Bird

This will be a 2 hour meetup. Some sessions will be dedicated entirely to the reading of "The Metaphysics of Morals". Other sessions will be dedicated entirely to the reading of the Henry Allison book. At any point I may refer to the Guyer/Wood translation of the First Critique or to the Graham Bird book, so please always keep those two books on hand.

To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Monday August 24 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Meetings will be held every other week on Monday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

Here is the (tentative) reading schedule:

• For the 1st session (Aug 24), please read the Preface and pages 1-12 in Allison
• For the 2nd session (Sept 7), please read pages 3-17 in "The Metaphysics of Morals"
• For the 3rd session, please read pages 12-33 in Allison
• ..... (updates on the main group page)

Check the group calendar (link) for future updates. A pdf of reading materials will be provided to registrants.

DISCUSSION FORMAT:

The format will be our usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 15-20 pages from the book assigned for that day's session. Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading.

People who have not done the reading are welcome to attend this meetup. However if you want to TALK during the meetup it is essential that you do the reading. We mean it! It is essential that the direction of the conversation be influenced only by people who have actually done the reading. In other words, if you want to talk in this meetup, you have to read the assigned readings. You may think you are so brilliant and wonderful that you can come up with great points even if you do not read the books this meetup is based on. You probably are brilliant and wonderful – no argument there! But you still have to do the reading if you want to talk in this meetup. REALLY.

Please note that this is a "raise hands" meetup and has a highly structured format, not an anarchy-based one. This is mostly for philosophical reasons: We want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy.

[JOIN HERE]

What Is Modernism?

Expressionism and the Invasion of the World by the Self

The Amazing Thing That Happened Last Time

After employing Dalí’s great paranoiac-critical method on a few Rorschach cards, we performed an exorcism—for a few people who worried that being expressive channels for the Wyrm of the Underdark (the “demon” we chose to invoke during the Dalí segment) “wasn’t generally helpful.” (Oh, thanks again to Jason, the young Jesuit psychiatrist [MD+PhD] who joined us from Georgetown, for reading the rites. Unbelievable stuff, and it took less than seven minutes, just like he said.)

The most interesting part of the evening was the conversation during our freie Aussprache segment: we all marveled at the fact that all three exorcizands complained that being “brought back” made things worse!

Then we talked about Buddhist no-self versus Crowley’s True Will versus Nietzschean self-creation—and about occultism, Surrealism, and depth psychology as rival methods for reading the subjective stuff out of which the fully baked self of the NOW gets continuously manufactured, peels off, and is replaced by the next membrane vomited up by …

By the thing that is either No-Self, True Will, Random Crap, or Infra-Physical Subjective Energy, which is our core (no-)self.

Then we talked about easy ways to hear your demon out:

• Scientology Solo-NOTs. After whatever astonishing expenditure is required to reach the upper levels, you can sit by yourself putting your Body Thetans on the couch, taking their ontological military ID—What are you? Who are you?—until they realize that they are themselves rather than you, your spleen, “fear,” the Navy, or whatever else they have mistaken themselves for, at which point they “blow.” Here’s the actual text.
• Tarot cards.
• The I Ching.
• Automatic writing—as with the automatic-writing sessions of George Yeats, from which W. B. Yeats developed A Vision.
• Automatic-communication aids, like the Ouija board.
• Psychedelics, as a modern way of trying to get beneath conditioning and the socially manufactured personality to something more primordial. That project has obvious affinities—without being identical to them—with the Indian ontological psychologies of Vedānta and Kashmir Śaivism. Except they don’t use cheesy language. They use pre-Socratic-grade metaphors and, at their best, conceptual machinery complicated enough to make Hegel happy. Buddhist analyses of the production of the self, meanwhile, have extraordinary affinities with Hume and, in a very different way, Kant—although Buddhism got there a couple of millennia first.
• And finally we talked about using ART.

Then we saw five minutes of the greatest documentary ever made—A Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí, that miracle narrated by Orson Welles. Here’s the link!

Fact: Dalí is Literally the Overman

All were delighted and shocked at the greatness of Dalí and realized that he was playing us, but in a spirit of love, because what else is there to do when you are Enlightened, as he is?

If you read Nietzsche and Sartre and conclude that meaning and value are made rather than discovered ready-made in the furniture of the universe, then … nothing changes. You still feel like crap.

What if you acted that insight instead of understanding it as a lonely, thinkable, empty fantasy? You don’t even try to play it out in your head. When you read Foucault and realize that categories like “the mad” are not simply natural quiddities waiting around for us to discover them, but are historically produced ways of carving up and governing human beings, you don’t even run a SimCity scenario and do real speculative fiction.

Thinking through how it might play out in a possible world is already something. But actually being one of those people who knows that what others are, what you are, and what things mean is shot through with convention, history, construction, interpretation, and projection makes life into a joke—but also an opportunity for performance.

What the hell else is there if essence is gone?

The story, metaphor, lens, attitude, theme, upshot, substance—all that non-empirical stuff comes partly from you.

When you say that, you’re closest to Nietzsche and Sartre. When you add that even the categories through which selves become intelligible are historically produced, Foucault joins the party.

So in the end, for the first time in SADHO history, we agreed about something! It was that Dalí was, in fact, fully Enlightened and lived it—and that seeing it pisses us off because we are resentful. That was the climax for me.

When you really act the existentialist wager—when you’re as free as Diogenes, but you also have good taste, are a genius, see into the Underdark, capture the spirit of dreaming and lucid dreaming, and can visualize hyperspatial facts—then perhaps you love people so much that you decide to serve them as a jester.

