Thelma and Plato are concerned about your quality of soul.

[JOIN HERE]

These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.

Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.

A Journey to the Core

We’re excited to kick off our first fully-fledged philosophical foray into Plato, from whom the perennial puzzles of philosophy received their original metaphorical embodiment. Here, in Plato’s dialogues, problems such as the One and the Many, appearance-vs-reality, substance-vs-property, and perdurance-vs-change find their seminal articulation. Plato imagined (a) universals as impossibly thing-like entities in an alternative space, and (b) physical objects (if intelligible = property-having) as blobs of matter imperfectly tuning these archetypes in. This sounds imbecilic, and yet Roger Penrose, Max Tegmark, Rupert Sheldrake, Philippa Foot, and Alvin Plantinga (qualified Platonists all) are not imbeciles.

This session will focus on Plato’s pivotal role as a synthesizer. He took the clashing philosophies of the pre-Socratics—Heraclitus, with his doctrine of constant flux, and Parmenides, with his vision of unchanging being—alongside the skepticism of the Sophists, to create a framework that has shaped Western thought ever since.

Highlights

• The Socratic Method in Action: An analysis of The Republic, Book I, where Socrates confronts definitions of justice. We’ll examine why this dialogue ends in confusion, revealing both the strengths and limitations of the method.
• The Allegory of the Cave: We’ll discuss Plato’s most famous allegory, which depicts the struggle to distinguish shadow from substance, and how it still resonates in our understanding of reality and enlightenment.
• Plato’s Theory of Forms: We’ll explore what Plato meant by “forms” and how this concept unites the phenomena of our experience under the abstract, enduring truths that he believed underlie reality.

Join us as we trace the origins of Plato’s thought and discuss its continued impact on our understanding of metaphysics, knowledge, and human existence. Understanding these early expressions and metaphors is really fun because they’ve bewitched us all and we still love them. They have colonized our collective imagination and become the default settings of our Western philosophical mythology.

METHOD

Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:

• Thelma Lavine: From Socrates to Sartre EP03 ⟩ Plato II – Shadow and Substance

Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here in two days. We’ve got lots of post-Halloween bonus materials so bear with Ingrid as she uploads it all:

• THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE

Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.

She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism. She really walked the walk.

View all of our coming episodes here.

[JOIN HERE]

We've added a second section for book program 6 (which now splits into 6A and 6B): The Ethics of Ambiguity.  Section 6B will meet on Saturday, November 16th from 11:30am-12:45pm (ET) to discuss Parts I and II, and on Saturday, November 23rd from 11:30am-12:45pm (ET) to discuss Part III. The Zoom link which will soon be sent out will work for both groups. Please feel free to mix and match or to attend all sessions--the conversation is never exactly the same. We ran two sections of the Siddhartha book program and while there was naturally some overlap the conversation did diverge in interesting ways.

Please join us on Patreon, if you haven't already: www.Patreon.com/TheSocraticCircle

------------------------------

Here's the info for 6A and the link to the book from a previous post:

------------------------------

Book club program #6 will feature The Ethics of Ambiguity by the 20th-century French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir--our first female author!

Here is the link to the PDF:

The Ethics of Ambiguity:

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/ambiguity/

-------------------------------

Here's the schedule for 6A (both sessions run from 7 - 8:15pm ET):

Tuesday, November 12: Parts I & II

Tuesday, November 19: Part III

-------------------------------

**I will post the Zoom information a day or two before the 12th.

Book club sessions are open to all members! Also, though it is preferable, it is not necessary to have read for you to join a session. I look forward to discussing de Beauvoir's work with you!

Professors Daryn Lehoux and Sergio Sismondo of Queen's University, Canada, will discuss their new project Epistemic Corruption on:

8 November 2024, 10 am ET

Join: https://meet.google.com/aiu-kdeo-ero

All are welcome. No registration required.

About:
The modern fact is in crisis. The very existence of something called an 'alternative fact' is enough to make one's head spin, but it raises a number of serious problems. What do we do when the people we are engaging with, politically, medically, or even socially, are unable or unwilling to accept our facts as facts? And how on earth did we get here?

Find out more: factorvalue.org/corruption

This lecture is organized by Fact or Value, a new forum based in Calcutta with a focus on (but not limited to) politics, literature and intellectual history. This is the third in a series of lectures on the nature of factual discourse. The first two were delivered by Steven Shapin (Harvard) and Richard Firth Green (Ohio State).

