Sydney Philosophy Symposia

Established in Sydney, Australia, SPS is a grassroots community of philosophers, psychologists, artists, poets, engineers, physicists, video-game designers, journalists, activists and social workers, who meet each month to discuss an influential work in the history of philosophy. When the weather is nice, we usually convene in a public garden with food and drink, or else throw a house party and philosophize into the early morning.

The group is free and open to all, no matter your level of education: our goal is to bring philosophy out of the classroom and back into public life. With the onset of covid-19, we've made the most of an otherwise distressing situation, and started holding our meetings online. The result has been phenomenal: the group is now international, and our numbers continue to swell each month!

We do our utmost to cultivate a spontaneous atmosphere that is both deep and deeply entertaining, free and inclusive. If you'd like to attend this potlach of ideas, whether as an active participant or a passive listener, please join the facebook group, or send us an email via the subscription page. Hope to see you soon!

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13 JULY 2024

Decolonisation: Violence, Liberation, Historical Trauma

In-person meet starts at 1PM at Wendy Whiteley's Secret GardenIf you'd like to join, send us a quick email via the subscribe page

Sydney Symposia are ticketed events. Please make a contribution at www.ko-fi.com/sydneysymposia before attending.“They talk to me about civilisation, but I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out. I am talking about millions of people in whom fear has been cunningly instilled, who have been taught to have an inferiority complex, to tremble, kneel, despair, and behave like flunkeys.” — Aimé Césaire“Decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon. It is, quite simply, the replacing of one “species” of men by another “species” of men.” — Frantz FanonWe have never been “post-colonial.” Insofar as capitalism is an economic mode of production that fundamentally relies on the appropriation of land, labour, and resources by means of dispossession and extraction — in forms both brutal and insidious — then the history of capitalism and the history of colonialism are necessarily intertwined. Indeed, colonialism might be seen as the hidden dirty “secret” of capitalism, its source of “primitive accumulation”, as well as the general growth-scheme that it's been subtly perfecting over time. Both hidden and omnipresent, disavowed and ever-operative, the colonial logic of capital continues to rule the planet today as it did the plantations of the 19th century.But colonialism isn’t just an abstract generalisable strategem of foreign invasion for the purpose of extracting wealth. It was also a set of racist policies propped up by sham moral-hygienic and religious apologetics – "a communion wafer dipped in shit" – and other supremacist ideological justifications. The legacy to be reckoned with is one of violence inscribed not only on the pages of history but upon the very bodies and minds of the oppressed. Indeed, if we are to read the living body itself as a cultural artefact, as an archive of fear, survival, resistance and suffering, we might ask how deeply these lacerations have scarred the roots of the human evolutionary tree, and to what extent we can speak of an epigenetic inheritance of historical trauma.Some further questions to consider:• Is armed rebellion against an occupying power ever illegitimate? What are the limits of national liberation? Is resistance that seeks emancipation "by any means necessary" justified as a survival imperative that goes "beyond good and evil?"• How do we measure the loss involved in wiping out a people's form of life and cultural memory, and with these, the wholesale extinction of worlding-possibilities that may have contained the seeds of alternative models of human civilisation?• What does utopian thinking have to do with wish-fulfilment fantasy? How can we draw strength from imaginary futures in order to project ourselves beyond the deadlock of the present? Can we blast ourselves out of this historical continuum and hyper-telically launch ourselves into a new timeline with a different orbital trajectory?• Is a politics of resentment capable of liberating itself from systematic structures of domination, or must the snake curl inward and bite its own tail? How can we bear the memory of a painful past and, rather than let it weigh us down, be energised and emboldened by it instead?• Is trauma-bonding a viable basis for political solidarity, or does it reinforce victimhood by reproducing the binary division of an in-group defined as a virtuous "Us" and an out-group perceived as a invective "Them"?• Does colonisation dehumanise the coloniser along with the colonised? Is 'Western Civilisation' poisoned by the consciousness of its own moral hypocrisy and destined for an age of barbarism? Are we becoming beasts again for the first time?• Does 'spiritual exhaustion' or 'world-weariness' accumulate in the species in proportion to the accumulation of capital? Pace Bataille, should we not therefore expropriate the expropriators and gloriously squander the surplus in horizontal public expenditures without limit or reserve?• Are the downstream consequences of grand-scale politics invariably bio-political? If so, does anything interesting happen to the nature/nurture, nature/culture divide?• Do predatory relations of socio-economic domination naturalise themselves in the brain, and are the norms encoded in social institutions the congealed expression of culturally entrained moral reflexes? Does "the tradition of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living?"• In brief, in what ways, and by what means, does ideology become biology? What could it mean for the ways we think about power, privilege, equality, and justice?So come have a think with the Sydney Philosophy Symposia this month! Bring some food and drink to share with the community, and REMEMBER TO RUG UP — seriously, it's freakin' winter out there!📚 The selected reading (with a... What!? With a Table of Contents!?)🥹 A short but powerful speech by Michael Parenti that moved me to tears🤓 A CrashCourse on Decolonisation👩🏽🔬A Ted-ed animation on Epigenetics

13 APRIL 2024

Deja Vu Absolute: Hegel on Contradiction and the Awakening of Universal Self-Consciousness

In-person meet starts at 2PM at Wendy Whiteley's Secret GardenIf you'd like to join, send us a quick email via the subscribe page