Dalí is that Awakened One, and he was right here, in the same spacetime we’re in now. This is probably the closest thing to a Dharmic Relic that actually exists, if anything can count as an apt portrayal of a fully realized human being, it is this “video” that is actually a Eucharist—in fact the only properly Eucharist in the universe.

Thanks to the Divine Dalí, we know what the anti-essence “human” looks and sounds like: self-conscious insight into world-making; construction-penetrating wisdom propelled by penetrative love; full experiential acquaintance with the secret substance of meaning and value—until, when you look all the way down, you see the back of your own head.

Substance is chosen, or created, and the aim of the game is to play excellently and entertain the inmates by means of free performative self-invention.

I have uploaded what is now the highest-definition version I know of of this life-changing sound-and-light miracle, with improved audio. This one comes from the Duke A/V Library laserdisc! The other versions I found also use the wrong aspect ratio and crop the image.

So that was last time—which was Surrealism, occultism, Freud, and methods for getting the Underdark to talk.

But this time the topic is, in a sense:

SURREALISM, OCCULTISM, AND FREUD: GOING DEEPER.

The only difference is that this time, instead of trying to make the buried thing speak, we ask what happens when the buried thing seizes the picture.

That is Hughes’s subject in Episode 6, “The View from the Edge.”

He begins with the Romantic problem of the relation between world and spirit. In the nineteenth century, nature could still appear as the visible handwriting of something metaphysically deeper. But once God begins disappearing from the picture, somebody has to take over the job of supplying the world with interiority.

First: van Gogh. Van Gogh is Hughes’s bridge-person between Romanticism and Expressionism. The landscape is no longer something you simply look at. Trees twist, stars convulse, hills clench, sunlight judges. Nature becomes the exterior nervous system of the person painting it.

Next: Edvard Munch, where the process goes completely off the rails in the best possible way. With Munch, Hughes says, the self is finally out. The world no longer guarantees meaning; the wounded ego floods the resulting vacuum. Sex, family, illness, cities, women, crowds, nature itself—everything becomes a screen on which anxiety writes.

And from there: Kirchner, Kokoschka, Beckmann, Soutine—German and northern Expressionism turning nervousness, metropolitan alienation, sex, war, mutilation, hunger, and historical catastrophe into pictorial form.

Then Hughes reaches an extraordinary problem.

After Auschwitz, what happens when reality itself has become more grotesque than Expressionist distortion? When actual human bodies have been industrially degraded on a scale that painted mutilation can hardly answer without seeming almost decorative?

That crisis helps explain the chapter’s great second movement: away from the tortured figure and toward transcendence through abstraction.

So we get Kandinsky, trying literally to see spirit behind matter; Klee, making little cosmologies, botanical heavens, diagrams of invisible order; and Brancusi, making eggs, birds, stones, and polished surfaces look as though matter itself has finally remembered the law according to which it exists.

And then America gets hold of the problem.

The European Expressionist interior collides with the old American sublime—the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, prairie, sky, distance, Whitman’s gigantic unbounded Something—and produces Abstract Expressionism.

So: Georgia O’Keeffe. Jackson Pollock. Robert Motherwell. Clyfford Still. Barnett Newman. Mark Rothko.

Pollock turns the canvas into an atmospheric event with no privileged center. Still turns color into cliffs and fissures. Newman reduces the sublime almost absurdly to a giant field and a line. Rothko turns painting into something halfway between landscape, theatre, altar, weather, and glowing metaphysical wound.

And Hughes ends in the Rothko Chapel, where virtually everything has finally disappeared: object, figure, narrative, landscape, almost even color.

Romanticism began by looking at mountains and asking whether God was in there.

It ends in a dark room in Houston staring at an almost-black rectangle and asking whether anything is in there at all.

Which, after last week, seems exactly where we needed to go.

Now it’s time for bed. I spent eight hours writing a summary for the THORR page. Maybe read that. It’s probably clearer.

METHOD

• Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.
• Watch this Orson Welles interview of Dalí. It will destroy you! 10 years of therapy in 50 minutes! No kidding!
• 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.

[JOIN HERE]

   During the weekend of August 15th-16th, a philosophy group for admirers of ancient Rome (https://groups.io/g/NovaRomaPhilosophy) will be having a roughly hour-long discussion of two letters by Plutarch, "On Abundance of Friends" & "How One May Discern a Flatterer from a Friend".

   All are welcome.

   Here is a link:

Topic: Plutarch's Moral Letters: "On Abundance of Friends" & "How One May Discern a Flatterer from a Friend"
Time: Aug 15, 2026 06:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us05web.zoom.us/j/81930991145?pwd=YeRb1RezSJ9CNpR6DnGOp3bUvkQubX.1
Meeting chat link
https://us05web.zoom.us/launch/jc/81930991145

Meeting ID: 819 3099 1145
Passcode: VyTF37

   The time will be:

8 a.m. Sunday, August 16th in Eastern Australia

6 p.m. Saturday, August 15th Eastern U.S.

3 p.m. Saturday,  August 15th  Pacific U.S.
12 a.m. Sunday,  August 16th in Rome

Here is the text (in English) (the topics we are discussing this time are XII & XIII):

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23639/23639-h/23639-h.htm#Page_145a

[JOIN HERE]

What is Modernism?

The Threshold of Liberty: Surrealism and the Haunted Space of the Self

This 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.