About the text:The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination by Wallace Stevens is a collection of essays exploring the relationship between reality and imagination, themes Stevens often explored in his poetry. In these essays, Stevens delves into how the imagination shapes our perception of reality, arguing that it is essential to human experience and artistic creation. He suggests that imagination does not merely embellish reality; it creates meaning and beauty, enriching human life and offering a refuge in a mundane world.

Through essays like “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” and “Imagination as Value,” Stevens presents his belief that imagination is not a form of escapism but a necessary element of consciousness that helps people make sense of their existence. He views the poet’s role as vital in society, as poets give voice to the unseen and unrealized aspects of reality. The essays reflect Stevens’ philosophical musings on art, perception, and the complex interaction between the world as it is and the world as we imagine it to be.

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This is an online reading and discussion group for Wallace Steven's The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. You can sign up for the 1st meeting on Tuesday November 12 (EST) here (link). The Zoom link will be available to registrants.

Meetings will be held every Tuesday. All future meetings can be found on the group's calendar (link).

Here's the schedule:

M1: The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words
M2: The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet
M3: Three academic pieces & Effects of Analogy
M4: Imagination as Value
M5: The relations between poetry and painting

People who have not read the text are welcome to join and participate, but priority in the discussion will be given to people who have done the reading.

All are welcome!

The Basic Problems of Phenomenology presents the first English translation of Martin Heidegger's early lecture course from the Winter of 1919/1920, in which he attempts to clarify phenomenology by looking at the phenomenon of life, which he sees as the primary area of research for phenomenology. Heidegger investigates the notions of life and world, and in particular the self-world, Christianity, and science in an attempt to discern how phenomenology is the primordial science of life and how phenomenology can take account of the streaming character of life. Basic Problems of Phenomenology provides invaluable insights into the development of Heidegger's thoughts about human existence up to Being and Time. It also offers a compelling insight into the nature of the world and our ability to give an account of human life. As an account of Heidegger's early understanding of life, the text fills an important gap in the available literature and represents a crucial contribution to our understanding of the early Heidegger.

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This is an online reading and discussion group for Heidegger's Basic Problems of Phenomenology. You can sign up for the 1st meeting on Monday November 4 (EST) here (link). The Zoom link will be available to registrants.

Meetings will be held every second Monday. All future meetings can be found on the group's calendar (link).

Reading schedule:

Session 1: Sec. 1-6
Session 2: Sec. 7-8
Session 3: Sec. 9
Session 4: Sec. 10
Session 5: Sec. 11-12
Session 6: Sec. 13
Session 7: Sec. 14
Session 8: Sec. 15
Session 9: Sec. 16
Session 10: Sec. 17-18
Session 11: Sec. 19a
Session 12: Sec. 19b
Session 13: Sec. 20
Session 14: 21-22

A link to the reading is available to registrants on the sign-up page.

People who have not read the text are welcome to join and participate, but priority in the discussion will be given to people who have done the reading.

All are welcome!

Here's how I moderate:

I ask that people use the raise your hand feature prior to speaking. If you've spoken several times already, I will call others who haven't spoken yet or as much. Please refrain from giving lectures - this is a discussion group. I will cut you off if you are going on too long. Also, please refrain from bringing up other works or philosophers for discussion - a brief comment or comparison is fine, but the idea is to focus on Heidegger's thoughts in BPP!

P.S. Also check out this other reading group on Heidegger's History of the Concept of Time that has been meeting since the spring, but newcomers are still welcome.

"To return to direct democracy, the democracy of people fighting against the system, of individual men fighting against the seriality which transforms them into things, why not start here? To vote or not to vote is all the same. To abstain is in effect to confirm the new majority, whatever it may be. Whatever we may do about it, we will have done nothing if we do not fight at the same time - and that means starting today - against the system of indirect democracy which deliberately reduces us to powerlessness. We must try, each according to his own resources, to organize the vast anti-hierarchic movement which fights institutions everywhere."

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905, Paris) was a French philosopher, novelist, and playwright, best known as the leading exponent of existentialism. In 1964 he declined the Nobel Prize for Literature, which had been awarded to him “for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age.”

Please read in advance this short article: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/1973/elections.htm

Disclaimer: These discussions take place purely for historical, educational, and analytical purposes. By analyzing movies and texts our objective is to understand; we do not necessarily endorse or support any of the ideologies or messages conveyed in them.