Sydney Symposia are ticketed events. Please make a contribution at www.ko-fi.com/sydneysymposia before attending."When the power of unity vanishes from the life of Spirit and oppositions gain a fixed independence, the need for philosophy arises."The world is in a bad way. “The time is out of joint.” Fractured along so many lines of division — be they economic, political, moral, racial, sexual, ecological, scientific, or religious — any effort to rationally account for and systematically comprehend all of these contradictions in some grand unified vision of a progressively unfolding Spirit of World History should seem like a farce to us. We, the unmoored post-moderns who shamble on in the absurdity of existence after the death of God, scrolling through the wreckage of grand narratives at the end of history, have grown too cynical, too incredulous to really believe in such fairy-tales. And yet a similar sense of generalised uncertainty, of nihilistic disbelief mixed with the hopeful longing for unity amidst universal strife, political dissension, economic alienation, and the restless struggle to overcome the pathologically constricting stages of pyschosocial development, had, in his own time, provided Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) with the yarn and subject-matter that he would dialectically weave into one of the grandest narratives ever spun. Perhaps, then, it's no less true for us than it was for Hegel, "that our time is a time of birth and transition into a new era. Spirit has broken away from its former world of existence; it is prepared to submerge all that into the past, and is already busy transforming itself anew."In his epic “Phenomenology of Spirit,” Hegel narrates the odyssey of self-consciousness as it winds its way through the "pathway of despair" and up the ladder of "absolute knowing." Part transcendental recapitulation of the embryological development of spirit, part allegorical psycho-drama of the history of the species, Hegel retraces the ideal stages of natural consciousness as it divides itself from itself, loses itself in its otherness, restores itself to selfsameness, and retrospectively discovers the meaning of its journey in the recollection of the shapes of consciousness and modes of existence it outgrew along the way. History might be "the slaughter bench on which the happiness of peoples is sacrificed", but it is nevertheless through this tortured process of cultural education unto freedom, that Hegel thinks we have the right to confidently affirm the Promethean ambition of the human spirit as it strives to raise itself above its lowly and wretched condition, and glimpse "The Absolute Idea" unconsciously revealed in the great achievements of Religion, Art, and Philosophy. Where Spinoza had maintained that, at the personal level of our emotions, “suffering ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it,” so too does Hegel, in his doctrine of “Absolute knowledge,” offer to the philosophical initiate the grave but sobering consolation of an Eternal Idea manifesting itself in human affairs with “the cold march of necessity.”Then again, Hegel also said that “only one person ever understood me — and not even he understood me.” So rather than try to summarise Hegel in a couple of gripping paragraphs, here are some questions you can expect to brood over this month with the Sydney Philosophy Symposia:• Does human history have a meaning, a goal, a purpose? On what grounds can we periodise history into epochs or stages of development? What role does passion play in fomenting great historical events?• Do collective realities like society and nation have goals or tendencies separate from the individuals that compose them? What principle, if any, guides their evolution? Are the two orders of reality, individual and collective, functional transcriptions of one another?• Is the historical passage of time limited by a priori transcendental structures of consciousness? Of material conditions of production? What modulates the rhythm and tempo of history?• Is the essence and structure of the universe intelligible in and for itself, or do we project systematic order and coherence onto the external world?• Is reality extruded from the mind like a web from the spinneret of a spider?• Can we know anything absolutely? Is there anything in principle beyond the reach of reason?• What is the relationship between truth, time, and recollection? Do you believe in ghosts?• Does the fruit refute the bud it blossomed from? Does the plant immanently syllogise the essence of its own Concept? Will the day come when "the risk of remaining tight in the bud becomes more painful than the risk it would take to blossom?" (Quote adapted from Anaïs Nin)• Does self-consciousness and personal identity depend on the recognition of others? Is the I fundamentally a We?• What does the experience of lack, desire, and death; fullness, satisfaction, and vigour, have to do with our sense of confidence and self-certainty?• What is the meaning of labour and works of art for the evolution of self-consciousness? Can we only fully understand ourselves by seeing ourselves externally reflected in products of our own making? What happens when we don’t recognise ourselves in the externalised world of artificial objects? What happens when we do, but don't like what we see?• What are the ontological limits of the mind? Does consciousness extend beyond the brain? Is consciousness not only about, but also somehow interfused with, things?• Is the master-slave relationship a necessary stage of self-development? Can we ever fully overcome this opposition, or is this struggle for mutual recognition inexorable? What does risking one’s life in violent conflict have to do with freedom and the dignity of self-consciousness?• Does the unconsciousness of sleep ontologically precede the waking state of consciousness? Is consciousness a special case of what is primordially unconscious? If the undulating movement of self-consciousness is an organic artefact of the ebb and flow of historically protracted cycles of dormancy and arousal, then how can we be sure that the current age is presently awake? Does "the sleep of reason produce monsters?" What are philosophers for?• Is madness a necessary stage of reason? Is there no wisdom without folly?• Is Religion a salve for failure; a psychological abreaction; a comforting illusion? Can we really be “spiritual” in a secular age? Can we ever really be secular?• Just what the heck is "The Hegelian Dialectic," and does it have anything to do with the "Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis" formula? Can anything positive emerge from the negation of negation?🤓📚The selected reading can be found over here🤤🍕 And Remember to bring food and drinks to share, for “the true is the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk; yet because each member is immediately dissolved as soon as they fall down, the whirl of revelry is just as much a transparent and simple repose.”A
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IN-PERSON 17 FEB
ONLINE TBD

Autonomy: Kant on Enlightenment and the Freedom of Moral Self-Legislation

In-person meet starts at 3PM at Wendy Whiteley's Secret GardenIf you'd like to join, send us a quick email via the subscribe page

Sydney Symposia are ticketed events. Please make a contribution at www.ko-fi.com/sydneysymposia before attending.“There is nothing in the world, or even outside of it, which can be regarded as good without qualification, except a good will… Thus a good will seems to constitute the indispensable condition of even being worthy of happiness.”The last time we encountered Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), we looked at his transcendental idealism as outlined in the Critique of Pure Reason. There we discovered the strict limits of knowledge, beyond which we could not stray without entangling ourselves in a series of irresolvable paradoxes: because the mind actively constructs our experience of the world, we are “forbidden” from asserting any positive knowledge about things as they are “in themselves” apart from the way they appear to the mind that organises sensations according to the fundamental forms of space and time and the logical concepts of the understanding. This month, however, we’ll venture upon a “permissible” foray into the “noumenal realm” beyond the theoretical limits of pure reason and uncover the shimmering jewel at the heart of Kant’s architectonic system — his practical philosophy of morals, where he affirms the singular dignity of each and every member of the human race to autonomously determine their wills according to the universal law of freedom.TLDR: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end in itself.”🥂🧀 Remember to bring some food and drinks to share with the group, because even if a pure moral act borne of a true and noble heart may never have been done before, it's nevertheless our “duty” to establish “the Kingdom of Ends” here on earth!📚 Grab the totally optional but highly recommended readings (I beseech thee!!!) over here. We’ll be looking at the “Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals”, and his short but epoch defining essay “What is Enlightenment?”📺 To help you make sense of Kant, here are some helpful youtube clips for you to viddy:🥇Prof. Darren Staloff on Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History”🥈Prof. Rick Roderick on Kant’s “Path to Enlightenment”🥉 A Crash Course on Kant’s Categorical ImperativeFor those who can't attend in person, an online version of the event will be posted in the following weeks!

ONLINE 11 DEC 7PM
IN-PERSON 14 OCT

Virtue: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

In-person meetup starts 2PM at Wendy Whiteley's Secret Garden.If you'd like to join, send us a quick email via the subscribe page

After a 3 month hiatus, Sydney Symposia are back in season!This is a ticketed event, so please PWYC at https://ko-fi.com/sydneysymposia to reserve your spot before attending.“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”Philosophy is more than just critical theory and groovy metaphysical speculation — allegedly it's meant to teach us something about The Good Life, too — so I reckon now's as good a time as any to hold a meeting dedicated to ethics.We'll be covering an age-old classic that still slaps: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Some people treat it like a self-help book, but it’s a veritable training manual in the art of aristocratic soul-craft. In it, the reader will learn the meaning of the highest good toward which all human action aims, eudaimonia (happiness or human flourishing); about the life-long art of distinguishing oneself from the base and incontinent masses by cultivating a noble state of character through the habitual practice of virtue; about self-mastery and choosing moderation between the extremes ("the golden mean"); about the proper connection between desire, volition, pleasure, and the role of rational deliberation in producing good actions; about the various types of love and friendship, and their affinity with the various types of political constitution; about courage, temperance, liberality, pride, ambition, honesty, justice, law, equality, and their opposites.But since I’m an irremediable doomer who delights in provoking despair (I’m sorry), I’ll try to cast suspicion on the possibility of developing a full sense of character in the hustle culture of our burn-out society that grinds down the soul into data for an overclocked information economy dominated by large-scale corporate computing systems lurking behind our screens. What are we to make of this 'brave new world' where voluntary choices are increasingly outsourced to algorithms that decide things for us in advance of our self-conscious deliberation? If the formation of character essentially depends on the exercise of this rational power of the soul, then does a decrease in the opportunity to exercise this power necessarily produce a world where quality of character is also in decline?Come find out this month and actualise your potential as a rational animal with the Sydney Philosophy Symposia!P.S. Remember to bring food and drink to share, for in perfect friendships, where we wish well for the other for the other’s sake, “each gets from each in all respects something like what he gives.”