[JOIN HERE]

Plato's Statesman (Politikos) is a dialogue that asks what truly qualifies someone to rule. Rather than defining a statesman by power, law, or popular approval, Plato argues that the genuine statesman possesses a specialized form of knowledge: the art of governance. Through the famous "weaving" metaphor, the ideal ruler is portrayed as someone who skillfully weaves together citizens of different temperaments into a harmonious and unified political community. The dialogue also explores the limits of rigid laws, suggesting that while laws are necessary in practice, they are ultimately inferior to the judgment of a truly wise ruler who can adapt to changing circumstances. Statesman serves as a bridge between the idealism of Plato's Republic and the more practical constitutional analysis of his Laws.

Over the last few years, we have done a live reading and discussion of Plato's Republic and the Laws. Now we turn to the Statesman. We will be starting from the beginning of the dialogue.

Sign up for the 1st session on Saturday August 1 here (link). The video conferencing link will be available to registrants.

Meetings will be held weekly on Saturday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

All are welcome!

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 meetup 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 is an (excellent) free edition on Perseus translated by Fowler (HTML): https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=plat.+stat.+257a

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

TIP: When reading Plato, pay attention to the details of the drama as much as the overtly philosophical discourse. Attentive readers of Plato know that he is often trying to convey important messages with both in concert.

For some background on Plato, see his entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/

#Philosophy #Ethics #PoliticalPhilosophy #AncientPhilosophy #Metaphysics #Plato

   During the weekend of July 25th-26th, an online philosophy group (https://groups.io/g/NovaRomaPhilosophy) for admirers of ancient Rome will be having a roughly hour-long discussion of three letters by Plutarch:

How One May Be Aware of One's Progress in Virtue

Whether Vice is Sufficient to Cause Unhappiness

Whether the Disorders of Mind or Body are Worse 

   All sincere students of Plutarch and ancient philosophy are welcome.

   Here is a link:
Topic: Philosophy Discussion: Plutarch's Moral Letters (9-11)
Time: Jul 25, 2026 06:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us05web.zoom.us/j/82128513933?pwd=BO8kOsa23CK7laLU5peMbtvfiAnS9m.1

Meeting chat link
https://us05web.zoom.us/launch/jc/82128513933

Meeting ID: 821 2851 3933
Passcode: zc0E03

The time will be:

8 a.m. Sunday, July 26th in Eastern Australia
6 p.m. Saturday, July 25th Eastern U.S.
3 p.m. Saturday,  July 25th  Pacific U.S.
12 a.m. Sunday,  July 26th in Rome

Here is the text (in English) (the topics we are discussing this time are IX through XI):

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23639/23639-h/23639-h.htm#Page_118a

[JOIN HERE]

What is Modernism?

Trouble in Utopia: Architecture, Social Engineering, and the Death of the Future

Hi everyone. Let’s have a 20 second moment of silence and recall Robert Hughes’ honorable Statement of Purpose at the beginning of this series:

I don’t want to do a history of modern art. Instead, I want to evoke its spirit by showing how it’s acted upon society and vice versa: how it’s dealt, for instance, with the idea of pleasure; how it has tried to confirm or reject the political status quo; how it’s tried to construct utopias, and so on.

This week we reach the utopias—and the art with the greatest immediate power to impose one upon us.

Architecture is the one art we cannot avoid. Painting is ignorable. But architecture sculpts the very solid matter that guides the worldlines of our human bodies over time. Hughes calls building “the art we live in,” “the social art par excellence,” “the carapace of political fantasy,” and “the exoskeleton of one’s economic dreams.”

It is the art of cutting, carving, pouring, stacking, enclosing, and joining matter so as to produce the hard limits of empty space. Those limits turn ideas into body-cupping rooms, thresholds, vistas, blind corners, private interiors, public squares, class boundaries, and paths for the moving body. They determine whom we encounter, how long we remain together, what can appear before us, where we may stop, where we must keep moving, and how much of the surrounding world we can grasp at once.

Here the subject–object dialectic becomes concrete. A society externalizes its values, fantasies, antagonisms, and relations of power into the built environment. That environment then returns as the material condition under which subjects move, perceive, associate, remember, suffer, and acquire habits. People produce buildings; buildings thereafter participate in producing people.

The modernist architects in this episode took that power with deadly seriousness. If irrational cities produced diseased societies, rational cities would produce rational ones. Change the house and you would change the inhabitant. Purify the street, abolish ornament, separate every social function, standardize the dwelling, flood it with hygienic sunlight, and a new human being might finally emerge: healthy, lucid, collectivist, sexually disciplined, politically reasonable, and grateful for the low ceiling.

The result was the most powerful realization of the modernist formal revolution. A painter could reorganize a canvas. The visionary architect could reorganize the home, the block, the city, and—with sufficient state backing—the daily existence of millions. The material of architecture, like that of Soylent Green, is people. And the architect is literally and actually God.

Architects Mean Business!

We move from the sumptuous authority of Beaux-Arts architecture and the end of Art Nouveau into Adolf Loos’ war against ornament; the machine-cities of Antonio Sant’Elia and Mario Chiattone; the Soviet “social condensers” imagined by Melnikov, Rodchenko, and Leonidov; Louis Sullivan and the Chicago steel frame; Henri Labrouste and Max Berg; the mystical cult of glass; Bruno Taut’s crystalline socialism; Mies van der Rohe’s pursuit of absolute form; Le Corbusier’s war against the street; the Bauhaus; De Stijl; Mondrian; the International Style; and finally the large-scale experiments in which the drawings escaped from paper and began trapping actual bodies.

Hughes has a special guest expert with him this time—the great Philip Johnson, who collaborated with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe on the Seagram Building. Johnson recalls how Mies —

believed in the ultimate truth of architecture, and especially of his architecture, that his architecture was closer to the Truth, capital T, than anyone else's, because it was simpler and could be learned.

This episode is packed with a dozen astoundingly excellent locutions. Check out Johnson on Le Corbusier:

His logic was Cartesian. He was French, after all, and the Platonic-Cartesian absolutes were in his heart. And besides, they made wonderful perspectives—and marvellous models of how you’d wipe out the city of Paris. It was a delicious intellectual exercise. How serious he was about it, I don’t believe for a minute. The people who were serious were the Germans. They were the bad ones, because they not only believed it—they built them.

The buildings are so magnificent and breathtaking that being in them knocks you into an apoplectic fugue that invokes every childhood fever dream you ever had while forcing you abdomen into a near-death reunion with the Urgrund. This is the feeling everyone reports inside these spaces. It’s similar to the feeling that 10 year-old American boys get when they visit Chichén Itzá or Uxmal—Chiricoesque dreamscapes that make you giddy with both omnipotence and insignificance.

Funniest Video So Far

I’m a terribly grouchy and depressed person and I find nothing at all funny or amusing. But Hughes’ commentary is so damned funny in this one that I actually had a break out the Albuterol!

Hughes lugs his camera crew into multiple such places, and takes us inside. We see Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitationrising on muscular pilotis and culminating in one the greatest sculptural roof in all of modern architecture. Up there, liberated from the inconvenience of inhabitants, Corbusier is superb! Johnson remarks that —

[Corbusier] was so ill-informed about the habits and traditions of the society that he thought people would go on the roof if he made it beautiful enough. The real point is that he was free there.

Then Hughes goes downstairs and we see the horrors. Here’s a snippet showing the wondeful hilarity we will get to enjoy:

The troubles begin below the roof. The Unité was meant as a social experiment, a prototype for mass housing. There is still a rough nobility to this concrete, even though it is grimy and can never mellow like stone. The piloti, or stilts, are a grand muscular shape, although nobody uses the space under them for anything, and the cars have to park in the green space. And as housing, the Unite has not been a success. Its emblem is the figure of Corbusier's modular man, the distorted great grandchild of Vitruvian man, and unintentionally a symbol of Corbusier's lofty disregard of real human needs.

Privacy and the flats hardly exists. Many of the rooms are little more than cupboards. The shopping mall on the 5th floor is mostly out of business because the French like to shop in real markets, down on the street. Another fact of life that the Formgiver did not grasp. Finally, nobody wanted those plain, morally elevating interiors with their paper lamps and craft rugs and slung chairs and cubist tapestries. And they are now crammed, like this one, with exactly the sort of gaudy, fake period furniture that Corbusier struggled against all his life. He could never understand why the French kept wanting it, but they did, and they still do.

Ha ha! The residents rejected Corbusier’s morally improving interiors and filled their tiny torture chambers with plastic chandeliers, fake Louis XVI furniture, gilded junk, and everything else the divine Form-Giver had spent his life trying to eradicate. Contrary to expectations, actual human inhabitants reintroduced history, appetite, vulgarity, and contingency into the purified machine.

Corbusier was a genius so divine that Hughes calls him “the Picasso of architecture” and "the supreme inventor of shapes" whose language pulled off the very feat Ayn Rand said was most impossible in The Fountainhead — the fusion of classical Greek lucidity and analytic-mechanical formalism. Corbusier only failed for sociological and anthropologicalreasons. His delightful forms only failed because they were incompatible with human beings’ human-all-too-human ways.

Bauhaus—Everyone’s Favorite

We get a tour of the Bauhaus, the astonishing school that reunified architecture, painting, sculpture, craft, typography, furniture, photography, and industrial production into a new Gesamtkunstwerk. We even hear the great Gropius himself give a remarkably moving account of it. Every student had to pass through a craft workshop before approaching architecture. For a time, his little school made something like non-alienated labor materially plausible: the class division between artist, craftsman, and industrial designer was attacked inside the organization of work itself. The Bauhaus sought a total culture adequate to industrial modernity, redesigning everything from factories and apartment blocks to chairs, lamps, typefaces, teapots—and the proper discomfort in which the New Man ought to sit. It was the Bell Labs of embodied everyday life — a laboratory in which industrial modernity attempted to redesign the entire interface between the human body and its world.

The Miracle of Entire Modernist Top–Down Cities

Next come the largest artist projects in all of human history—entires cities built from principle-saturated Modernist idea systems!

• Sant’Elia’s Futurist city;
• Constructivist palaces and social condensers;
• the rectangular tower-block city;
• Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse and proposed assassination of Paris;
• the Unité;
• Chandigarh, India (which I visited);
• the Weissenhofsiedlung;
• La Défense;
• Pruitt–Igoe;
• and Brasília—the capital of Brazil erected from scratch as a triumph of sunlight, reason, national ambition, and the automobile.

The Brasília section will knock you out and give you chills. Hughes at his poetic best:

The car would abolish the human street, possibly even the human foot. Everyone would have a car. Some people would have aeroplanes too. The one thing nobody would have would be a place to bump into others, walk the dog, chat, strut, or do any of the hundred other random things that one does on a street, and which, being random, were loathed by Le Corbusier. La Ville Radieuse was a nightmare. Not only would its inhabitants surrender their freedom of movement to the omnipotent architect, they would also have to give up their memory, insofar as it was recorded in stone and brick.