IN-PERSON: MAY 13
ONLINE: MAY 27
11AM (AEST)

Cosmic Organism: Schelling's Philosophy of Nature and the Self-Organising Universe

In-person meetup starts 2PM, May 13 at Wendy Whiteley's Secret Garden.If you'd like to join the online event, please send us an email via the subscribe page

“With the universe, things stand the same way as they do within the living organism: everywhere intertwined with itself, it perpetually strives to realize itself and become one in body and soul.”Born a generation after the intellectual orgy of German Romanticism ended, the renowned buzzkill and father of organic chemistry, Justus von Liebig, diagnosed Friedrich Schelling’s Naturphilosophie as “the insane sister of true science, the active influence of which was the intellectual pestilence and Black Death of the century.” This esteemed doctor of dung and organic decomposition should have known better, however, for a surprising number of Schelling’s metaphysical insights proved fruitful (perhaps even prophetic) for the future of scientific research. From the quantization of energy and the unification of physical forces like electro-magnetism, to the galvanic (electro-chemical) currents of sensory excitation that wire-up living organisms, Schelling’s paradigm of universal autopoiesis envisions the whole of Nature gradually bringing itself forth through a series of developmental stages like some immense Cosmic Super-Organism emerging from the eternal womb of the primordial Absolute. It remains one of the most profound — if somewhat bizarre — doctrines in the history of philosophy.So join us this month as we ‘taste the forbidden delights’ of one of my personal all-time favourite philosophers, Friedrich Schelling. Bring some food and drinks to share with the group, and prepare to learn a bunch of weird German words like Abgrund, Bildungstrieb, Polarität und Steigerung, while we participate in the ongoing construction of the cosmos, for “to philosophize about Nature means as much as to create it!”In the meantime, here are some groovy links to help you tune your brain-waves to a cosmogenic frequency:This vibrational sound-Image of a living cellA gurgling glitch-aquatic soundtrack produced by the late Japanese composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto, for an art installation called PlanktonThe abyssal sonic drone of a blackhole nourishing itself at the centre of the Perseus galaxy cluster, recorded by NASAAnd this cerebrally stimulating talk by modern-day Naturphilosoph, Iain Hamilton Grant, On the Construction of Matter and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field

18 MARCH & 02 APRIL

Transcendental Idealism: Kant's Metaphysics of Finitude

In-person meetup starts 3PM, March 18 at Wendy Whiteley's Secret Garden.ONLINE via Zoom on April 2nd at 7pm Sydney time zone.

"Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. Let us then make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in metaphysics, if we assume that the objects must conform to our cognition instead."As regular as the motion of the orbiting planets in the celestial heavens, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) would take his daily stroll around Königsberg at precisely 3pm each day. So exact were his walks, in fact, that local residents referred to him as "the clock of Königsberg," and could measure the round of their own daily errands by the predictability of his movements. Although he never set foot beyond the city limits of this small East Prussian town, that didn't prevent him from lecturing on wide-ranging topics like Physical Geography and Anthropology, often attracting crowds that packed into the auditorium rafters. Barely standing an inch above 5ft, what Kant lacked in vertical stature he more than made up for with a towering intellect — so vast in scope was his mind, that he envisioned with near prophetic foresight the first modern scientific nebular hypothesis for the natural formation of the stars and planets. In this sublime vision of perpetual universal creation, an infinity of galaxies like the Milky Way swirl into existence and coagulate into planets teeming with alien forms of life that strive to unfold the germ of their spiritual powers to its maximum extent. When at last the living flames at the heart of these solar systems supporting the progressive effort toward universal moral perfection burn out, they disperse their delicate ash back into a subtle but ever undulating cosmic aether that is continually regenerating new star systems from the ambient chaos. In this way, Kant thought, could the universe recycle its imperishable world-material according to the mechanical laws of gravitational attraction and a tangentially expansive force that eccentrically dance around a centrally sinking infinite mass for all eternity. Hence, “two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within.” But these flights of fancy inspired by an unrestrained use of speculative reason were not to last. Having announced, from his small corner of the world in Königsberg, the dawn of The Enlightenment, “the age of criticism, to which everything must submit,” Kant now turned his gaze inward, toward a critique of the power of pure reason itself.This month we’ll be looking at Kant’s Transcendental Idealism as it was expounded in his monumental work “The Critique of Pure Reason.” In a remarkably contemporary fashion, Kant portrays the mind as an organ that actively constructs our experience of the world by its power to imaginatively synthesise the matter we intuit through the senses with the logical categories that frame these sensations according to fundamental concepts of the understanding. Having specified the organic machinery of cognitive experience, he then seeks to trace "the permissible boundaries" of our knowledge as finite rational creatures who hunger for answers to metaphysical questions which we cannot dismiss — whether or not the world had a beginning in time and space, whether nature is composed of irreducibly simple parts, whether we are free or determined in our actions by a strict causal necessity, and whether there is a God or an immortal soul — but which, owing to the limited nature of our human minds, we can never hope to answer in a completely satisfying manner. The impossibility of unconditioned knowledge notwithstanding, Kant nevertheless offers a form of “epistemic therapy” meant to dissolve the vexing paradoxes that necessarily arise from our futile attempts to grasp the Absolute, as well as a critical means to adjudicate between the ungrounded metaphysical claims of dogmatic realists and the self-devouring skepticism of empirical idealists alike. So while we may not be able to know things “as they are in themselves,” we can at least know the a priori conditions that make experience possible in the first place — and this, Kant assures us, should be sufficient for the human purposes of gaining objectively valid knowledge in the physical sciences, politics, and morality.…What the heck do all these words mean?! Come find out as we synthesise the manifold at Wendy Whitely’s Secret Garden on Saturday, March 18th! Or join us online via ZOOM and register through the SUBSCRIBE page!