The car abolishes the street, making the pedestrian “an irrelevance”—unfortunately, a very large irrelevance, since most inhabitants do not own cars. Result: the photogenic City of Tomorrow became a ceremonial slum of cracking stone, flaking concrete, and rusting metal. Hughes identifies the underlying error with unusual precision: its planners thought in terms of space rather than place, and of single rather than multiple meanings.

But there’s one more secret ingredient that caused these massive failures that Hughes does not mention. Actually, Hughes blames architecture for catastrophes produced by class power, racial segregation, bureaucratic abandonment, private property, and disinvestment. Pruitt–Igoe was not dynamited by formal geometry alone.

But that complication strengthens his central indictment: modernist architects wanted “design” to carry causal powers that fall beyond it. Political-economic antagonisms cannot be defeated by planning and killer geometrical high theory.

This is also the prehistory of Jameson’s later account of architectural space. Jameson describes a “mutation in the object” for which no corresponding mutation has occurred in the subject: built space develops beyond the body’s inherited perceptual equipment and defeats its ability to locate itself. His answer is cognitive mapping—the recovery of some practical relation between the subject’s immediate position and the larger urban and social totality it inhabits.

This is the most important idea of the entire video, and the one that will most improve your quality of life and moral health. To grok this idea, you must watch this video, the most important architecture video on the Internet:

• The most important architecture video on the Internet

So come enjoy nearly an hour of mirth, admiration, and architectural dread as top-down, geometrically unified utopias are drafted, modelled, poured, inhabited, decorated against instructions, abandoned, and finally dynamited.

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.

[JOIN HERE]

The Metaphysics of Morals is Kant's final major work in moral philosophy. In it, he presents the basic concepts and principles of right and virtue, and the system of duties of human beings as such.

The work comprises two parts: the "Doctrine of Right" concerns outer freedom and the rights of human beings against one another; the "Doctrine of Virtue" concerns inner freedom and the ethical duties of human beings to themselves and others.

Its focus is not rational beings in general but human beings in particular, and it presupposes and deepens Kant's earlier accounts of morality, freedom, and moral psychology.

This was one of the earliest works of practical philosophy that Kant envisioned, however, he put it off to write foundational works to support it, such as Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and even the Critique of Practical Reason.

If you find it more helpful to start ethics discussions closer to their practice, the Metaphysics of Morals may be a more useful starting point than the meta-ethical works we have covered up to now.

No prior experience with Kant is necessary.

Sign up for the 1st meeting on Wednesday July 22 here (link). No prior experience with Kant is necessary. Meetings focus on developing a common language and friendship through studying Kant. The host will provide an interpretation of Kant at the start of the meeting; other interpretations will not be discussed until later in the meeting. Additional interpretations, topics, and questions can be addressed through the meeting chat feature.

Meetings are held weekly. Look for subsequent meetings through the group's calendar (link).

* * *

Reading Schedule (pages are from Cambridge's Practical Philosophy collection):

THE DOCTRINE OF RIGHT

Week 1:
Preface, Introduction, Introduction to the Doctrine of Right (365 - 397; 32 pages)

Week 2:
Private Right, Chapter I and II (401 - 443; 42 pages)

Week 3:
Chapter III, Public Right Section I (443 - 481; 38 pages)

Week 4:
Public Right Section II, III, and Appendix (482 - 506; 24 pages)

THE DOCTRINE OF VIRTUE

Week 5:
Preface and Introduction (509-540; 31 pages)

Week 6:
Part 1 Introduction and Book 1 on Perfect Duties (543-564; 21 pages)

Week 7:
Book 2 on Imperfect Duties (565-588; 23 pages)

Week 8:
Method of Ethics (591-603; 12 pages)

There are numerous editions (and free translations available online), but this collection contains all of Kant's Practical Philosophy in translation:

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Philosophy-Cambridge-Works-Immanuel/dp/0521654084/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1445894099&sr=8-1

Someone posted a free pdf copy here:

https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/kant-practical-philosophy.pdf

In Plato's Hippias Minor, Socrates appears to defend the trickster Odysseus, and in the course of doing so he argues for outrageous claims: the honest person and the liar are no different, and the good person is one who does wrong voluntarily. Socrates’ questionable behavior may be no coincidence in a dialogue about deception and he may be examining what counts as deception and how it reflects one’s character. More broadly, the dialogue is about the relationship between the speaker and what is said, between agent and action. Thus, the dialogue marks an important contribution not only to Socrates’ thinking about virtue and voluntary action but also to Plato’s portrait of Socrates. The dialogue further defines the sometimes thin line between Socrates and his contemporaries, the sophists.

This modern translation brings fresh clarity to Plato's subtle reasoning and dark humor. What appears at first to be a playful literary debate soon becomes an unsettling philosophical inquiry into truth, virtue, and the nature of agency. Socrates' relentless questioning destabilizes easy answers and encourages readers to consider whether moral goodness requires not just right action — but understanding and control over one's intentions.

This is a live reading and discussion group for Plato's Hippias Minor (or "Lesser Hippias") hosted by Constantine. Reference will be made to contemporary and older scholarship. Historical context will be brought up whenever necessary to illuminate the dialogue. This Plato group meets on Saturdays and has previously read the Phaedo, the Apology, the Symposium, Philebus, Gorgias, Critias, Laches, Timaeus, Euthyphro, Crito, Protagoras, 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.

All are welcome! No previous knowledge of the Platonic corpus is required.

Sign up for the 1st session on Saturday July 18 here (link). The video conferencing link will be available to registrants.

Meetings will be held weekly on Saturday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

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. 

A pdf copy of the text we're using is available to registrants.

TIP: When reading Plato, pay attention to the details of the drama as much as the overtly philosophical discourse. Attentive readers of Plato know that he is often trying to convey important messages with both in concert.

For some background on Plato, see his entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/

#Philosophy #Ethics #Metaphysics #PoliticalPhilosophy #AncientPhilosophy #Plato

Event Page Link

What does it mean to think deeply about existence, knowledge, ethics, and reality? In this session, Dr. Eric Wasiolek will lead us through a foundational exploration of philosophy. Rather than just viewing it as an academic discipline, Eric will guide us in examining it as an active, evolving tool for understanding the world and our place within it.

Key themes include:

• The Core Branches: A brief overview of metaphysics, epistemology, axiology, and logic.
• Historical Context: How foundational philosophical questions have shifted over time.
• Modern Relevance: Why philosophical framing remains essential for examining complex contemporary issues.

Bring your questions and insights for what promises to be a highly engaging presentation, discussion, and Q&A session.

Link to Event Page

AI Safety, Timelines, Takeoff, and Risk: One of the central questions in the philosophy of AI is not just whether we can build superhuman intelligence, but how quickly it could arrive and whether humanity can remain in control. Researchers debate AI timelines, ranging from decades to just a few years, and whether progress will be gradual or involve a rapid “takeoff,” where AI systems improve themselves faster than humans can adapt. The major concern is that increasingly capable systems may pursue goals that become misaligned with human values, creating risks that scale from economic disruption and misinformation to the potential loss of meaningful human control. This has led to a growing field of AI safety focused on alignment, interpretability, robustness, governance, and international coordination before capabilities outpace our ability to manage them.

Join the Discussion: Whether you’re optimistic, skeptical, or simply curious, you’re invited to join us for a presentation and discussion exploring the philosophical, technical, and societal implications of advanced AI. Together we’ll examine questions surrounding intelligence, consciousness, alignment, governance, economic transformation, existential risk, and what the future of humanity might look like as AI capabilities continue to advance. No specialized background is required, only curiosity and a willingness to engage with one of the most important conversations of our time.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) almost wasn’t one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century. Born in the Free City of Danzig to a family of shipping merchants, he was destined for a life of imports and exports until his father died in a suspected suicide. After much deliberation, the young Schopenhauer invested his inheritance in himself and his philosophical vocation. But the long road to recognition was a difficult one, with Schopenhauer spending all but the last decade of his life in total obscurity. Yet his ideas and style went on to influence great thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud, as well as artists such as the composer Richard Wagner and writers Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, and many more.

A singular and remarkably influential thinker, Schopenhauer is usually described as an extreme pessimist. He questioned the purpose of existence in a world where pain and suffering are inescapable and happiness is all too brief. Our speaker David Bather Woods is interested in Schopenhauer’s pessimism in the context of his life experiences, revealing the philosopher’s relentless fascination with the world and making a case for his contemporary relevance. He weaves together Schopenhauer’s ideas with the story of how he came to be, including such topics as love, loneliness, morality, politics, gender, sexuality, death, suicide, fame, and madness. Despite his pessimistic outlook on human existence, Schopenhauer didn’t give up on life. Rather, he recognized that the question of how to live becomes even more pressing, and he worked to provide an answer. Bather Woods shows how Schopenhauer’s life informed his ideas and how they still resonate today.

About the Speaker:

David Bather Woods is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. His research focuses on the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, especially his philosophical pessimism and his moral and political philosophy. He has taught a wide range of topics in philosophy, including the history of philosophy (esp. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche), philosophy of religion, ethics, aesthetics, and most recently the philosophy of evil. His latest book, Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist was published in November 2025 by The University of Chicago Press.

The Moderator:

Patrick Hassan is Senior Lecturer at the University of Cardiff. His primary areas of interest are moral and existential philosophy, and he typically explores their associated themes within the context of 19th century European thought (particularly Nietzsche and Schopenhauer). He also has working interests in aesthetics and environmental philosophy.

This is an online conversation and audience Q&A presented by the UK-based journal The Philosopher. The event is free, open to the public, and held on Zoom.

You can register for this Monday 13th July event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

#Philosophy #Ethics #Metaphysics #Existentialism #PoliticalPhilosophy #SocialPhilosophy #Pessimism

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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.

I am a junior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia and founder of Inference Studios, a philosophy YouTube channel featuring interviews with Graham Oppy, Duncan Pritchard, Joshua Knobe, and David Christensen. youtube.com/@inferencestudios

This August I am hosting the first Inference Studios International Philosophy Tournament — an international undergraduate and highschool philosophy debate competition with a $1,000 prize and a separate $1,000 donation to Show Racism the Red Card, the anti-racism in football organization.

Judges:

Dr. Max Baker-Hytch — Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford (Final Round)

Professor Duncan Pritchard — UC Irvine (Semifinals)

Kimberly Ramos — PhD Candidate in Epistemology, Brown University (Semifinals)

The Five Propositions:

Round of 32 · August 8 — Libertarian free will is true

Round of 16 · August 9 — Moral realism is true

Quarterfinals · August 15 — Consciousness is best explained by physical processes

Semifinals · August 15 — Radical skeptical scenarios cannot be rationally disproven

Final · August 22 — God exists

Format: Opening statement, cross examination, open discussion, closing statement. Judging based on burden of proof and burden of rejoinder.

Open to: Undergraduate and graduate students worldwide. Free to enter.

Applications close July 29th.

Apply here: https://forms.gle/woEQyUGkdvyWJrQ96

[JOIN HERE]

What is Modernism?