21 Feb 2023

The View from Eternity: A Seminar on Spinoza's Ethics

PRIVATE SEMINAR

“From the supreme power of infinite nature, an infinite number of things flow forth in an infinite number of ways, and flow with the same eternal necessity.”SPS will be holding a 2 part online private seminar on the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza this month. It's not a free event, but the fees are pretty flexible, so if you'd like to participate, send us an email at sydneysymposia@gmail.comHere's a breakdown of what we have planned:For the first meeting, we'll review the substance metaphysics of Aristotle and Descartes as an introduction to Spinoza's substance monism. To get those neurons really firing, we'll take a look at a principal example of geometrical deduction from Euclid's classic work, "The Elements," before braving the rigours of Spinoza's own geometrical method of argument; then we'll unpack his definitions and axioms, and examine how they all run together like clockwork in his logical proofs for the existence of God. For the back half of the seminar, we'll suss out the meaning of Pantheism, the political absurdities surrounding his condemnation as a radical atheist, and excogitate on some of the possible implications of Spinoza's identification of God with the totality of Nature. Finally, if time permits (or rather, if you'll permit me the time), I'll say a few things about the cosmological implications of Einstein's theory of General Relativity for the (un)reality of time, and summarise the view that some philosophers of physics have called the Eternal Block Universe.During the second meet, we'll focus on the practical side of Spinoza's ethics, and look at his notion of conatus as it relates to the emotions (of desire, joy, and sorrow), whereby joy arises with the feeling of an increase in power, while sadness ensues when that power is diminished. Given Spinoza's vision of Nature "sub specie aeternitatis" (i.e., as a causally determined system seen from the view of eternity), we'll examine his claim that knowledge of the logically necessary relations revealed to us in the clear light of Reason can raise us above our pathological states of emotional bondage sheerly by the gentle power of understanding: "emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it." Finally, at the close of the Ethics, Spinoza contends that the highest and most lasting form of happiness can be attained through a liberating intuition of the Absolute, whereby we achieve that state of "blessedness" he calls "amor dei intellectualis", the intellectual love of God... So, I'll also do my best to decrypt this most hermetically sealed portion of "The Ethics," and offer a few possible interpretations — does it mean a mystical union with The One, a Stoic apathy toward one's ineluctable fate, a cool and sober indifference toward the perfect mathematical calculation of God's Machinic Universe? I'm not entirely sure yet. But we'll definitely get to the bottom of it this month, so you won't want to miss out!The meetings will be held via Zoom, and all readings, audiobooks, and seminar notes will be provided in advance.Join us as we joyfully — which is to say, powerfully — contemplate the infinite modifications of Absolute Substance. SUBSCRIBE!

26 NOV & 4 DEC 2022

No Gods, No Goddesses: The Existential Feminism of Simone de Beauvoir

[In-person] Meetup starts 4:30PM, 26th of Nov @ Wendy's Secret Garden[Online] 4th of Dec via Zoom. RSVP

"Is femininity secreted by the ovaries? Is it enshrined in a Platonic heaven? Is a frilly petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? Although some women zealously strive to embody it, the model has never been patented... One is not born, but rather becomes, woman."Sydney Symposia are back in season! We'll be kicking it off this month with the existential feminism of Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), drawing a link between two of her most famous works, "The Ethics of Ambiguity" and "The Second Sex."In the former, Beauvoir outlines an approach to ethics that does not flee, but courageously embraces, the fundamental ambiguity of human existence as an indispensable condition for the creation of values and the possibility of making free authentic choices. In the absence of any absolute reassurances, can we bear the responsibility of "forging laws that are valid for all"? Perhaps no unconditional answers can be given; but cowardice doesn't pay: we must "take delight in this very effort toward the impossible, and experience it as a triumph, not a defeat."In "The Second Sex," Beauvoir fiercely scrutinizes the alleged destiny of woman as "the Other," braided in her subservience to man, "the Master," from the perspective of her existential philosophy: "The world has always belonged to men, and none of the reasons given for this have ever seemed sufficient." Having her transcendence denied since time out of mind, Beauvoir envisions nothing less than a total transformation of the world so that the contours of the future bear the imprint of women, not as mere accessories to the ends of Man, but as the genuine co-creators of an evolving human reality.All are welcome to join, but please bring some food and drinks to share with the group!If you're joining us online, send us an email through the SUBSCRIBE page, or RSVP HERE

20 OCT 2022

Progress in Retrograde: A Seminar on Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

PRIVATE SEMINAR

"O man, of whatever country you are, and whatever your opinions may be, behold your history, such as I have thought to read it, not in books written by your fellow creatures, who are liars, but in nature, which never lies. The times of which I am going to speak are very remote: it is the life of your species which I am going to write, which society may have depraved, but cannot have entirely destroyed."The life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was an absolute sensation that defined his age, and continues to send shockwaves down to the present day. Self-confessed deviant, thief, sexually depraved masochist, champion of breastfeeding and early childhood education, deadbeat dad, musical composer, and paranoid narcissist, Rousseau's life gave body to the celebrity cliche of fame advanced by controversy. "I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and perhaps Nature did wisely in breaking the mould with which she formed me." Buried in the Panthéon among the revolutionary Jacobins whose hearts he inflamed a decade after his death, Rousseau's work would also go on to influence the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the romanticism of Goethe and Schiller, and the political economy of Karl Marx.But he also influenced a whole slew of important French anthropologists (such as Marcel Mauss, André Leroi-Gourhan, and Claude Levi-Strauss) from whom we'll take our bearings this month. The seminar will be online, and will take place on two separate dates:On the first meet, we'll cover Part 1 of Rousseau's Discourse, which sets forth a "hypothetical reasoning" regarding humanity as it might have been found in a "state of nature" prior to its artificial domestication in the civil state. Being at times too great a writer for his own good, it's often hard to determine the extent to which Rousseau's account is meant to be taken literally. So we'll compare his narrative with some of our present knowledge from primatology, paleoanthropology, and evolutionary psychology, in order to see just how far-fetched his tale really was. Is this anachronistic? Of course it is! But so is an Australopith holding a hoverboard strutting through a 7-eleven. If you want to learn about fossils and our genetic relationship to the great apes, the evolution of bipedalism, the fanning-out and differentiation of the cerebral cortex, the invention of stone tools, hunting, scavenging, and the capture of fire, ancient climates and diets, our expansion out of Africa, and the evolution of language, deception, empathy and social intelligence, then this is the date for you.In the second, we'll cover part 2 of the Discourse, which builds on the first, and traces out a path of retrograde progress from small-scale, egalitarian Paleolithic societies, to the institution of private property and its demented historical offspring: stratified hierarchical regimes of military power founded on the twin pillars of Neolithic agriculture and metallurgy. In the ferment of war, disease, and decadence, the omnipresence of civic corruption habitually warps our innate sense of compassion, and further frays the natural bonds of social solidarity. Once a critical threshold is crossed, insurrectionary violence breaks loose and unleashes "a second state of nature more gruesome than the first". An eerily familiar story, perhaps, but one that we'll nevertheless supplement with some material from the ethnographic record of hunter-gatherer societies, the totemic structure of tribal groups, the archaeology of early state formation, and a consideration of some of the recurring reasons for how and why states collapse.If you'd like to take part in this small group seminar, send us an email at sydneysymposia@gmail.com

1 AUGUST 2022

The Accursed Share: Sacrifice and Superabundance at the End of History

Meetup starts 7:30 PM AEDT via Zoom

"A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism."The work of Georges Bataille (1897-1962) blurs if not 'crosses the line' between erotic literature, philosophical anthropology, psychoanalytic self-confession, mysticism, and the sociology of religion.This month we'll be looking at selections from his 3 volume work, "The Accursed Share," which outlines a theory of "general economy" based on the principle of cosmic superabundance and the inevitability of non-productive expenditure. For Bataille, the question is always posed in terms of excess: our only choice is whether we will spend the sun's energy "gloriously or catastrophically."Join us online as we talk about the sublime outpouring of solar radiation that plays on the surface of the earth; the transition from animal to man by the institution, and transgression, of cultural taboos; the archaic horror of ritual sacrifice and the febrile erotic desire for annihilation that melts individuality in the primordial void of universal non-being; the idiotic waste of resources involved in the build-up for war and the necessary surrender of wealth in the social practice of gift-giving; and the fulfilment of self-consciousness as an experience of sovereignty at the end of history.Words are futile; we thirst after frenzy. Here's a video I made for this month:

27 JUNE 2022

Anxiety of a Time to Come: Hobbes on War, Conquest, and Religion

[ONLINE]

"For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather."We'll be holding an ONLINE private seminar on the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes this month, taking a look at his enormously influential work "Leviathan." It's a work as dense as the style is pithy, but for this seminar we'll narrow in on 4 pertinent themes: anxiety, war, religion, and conquest. In overview, we'll critically examine how Hobbes argues that our innate fear of violent death and the gnawing struggle for self-preservation leads to a natural state of war; how our ignorance of the ultimate causes underlying the physical world of matter-in-motion leads us to worship the illusory explanations enshrined in religious superstition; how our reason compels us to seek peace through social contract, the terms of which involve relinquishing individual liberty in exchange for collective safety; and how the "nourishment of the Commonwealth", fed by sea and land, leads to foreign conquest and the establishment of plantation colonies.If you'd like to take part in this small group seminar, send us an email at sydneysymposia@gmail.com

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7 MAY 2022

Utilitarianism: Happiness and the Rational Calculation of Punishment

[ONLINE]

"Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do."A week before his death, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) instructed his friend, Dr. Thomas Southwood, to arrange for his body to be dissected in front of a medical audience, and have his skeleton and head mummified so that it could be dressed in a hat and suit, propped up with his cane upon a stool "in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought." To this day, his "auto-icon" is carted around the globe and exhibited in museums, "reaping benefit" for all who gaze upon the taxidermied corpse. Whatever we might say about Bentham's philosophy in the last analysis, we can't deny his being perfectly consistent with it to the very end: "I shall at least be not altogether useless after my death."Utilitarianism is often reduced to the so-called "greatest happiness principle", a moral maxim which states that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to promote the reverse of happiness." In actual fact, the doctrine implied a much broader political program that sought to apply sweeping reforms across the whole of society, renovating everything from sewerage systems to schools, hospitals, mental asylums, and prisons. It's with respect to the lattermost that Bentham first formulated his theory of utility, which he originally intended as the moral foundation for a new penal code: if happiness could be calculated on the basis of pleasure and pain, then punishment—the deliberate application of suffering in order to deter criminal behaviour—must also be amenable to a similar arithmetic... An arithmetic of pain meant to "grind bad men good."So if you're a denizen of this ex-penal colony, Australia, and have a hunger for meaningful conversation, join us at this month's Symposium, where we'll binge on high-intensity/short-duration pleasures like cakes, pizza, and gin cocktails, while ruminating on high-intensity/long-duration questions like:• What is the role of the state when individual liberties bump up against the common good? What is the legitimate extent of state coercion? Can it ever be justified?• What is Law, and how does it shape the historical development of a society? How does its apparatus "subjectivate" individuals by selecting for dispositions that fall within the compass of permissible behaviour? Can we eliminate crime by "weeding out mischief"? Is this even desirable? Who gets to define these terms? Who suffers them?• What role do sanctions (moral, religious, social, political, economic) play in instances where the law has no reach?• What is the relationship between pain and memory, and how might their interaction be utilised by the powerful?• What is the ontology of individual actions, and how do they interact with the circumstances they ripple through?• What is the p a n o p t i c o n, and is it in the room with us right now?• Must everything everywhere always be made into a means for fulfilling some useful purpose, and is it actually a good idea to engineer society on the model of happiness defined as the positive sum of pleasure over pain? Are there other components to happiness? Is happiness an overrated moral category?

Be there or be square!

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21 FEB 2022

Self-Imaginary: Hume on Causal Skepticism and Personal Identity

Meetup starts 8 PM AEDT via Zoom

"For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by a sound sleep; so long as I am insensible of myself, I may truly be said not to exist."What is it that gives us a sense of personal continuity amidst the manifold changes that span a lifetime? Is it simply memory and the coherent association of our most lively perceptions? The constant experience of the body and the organic sympathy of its parts? Or could it be the hopes we entertain and the goals we pursue that give a determinate shape to our identity and purpose to our existence?For the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), the self is an ineluctable fiction that passively arises from the connection of our ideas and sensations. Originally, we are "nothing but a bundle of perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux." To bring order to this flux, however, the mind needs only a few simple psychological relations of association that weave the mass of sensations into a relatively stable illusion we get in the habit of calling "myself": Contiguity, Resemblance, and Cause & Effect. While the latter seem straightforward enough – contiguity associates in the mind those things that appear close together in space and time, while resemblance joins qualities that appear similar according to their degree and kind – our notion of cause and effect is a "bias of the imagination" that, strictly speaking, cannot be said to be anchored in the nature of things themselves. And yet, because the psychological mechanism of causal association underlies the foundation of both science and our conception of the self, the question arises: can we ever take either of these for certain? And if not, why do we so stubbornly believe in them as though we could?Come find out this month with the Sydney Philosophy Symposia!

The super-custom-pdf-reading-bundle can be found here

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18 & 20 DEC 2021

Karl Marx: Historical Materialism and the Revolutionary Transformation of Society

DEC 18 - [IN PERSON]
Meetup starts 2 PM AEST at Wendy Whiteley's Secret GardenDEC 20 - [ONLINE]
Meetup starts 8 PM AEST via Zoom

"We suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development."Not unlike Herr Doktor Freud, Karl Marx (1818-1883) is another maligned figure in the history of ideas about whom people think they already know everything they need. The average PragerU graduate of subaverage intelligence will tell you that his work was single-handedly responsible for the deaths of exactly 9, 289, 736, 290 Russian peasants imprisoned in the Gulag Archipelago; smug jean-ironing cLAsSiCaL liberals are only too pleased to repeat the same stale platitudes, adding that socialism is "great in theory, but bad in practice... b/c human nature or something"; to top it off, anonymous armies of larping Bolsheviks, unironically living out the opening lines of the 18th Brumaire, goose step on chan boards while defending the horrors of Stalin behind pervy anime avatars. Looking at these admittedly ridiculous ideological portraits, it's no wonder Marx himself was the first to proclaim "je ne suis pas Marxiste!"On the whole, the accusations brought against Marx are usually expressed with a level of confidence inversely proportional to the number of books his detractors have actually read by him... Which is a real shame! Because, love him or hate him, Marx was a first-rate writer and a firebrand thinker who still has a lot to teach us. So what I propose to do for this month is bracket all the bull we've seen in the memes and the media, and engage with his work directly and in earnest. As per the readings I've judiciously selected for this month, we'll focus our discussion around the fundamental concepts of Historical Materialism, Species-Being, the Labour Process and Alienation, Commodity Fetishism, Machine Automation, and the fundamental ambiguity of Marx's prophetic vision for a revolutionary transformation of society that promises to bring us beyond this hellbound nightmare that Crapitalism has wrought into existence after its own demented image.