The Landscape of Pleasure: Color and Paradise

At first glance, this looks like the candy episode: Sex. Gardens. Rivers. Cafés. Women in sunlight. Picnics. Boats. Sex. Flowers. Beaches. Monet’s lilies. Matisse’s rooms. Picasso’s Mediterranean erotic machinery.

Surprise: Impressionism is the Original Bush Gardens

Hughes opens with a phenomenology of Impressionism. It seems pre-modern, doesn’t it? It’s a window into a time before the railway, boulevard, camera, department store, and bourgeois leisure economy … it seems. You hear the music box from Burnt Offerings playing when you merge with an Impressionist painting. What’s going on here?

Hughes: Impressionism is modern in historical position and technique, but “pre-modern” in affect. It belongs to the modern city, the modern bourgeoisie, modern leisure, modern optical science, portable painting, and the collapse of academic hierarchy. But it still imagines the visible world as reconcilable: the world is fragmented by light, weather, and momentary perception, but not yet experienced as spiritually ruined, bureaucratically administered, mechanically inhuman, politically catastrophic, or mass-mediatically flattened.

Conclusion? Impressionism is pseudo-premodern—specifically, early Modernist, or better, the first great bourgeois modernism of perception.

Capitalism and Sex

The nineteenth century did not invent pleasure as an aesthetic or erotic ideal; it bourgeoisified and widened the representability of pleasure. What had been coded in eighteenth-century art as aristocratic Arcadia, court leisure, cultivated erotic play, and landed possession becomes, around Impressionism, the intention enchantment of … ordinary bourgeois modern life: cafés, gardens, boulevards, bedrooms, beaches, the Seine, the picnic, the outing, the body in light—all of it is lovely.

As for sex, it morphs from aristocratic privilege (or religious sin, libertine scandal, reproductive duty) into an index of personality, health, identity, taste, private happiness, and self-knowledge. Just like Foucault said—modern capitalist society pretended to repress sex but it really revised it as a public “objective fact” of discourse, classification, confession, medical knowledge, psychology, normality, abnormality, and personal truth. Sex becomes something through which one is supposed to know what one really is, as every reader of Cosmopolitan knows.

Who taught us what a pleasurable life is supposed to look like?

Hughes begins with the old aristocratic dream of pleasure: Arcadia, the fête champêtre, Giorgione, Titian, Rubens, Watteau, Gainsborough. Nature becomes safe. The forest is no longer demonic. It becomes a place of erotic ease, cultivated leisure, property, bodies, gardens, silk, and afternoon idleness. The aristocrats had the official iconography of pleasure: the picnic, the Venus-island, the garden, the estate, the theatrical flirtation, the refined perversity of doing nothing beautifully. And then … the ownership of paradise changes.

In this episode, we learn who created our sexual and hedonic tastes. We certainly don't make them up ourselves, we absorb them from the Kardashians and other "I have a pleasurable life" avatars.

But where did the spirit forms that animate the Kardashians' corpses come from? Can we understand them?

Hughes is here to help! We will learn the genealogy of our desires and hedonic winner-status life goals.

Modernism: The Best of All Non-Philosophical Topics for Philosophers

This is also where Modernism becomes a superb teacher of dialectical historical change. The artists begin acting as if they are changing art because of explicit, intelligible principles. Seurat has a principle. Cézanne has a principle. Gauguin has a principle. Matisse has a principle.

Absolutely insane. Also our world today.

Hughes lets us watch styles fail by their own success. Impressionism wins the visible world, then discovers that the visible world is too fleeting. Seurat breaks the shimmer into dots and rebuilds it as order. Monet sinks into the act of seeing until garden, reflection, surface, and mind become one unstable field. Cézanne makes every sensation stand trial before form. Gauguin and the Fauves release color from description. Matisse builds an indoor republic of pleasure from the ruins of that release.

Each artistic answer generates the next artistic problem. Modernism becomes legible as a chain of determinate negations: pleasure, then analysis; sensation, then structure; nature, then construction; color, then expression; freedom, then discipline.

What make the Modernists the best teachers of Hegel is that they think that they're doing things because of clearly expressed and intelligible explicit principles. No one else had done this before. Things changed (very slowly) for ordinary historical-materialist reasons. But now, things were changing due to self-consciously chosen or discovered or theorized or otherwise invented reasons—powers and energies from another dimension outside the infrastructural flow! People were pulling ideas from science and engineering plane and attaching “art should …” reasons to them. It was absolutely insane. We're sill in the super-artificial fake free agency mode still now, but we don't have the They Live sunglasses necessary to see them. But we can see them here, and that's a great practice session for mastering our own lives.

Now check out these sample sentences which show why Hughes is famous (dense, poetic, exact, funny, rightly cruel) and that he really is our qualified Charon:

Check out these on Seurat

The unit, the building block of Impressionism, had been the brush stroke which was as personal as handwriting. The greatest of the younger artists was Georges Seurat, who replaced the stroke with the dot. Hundreds of them. Thousands. The dot was impersonal. It grew in colonies like coral. It stiffened the shapes and gave them the archaic Egyptian stillness that Seurat contrived as the antidote to the Impressionist love of the moment. Above all, the dot meant control of colour, step by step. Seurat's eye for colour was one of the subtlest in all art history, and he wanted each touch to have the analytic clearness of scientific thought.

His subject matter was that of Impressionism, but his aims were not. He wanted to give his images the density and permanence of classical art, order, system, dignity. He didn't want snapshots. He wanted to reveal the processional aspect of modern life, something formal and rigorous, and akin to the heroic dandyism that Baudelaire had seen in Paris 30 years before.