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30 OCT 2021

Freud on Civilization and the Unconscious Dynamically Repressed

Meetup starts 11AM AEST via Zoom

"Civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct, and that is why it is largely responsible for our misery."No intellectual is easier to dismiss with a smirk than Freud. We all know how the jokes go, about choo-choo trains and dark tunnels, about the psychosexual drama starring Mommy, Daddy, and Me. But in the era of "Yas Queen!" and "You dropped this King," of OnlyFans and crackpot self-help father figures preaching dominance hierarchies to AlphaBetaSigma dorks — in the midst of a "culture war" where new sexual identities are in full bloom just as an avowed crisis in masculinity breeds a thirst for authoritarian politics — we might stop to wonder whether Freud has something to tell us about any of this. Besides, jokes, like our dreams, usually betray a wish gone unfulfilled... So maybe there's no better time for Freud than now?Setting the cliches aside, I'd like to highlight some of the more "metapsychological" aspects of psychoanalysis this month, and sketch an outline of a "Freudian ontology" before we dive into his famous work, "Civilization and its Discontents." Basically, I'll give an overview of a theory of the being of the mind conceived as an historical-organic substance stratifed by layers of evolved functional-anatomical regions shot through with libidinal energies that channel our conflicting primitive desires for sex and destruction, Eros and Thanatos. When these instincts pressing for release are met with frustration (or when we suffer an external stimuli too intense for the ego to integrate), the equilibrium of our psyche is torn open by a traumatic disruption of the circulation of nervous energy. Distorted memories, wish fulfillment fantasies, emotional hallucinations, obsessive neurotic symptoms, and guilt complexes surface from the wound, giving vent to the fixated libido that warps the mind around the rivets of its past trauma. Lurking beneath this mangled ego, which is punished by the moral censure of a superego embodying figures of authority that command our personal and collective identification, lies an unquenchable hunger that respects neither the limits of reason nor reality: the nucleus of an ancient inhuman id pulsing at the core of our unconscious.P.S. It's Halloween! So it's okay if you want to dress up and wear a costume other than your everyday human one.

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25 SEPT 2021

On the Absurdity of Existence: the Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus

Meetup starts 7PM AEST via Zoom

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."In order to deserve our respect, "the philosopher must preach by example." So who was Albert Camus (1913-1960)? The poster-child of French existentialism, he was a famous novelist, playwright and theater director, and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 (he would die just 3 years later in a car wreck, aged 46). Distinguished ladies' man and cigarette smoker, he was also an anarcho-syndicalist who actively supported the trade-unionist movement, but fiercely denounced the totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union. During the outbreak of WWII, he was an influential member of the underground resistance to the Nazi occupation of France, and editor of the banned newspaper "Combat." Behind the intellectual celebrity, however, Camus was a sincere and unpretentious man who wrote in the everyday language of the common person (at least compared to his Existential and Surrealist compatriots). He enjoyed playing soccer, sun-bathing, and swimming at the beach, and was something of a hometown hero whenever he returned to Algiers for the summer. When his mother-in-law first saw a photograph of him, she teased, "how absurd, he looks like a little monkey!", to which her daughter replied, "I agree, he is the closest thing to a man I've ever seen!"This month, we'll be looking at his famous essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus." In it, Camus seeks to strike a balance between emotional lyricism and rational lucidity in asking an apparently simple question: is it possible — without cheating by a leap of faith or a lapse in reason — to find meaning in the world and live "without appeal?" Can we passionately affirm our existence despite feeling like strangers in a universe not made for us — a world which is, at best, benignly indifferent to our nostalgia for unity and understanding, and, at worst, a plague-ridden madhouse that destroys every link between our best intentions and their practical realization? Can we, in a word, say "Yes!" to life in face of the hopelessness of the absurd? In Camus' opinion, we can: "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."So fix yourself a snack, pour a glass of wine (we won't judge you), and come get lifted with the Sydney Philosophy Symposia!

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21 AUG 2021

In the Shadow of the Gigantic: Heidegger on Truth and the Essence of Technology

Meetup starts 2:00PM @ Wendy's Secret Garden

"Everywhere we remain chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm it or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral: for this conception of it makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology."Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is often credited with being the most influential philosopher of the 20th century. Phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, critical theory, deconstruction, and post-humanism, all take their bearings from his fundamental rethinking of the question of the meaning of Being. But Heidegger was also kind of a dick: tediously formal, a snobby and snitching careerist, notoriously obscure in his writing, and a card carrying member of the nazi party to boot. While his most famous book, "Being and Time," was a genre-defining work of existentialism, written from the standpoint of "Dasein" – "that being for whom the meaning of being is an issue for it" – Heidegger's thought took a turn away from the categories of human subjectivity as such, and became increasingly mystical and prophetic following the inhuman carnage of WWII. Writing on a wide range of topics, from the history of ancient philosophy to modern science, mathematics, language, poetry, and art, his seminal essays on "The Essence of Truth" and "The Question Concerning Technology" will be our focus for this month.If the text is bewildering at first, I promise its meaning can be made clear with some patience on the part of the reader, and maybe a little help from yours truly. The gist of the argument is that the essence of technology isn't any tool or device that we're dumbstruck and captivated by, but a pervasive interpretative framework that we've inherited from a metaphysical tradition inconspicuously draped over the whole of Being. From under this veil, beings only show up and count as 'mattering' insofar as they are objects capable of being represented by a subject who can quantify and instrumentally manipulate them according to the rigorous procedures of the exact physical sciences. The fateful consequence of this will-to-mastery is not that it doesn't get things 'objectively correct' (far from it!), but that it installs man as the "self-exalted Lord of the earth," and enframes the entirety of nature, ourselves included, within what Heidegger calls "the standing-reserve": that is, as units of energy that we challenge-forth and wrench from the earth in order to stock-pile and exhaust as mere resources. Being is only seen as a realm to plunder, and the essence of technology manifests itself as an uncanny and gigantic anthropocentric project of technological world domination. Curiously, however, this industrial planetary reaping doesn't fully represent the apex of the existential threat facing humanity. The real danger, says Heidegger, lies in the possibility that the technological mode of revealing will come to be the dominant one that overshadows all other modes of disclosing the world, so that – without our even knowing it – semblance comes to reign, and truth never again shines forth in its primordial and originary splendour. And yet, "where danger is, there grows the saving power also."

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24 JULY 2021

Quarantine and Chill: Plato on Death and the Immortality of the Soul

Meetup starts 2:00PM VIA ZOOM

"Those who practice philosophy in the right way are in training for dying, and among men, philosophers fear death least of all, for when their soul has quit the body, they will dwell among the gods."We'll be discussing the Phaedo, a dialogue that takes place just after the trial of Socrates, where he awaits execution inside a prison cell. He's visited by his wife and grieving friends, whom he tries to console with some final parting words about the soul and it's relationship to the body, the fear of death, the cyclical birth and destruction of things by their opposites, the Eleusinian mysteries, moral purification, the afterlife, and the doctrines of recollection and reincarnation.I promise the dialogue is way more fun than it sounds. So fix yourself a snack, pour a glass of wine (we won't judge you), and log-in to Platoscave2021!

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19 JUNE 2021

Paradise Lost: Rousseau on the Origin of Inequality and the Rise of Despotism

Meetup starts 2:00PM @ Wendy's Secret Garden

Background Reading: Part II of "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality," by Jean-Jacques Rousseau"The happy life of the Golden Age could never really have existed for the human race. When men could have enjoyed it, they were unaware of it; and when they could have understood it, they had already lost it. Peace and innocence escaped us forever, even before we tasted their delights."The life of Hobbes was less interesting than the times he wrote in. By contrast, the life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was an absolute sensation that defined his age and sent a shockwave down to the present day. Self-professed deviant, thief, political exile, sexually depraved masochist, champion of breastfeeding and early childhood education, deadbeat dad, composer of opera, best-selling novelist, and paranoid narcissist, Rousseau's life gave body to the cliche of the celebrity advanced by controversy. "I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and perhaps Nature did wisely in breaking the mould with which she formed me." Buried in the Panthéon among the revolutionary Jacobins whose hearts he inflamed a decade after his death, Rousseau's work would also go on to influence the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the romanticism of Goethe, and the political economy of Karl Marx.In his "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality," Rousseau launches a critique against the Enlightenment fantasy of achieving moral progress through the dispassionate use of reason, and securing peace by surrendering liberty to an absolute monarch. He argues, rather, that none but vice and calculation hide under the veil of politeness; that decorating our chains with garlands of flowers leads us to fancy ourselves free, when in truth the submission to authority from fear of coercion warps our fundamentally compassionate moral nature. "When I see free-born animals dash their brains out against the bars of their cage, from an innate impatience of captivity, I feel that it is not for slaves to argue about liberty."The root cause of our "expulsion from Eden," however, can be reduced to the institution of property, and the exacerbation of the natural inequalities it magnifies: "The fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!" To make the case, Rousseau tells a tragic tale of primitive society as it might have emerged from "the first expansions of the human heart" among our earliest ancestors (who passed the time singing, dancing, and making collective decisions under a great tree), and then, with the development of agriculture and metallurgy, proceeds to trace out the inlets of misery that civilization invents for itself before finally devolving into government corruption and social revolt — a second state of nature, he says, more gruesome than the first. The result, which is certainly conjectural, is nothing less than a literary work of art, where every line beats with passion, bidding our sense of justice and human sympathy to wake up. "Let us enlighten his reason with new knowledge, let us warm his heart with new feelings; let him learn to multiply his being and his happiness by sharing them with his fellows. Reason, which led men astray, will bring him back to humanity."

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22 MAY 2021

Man is Wolf to Man: Hobbes on Human Nature and the Origin of The State

Meetup starts 2:00PM @ Wendy's Secret Garden

Background Reading: Chapters 10-17 of "The Leviathan" by Thomas Hobbes"Man, in his concern for the future, hath his heart all the day long, gnawed on by the fear of death, poverty, or other calamity; and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep."When Thomas Hobbes's mother heard that the Spanish Armada had set sail for the shores of England, the news so pierced her heart with fright that the shock sent her into labour prematurely. "On that day, Fear and I were born twins together," recounted Hobbes. Yet he went on trembling for almost a full century (1588-1679), living to the ripe old age of 91.Like most dogged pessimists prone to seeing the world through morose coloured glasses, Hobbes would probably say he was only being a realist when he wrote that, in a state of nature, "the life of man is solitary, nasty, brutish, and short." Such was his view of human nature, however, prior to the formation of government based on the will of contracting parties, who agree to surrender some of their freedom to the rule of an absolute sovereign in exchange for mutual security. Were it not for the mediating power of the State, Religion, and Law to domesticate the wild liberty of our passions, then the struggle for power, competition, and the glory of violent retribution, says Hobbes, would combine to brew a wicked swill of anti-social strife and insecurity. A brutal "war of all against all" would reign, and no culture, art, or industry could take root in the suffocating fog of misery and death.So far, this is the standard interpretation of Hobbes: since morality is artificial, being second to our drive for self-preservation, it can lay no claim on us in our original condition of fear and uncertainty, and only enters social life with the establishment of enforceable laws (indeed, Hobbes even goes so far to say that "in nature, there is no sin," because no rules exist yet). But perhaps there is also a more humanistic side to Hobbes that might soften the edges of this otherwise brute materialist picture. For, ultimately, the aim of the Leviathan is peace; and throughout the work, Hobbes outlines a number of "deontological" moral principles that ought to flourish under shelter of a prosperous Commonwealth: justice, trust, mutual accommodation, equity, liberality, gratitude, mercy, and "the equal use of those things enjoyed in common" that only arrogance and pride seek to possess selfishly.So come join us for our first foray into politics, as we discuss "The Leviathan" by Thomas Hobbes! Remember to rug up (it's getting cold out there), and bring some snacks and a drink or two to share with the rest of the Symposium!

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24 APRIL 2021

Living Mirrors of the Universe: Leibniz's Monadology

Meetup starts 2:00PM @ Wendy's Secret Garden

Background Reading: Leibniz's Monadology"There is a world of creatures in the least part of matter. Each portion of it can be conceived as a garden full of plants, or as a pond full of fish, and each branch, each limb, each drop of its humours, being still another such garden or pond."Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was one of the most brilliant minds the world has ever known. Usually recalled for his invention of the calculus independently of Sir Isaac Newton, his contribution to nearly every other field of knowledge was equally staggering: mechanical calculators, cryptography machines, binary coding systems, a "universal alphabet of human thought" expressed in symbolic logic, a relativistic theory of space/time, an early formulation of the law of the conservation of energy, and a theory for the formation of the earth through a sequence of geological catastrophes which he surmised from the fossil record. In a word, Leibniz shone a light wherever he turned his mind. And yet he presents us with a bit of a paradox: being at once ahead of his time in his capacity as an engineer and physicist, he was also deliberately behind the times as a philosopher, seeking as he did to revive the ancient doctrines of "substantial forms" and "entelechies" that the Moderns were trying to banish from natural philosophy. Why?Well, the story goes that when Leibniz peered through one of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's microscopes (made by encasing a finely polished bead of glass inside of a copper frame), a wondrous world of "tiny animals" invisible to the naked eye jumped out at him. Seeing that these little critters were very curiously animated, and could be found almost everywhere he pointed the lens, Leibniz was compelled to posit that our world and its familiar scale of existence was subtended by "infinite levels of life," all of them packed with crowds stirred on by a primordial appetite for perception.Monads, as he called these immaterial atomic seeds of consciousness, are unique and self-contained substances that represent the whole universe from a limited perspective within themselves, such that each being composed by them is already in itself what it is in relation to everything else. Everything is contained in everything, in other words, and yet no two things are ever exactly alike, because monads differ from one another according to their relative points of view. Strictly speaking, then, there are no external relations for Leibniz: God, being something like a benevolent and omniscient programmer, has harmoniously orchestrated the correlative representations of each and every monad in advance of their apparent physical interactions. Being constantly created by the absolute power of "divine fulguration," and reflecting this flash of light as it glimmers across an infinite series of ascending lifeforms, the Monadology outlines a metaphysical picture of the universe where every being is a force, and every force a thought which tends toward a richer and more complete notion of itself.Totally weird. But absolutely brilliant.