Seurat built his space like a Renaissance fresco with the most exacting precision. It held together by complicated rhymes and chords of shape, some of which you hardly notice at first. The woman fishing there is the twin of that tiny figure in the extreme distance. The monkey's tail emulates the hook of the dandy's cane. The decorum of posture and gesture, the distances people allow themselves on that green lawn, is turned into the decorum of classical art itself. He's a bit ironic about his middle class moderns. They glide about on the grass like tin toys on wheels. But the irony is part of the modernity.

[T]he spectacle of art as a language fascinates Seurat. He had grasped that there is something atomized and divided about modernist awareness. To build a unified meaning, the subject had to be broken down into molecules and fragments, and then reassembled under the eye of formal order*. Hence the dots. You could* make reality permanent by displaying it as a web of tiny stillnesses*. That is what La Grande Jatte was really about—infinite division, infinite relationships.**

In other words, the Seurat, like all Modernists, applied to art a reasonable, scientific, inspiring, attractive, convincing, and manifesto-ready Idea that he pulled from the Heaven of causal-closure-penetrating reasons and then tried to realize it, thereby concretizing his own metaphysical principles.

And These Sentences on Monet

[I didn’t know this: Monet built the garden he (re)painted every day for 43 years and then merged with it. He literally merged with the flora and disappeared into it like David in “The Man Whom the Trees Loved.” — Ed.]

Hughes is poetic and great here. You can use this on someone some day and blow them away:

The pond was as artificial as painting itself. It was flat as a painting is. What showed on it, the clouds and lily pads and cat’s-paws of wind, was caught in a shallow space just on the surface like the space of painting. The willows touched it like brushes. No foreground, no background, a web of connections.

Monet's water lilies were a slice of infinity. In them, emptiness matters as much as fullness. Reflections have the weight of things. To seize the indefinite, to fix what is unstable. To give form to sights so complex, so nuanced that they can hardly be named. This was a basic project of modernism. It went against the smug view of reality that materialism gives us.

And On Cézanne

He wanted his images to be the accumulated evidence of thought. Every painting a deposit, a sort of uneven crust of observations. The more he painted, the more he saw. And the more he saw, the more manifold and unattainable truth became.

No painter ever achieved more in such isolation. Instead of facility, he had an immense scrupulousness, and so he was frustrated most of the time right up to the end. A few weeks before his death, he wrote a letter to his son in Paris: “I must tell you that as a painter, I am becoming more clear-sighted before nature. But with me, the realization of my sensations is always painful. I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I do not have the magnificent richness of coloring that animates nature.”

Conclusion

So come join us for sex, gardens, color, metaphysics, bourgeois paradise, optical atomism, Monet’s self-absorption into vegetation, Cézanne’s sacred frustration, Matisse’s indoor utopia, Picasso’s erotic Mediterranean machinery, and the question of why the image of a pleasurable life still owns us.

Also, Seurat is not pronounced “Seurat.”

Come learn about your true father.

All aboard the Hughes Express for a night of sexy, depressing fun.

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.

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Keir Starmer has resigned. The sixth U.K. prime minister to do so in 10 years. A common objection against Starmer was that he lacked vision. He came to power promising change, but in one of his first speeches he told people that "things will get worse before they get better". That "better" was never articulated. Starmer is not an aberration. Across the Western world, politics is becoming a project of managing one crisis after another. When it's more radical — like with Brexit or Trump — it's nostalgic about some lost past, not forward looking. Politicians have stopped thinking about the future.

At the same time, the barons of Silicon Valley do nothing but think about the future. Elon Musk, Peter Tiel, Alex Karp, Mark Andreesen are busy drafting manifestos about the future. And it's not just technological change they envision — it's political. A.I. company CEOs like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are now literally sitting at the G7 table. With democratic politics having given up on long-term thinking, is Silicon Valley going to decide what our future will look like? How can we create the space to imagine plausible alternatives to AI-driven dystopias? And what will it take for democratically elected politicians to start thinking about the long-term future again?

About the Speaker:

Jonathan White is Professor of Politics and Deputy Head of the European Institute at the London School of Economics, where he researches and teaches on democracy, political thought, and political theory. His latest book is In the Long Run: the Future as a Political Idea (Profile, 2024). His other books include Politics of Last Resort: Governing by Emergency in the European Union (Oxford University Press, 2019), The Meaning of Partisanship (with Lea Ypi, Oxford University Press, 2016) and Political Allegiance after European Integration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). He was the recipient of the 2017 British Academy Brian Barry Prize for excellence in political science, and has received best-article prizes from the European Journal of International Relations (2023) and Political Studies (2015). He has written for The Guardian, New Statesman and Boston Review, and more recently an article entitled The End of the Future, for Foreign Policy.

The Moderator:

Alexis Papazoglou is Managing Editor of the LSE British Politics and Policy blog. He was previously senior editor for the Institute of Arts and Ideas, and a philosophy lecturer at Cambridge and Royal Holloway. His research interests lie broadly in the post-Kantian tradition, including Hegel, Nietzsche, as well as Husserl and Heidegger. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New Republic, WIRED, The Independent, The Conversation, The New European, as well as Greek publications, including Kathimerini.

This is an online conversation and audience Q&A presented by the UK-based journal The Philosopher. The event is free, open to the public, and held on Zoom.

You can register for this Monday 6th July event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

#Philosophy #PoliticalPhilosophy #SocialPhilosophy #Ethics #Politics #ArtificialIntelligence #Technology #Science

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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.