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20 MAR 2021

Spinoza and the Absolute Unity of Infinite Substance

Meetup starts 2:00PM @ Wendy's Secret Garden

Background Reading: Parts 1 and 5 of "Ethics" by Baruch Spinoza"In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity."If the birth of modern philosophy was inaugurated by Descartes' dismemberment of the world into two distinct substances — the physically extended world of Matter, and the inner world of immediate Consciousness — it wasn't long before another philosopher came and knit the fragments back together as a unified whole.Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was an excommunicated Sephardic Jew of Portuguese descent, who died in Amsterdam at the age of 44. While his life may have been relatively brief and tumultuous compared to other philosophic sages, what he managed to produce, in such a tight and polished form, was nonetheless astounding. In his work, the Ethics, Spinoza demonstrates, according to a "geometrical method" reminiscent of Euclid's Elements, that the mind and extended matter are immanently unified in a singular yet infinite Substance he calls "God, or Nature." His theory of affect (of desire, joy, and sorrow), shows an obvious debt to the ancient Stoics, and argues that joy arises with the feeling of an increase in power, while sadness arises when our power is diminished. Reason, furthermore, can raise us above our pathological states of emotional bondage by the gentle power of understanding: "emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it." At the close of the Ethics, Spinoza contends that the highest and most lasting form of happiness is attained by the pursuit of knowing Absolute Substance under its Eternal aspect, whereby we achieve a state of blessedness he calls "amor dei intellectualis", the intellectual love of God, or Nature.So, come contemplate the Absolute and the infinity of its modulations with us on Saturday, March 20th! BYOB, and please feel free to bring snacks to share with the group!

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20 FEB 2021

Dream Machines: Mind, Matter, and God in Descartes' Meditations

Meetup starts 2:00PM @ Wendy's Secret Garden

Background Reading: Books 1—3 of "Meditations on First Philosophy" by René Descartes"How often, while asleep at night, am I convinced of just such familiar events — that I am here, sitting by the fire, wearing this winter dressing gown, holding this piece of paper..."After completing the course of his education at some of the most celebrated schools in Europe, René Descartes had to come clean with himself: years of study had gone by, and yet he hadn't learned anything — he was just as ignorant as the day he started. Plagued by doubts and contempt for the teachings of his old schoolmasters, he experienced a series of visions that came to him in a dream one night while stationed in a small oven-heated room in Bavaria. From this point forward, Descartes would take it upon himself to topple the entire edifice of his received knowledge by exposing its foundations to a severe and total skepticism. By means of this "methodological doubt", Descartes initiated a massive philosophical renovation project that sought to secure the foundations on which a new system of science could be built. At the very basis of this system lay the absolute certainty from which he moved the world: cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am."The Meditations On First Philosophy" are a series of short, riveting reflections on the topics of doubt, certainty, the senses, the mind, matter, robots, and God. In them, Descartes entertains the possibility that all of existence could be a dream, that perhaps he doesn't have eyeballs and his body is made of glass, because he's been deceived by an evil demon who is beaming hallucinations directly into his mind. And yet, despite all of this, we can nevertheless arrive at a few absolute truths by the natural light of reason.Join us as we discuss Meditations 1—3 from this classic of Modern Philosophy!

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16 JAN 2021

Atoms in The Void: The Ancient Materialism of Epicurus and Lucretius

Meetup starts 2:00PM @ Wendy's Secret Garden

Background Reading: Books 1—3 of "The Nature of Things" by Lucretius"By convention, sweet; by convention, bitter. In truth, only atoms and the void." — DemocritusA scandalous thought that shocked the ages: the entire universe, in all of its manifold diversity and duration, is made by the chance coalescence of atoms swirling in the void. Everything seen, said, touched, smelled, tasted, and heard, is nothing but the after-image of an infinity of things so exceedingly tiny and swift that they're invisible to the senses. Just these two ingredients, and their variable combinations, are enough to make a cosmos — and indeed, not just One Cosmos, but an infinity of them! Worlds on worlds, all born on the plains of a cosmic aether, where the stars graze on indestructible atomic seeds dispersed in the vast expanses of eternity.This month we'll be looking at the Ancient Materialism of Epicurus (341–270 BC) and Lucretius (99–55 BC). Historically, both have been the subject of much slander and praise, being held responsible for the corruption of morals by their Godless pursuit of pleasure according to some, or for dragging humanity out of the dark ages by igniting the spark of the Scientific Revolution by others. The truth, of course, is usually somewhere in between. The good life they recommended aims for tranquility by liberating the mind from the fear of death and superstition; their ethics were firmly rooted in the bonds of friendship among equals, the scrupulous examination of Nature, and the pursuit and enjoyment of earthly pleasures in accordance with a measured practical wisdom. Ultimately, the atomists taught that knowledge, beauty, and happiness were necessarily entwined: by coating the cup of knowledge with the honey of poetry, philosophy helps the medicine go down smooth. "Don't fear God; don't worry about death; what is good is easy to get; what is terrible can be made easy to bear."Join us as we discuss Books 1—3 of "The Nature of Things" by Lucretius at Wendy Whiteley's Secret Garden!

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13 DEC 2020

Aristotle on the Nature of Life and Mind

Meetup starts 2:00PM @ Wendy's Secret Garden

Background Reading: Books 2 & 3 of Aristotle's De AnimaLooking at the title in the original Greek, you might notice the familiar root word "psyche" in Aristotle's treatise, "Peri Psyches." You'd be right to make the connection: this is indeed one of the first systematic works of Psychology — though it's likely to be more abstract and more general than you're probably used to, since Aristotle treats of the soul, vital spirit, or mind (all possible translations of anima!) within the wider framework of his philosophical biology.Some of the topics we'll examine are Aristotle's definition of soul as a special kind of organic combination of form and matter, or Life as the actualization of an inherent potential within formless matter ("hylomorphism"); his ordering of the living world along an ascending "scala naturae", where the various powers of the soul (nutrition, perception, intelligence) correspond to 3 broad classes of living beings that compose the natural world (plants, animals, humans); and his description of the 5 senses as they lead up to his discussion of the higher mental faculties like imagination, memory, and intellect.Within this broadly zoological context, we can then turn to Aristotle's conception of the "Good Life" and Flourishing, and ask whether and to what extent human happiness is intertwined with the ends of the rest of living Nature.

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21 NOV 2020

Plato on Death and the Immortality of the Soul

Meetup starts 2:00PM @ Wendy's Secret Garden

Background Reading: The Phaedo by Plato"Those who practice philosophy in the right way are in training for dying, and among men, philosophers fear death least of all, for when their soul has quit the body, they will dwell among the gods."Our first meetup! We'll be discussing the Phaedo, a dialogue that takes place just after the trial of Socrates, where he awaits execution inside a prison cell. He's visited by his wife and grieving friends, whom he tries to console with some final parting words about the soul and it's relationship to the body, the fear of death, the cyclical birth and destruction of things by their opposites, the Eleusinian mysteries, moral purification, the afterlife, and the doctrines of recollection and reincarnation.

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