You can join the event here: https://www.meetup.com/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/events/304245944/

Euthyphro was written by Plato and published around 380 BCE. It presents us with Socrates, shortly before his trial on charges of impiety, engaging the likely fictional character of Euthyphro on the meaning of piety or holiness. The dialogue introduces the famous "Euthyphro Dilemma", which questions whether something is good because the gods command it or if the gods command it because it is good. The dialogue explores themes of ethics, religion, and knowledge, reflecting Socrates’ method of questioning and use of irony to reveal deeper truths. Euthyphro — along with The Apology, Crito, and Phaedo — together comprise the quartet of Plato’s works that are sometimes collectively called "The Trial and Death of Socrates".

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This is a live reading of the Euthyphro (i.e. we read the text out loud together with pauses for discussion). This Plato group meets on Saturdays and has previously read the Philebus, Gorgias, Critias, Laches, Timaeus, and other works including texts for contextualisation such as Gorgias’ Praise of Helen. The reading is intended for well-informed generalists even though specialists are obviously welcome. It is our aspiration to read the Platonic corpus over a long period of time.

Sign up for the 1st session on November 2 here. The video conferencing link will be available to registrants.

Meetings will be held every week on Saturday. (meetings will probably continue into 2025). Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar.

The host is Constantine Lerounis, a distinguished Greek philologist, author of Four Access Points to Shakespeare’s Works (in Greek) and Former Advisor to the President of the Hellenic Republic.

The text can be found here: [link to be posted on registration page]

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

This week, we will be exploring the moral concept of call of conscience and the psychological concept of self-love. Specifically, we want to understand how these two are connected to each other and to mental health and well-being. Our discussion will be based on two short texts by two giants in the field of psychotherapy:

Readings (Click to Download):

1. Abraham Maslow – Towards a Psychology of Being (3 pages): Maslow first compares Freud's idea of the superego as the authoritarian conscience and Fromm's idea of conscience within a humanistic ethics. He goes on to question whether mental health equals absence of symptoms, for sometimes distress owing to moral demand may be "healthier" than numbness.
2. Irvin D. Yalom – Existential Psychotherapy (8 pages): Existential guilt is good for you! For it is how you can find your way back to your conscience. These pages include actual examples of clinical cases from which you can learn the healing journey from self-hate to self-love.

Guiding Questions:

• How do you understand the call of conscience? What are some related concepts you can think of?
• Have you had instances where you have listened or failed to listen to your conscience? What did you feel afterwards?
• What insights did you gain from Bruce's story?
• How may you change your outlook to improve your mental health according the readings (so far)?
• (questions circling back to session 1 and 2)

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This is an online meeting hosted by Leanna on Sunday November 10 — to join the discussion, RSVP in advance on the main event page here {link); the video conferencing link will be available to registrants.

People who have not read the text are welcome to join and participate, but priority in the discussion will be given to people who have done the reading.

All are welcome!

Following Up:

This meeting is the third part of a three-part series, with each session building on the last:
(1) Self-alienation as Original Sin (completed)
(2) Resentment and Forgiveness (completed)
(3) Call of Conscience and Self-Love (this session)

Therefore, we’ll be referring to the key points from our previous session and explore how they are related to this week's topic. If you attended the previous session, we encourage you to continue the journey with us. If you didn’t attend, don’t worry! We will provide a brief recap at the start to ensure everyone is on the same page.

#integrity #authenticity #humanpotential #selfactualization #selfesteem #selfworth #selfrespect #selfcontempt #selfhate #existentialguilt

Stay in Touch:

Feel free to contact Leanna if you want to suggest or request a topic for group discussion. You are also welcome to send her a DM for personal opinions or questions you don't feel comfortable sharing in the group.

This event is brought to you by Leanna, a philosophical counsellor in training for spiritually integrated psychotherapy. She has a Master’s degree in philosophy and is a meditator in the Theravada Buddhist/Vipassana tradition.

Hello! My name is Matt Konig (Brown University, Ph.D.) and I am the director of The Socratic Circle on Patreon. I am excited to invite you to join us for the following program:

Book club program #6 will feature The Ethics of Ambiguity by the 20th-century French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir--our first female author!

Here is the link to the PDF:

The Ethics of Ambiguity:

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/ambiguity/

-------------------------------

Here's the schedule (both sessions run from 7 - 8:15pm ET):

Tuesday, November 12: Parts I & II

Tuesday, November 19: Part III

-------------------------------

**I will post the Zoom information on Patreon a day or two before the 12th.

If you haven't already, please join us on Patreon (free membership is available):

www.Patreon.com/TheSocraticCircle

Book club sessions are open to all members! Also, though it is preferable, it is not necessary to have read for you to join a session. I look forward to discussing de Beauvoir's work with you!

EXISTENTIALIST SOCIETY.

Online Lecture/Discussion:
"Poetry and Philosophy: Martin Heidegger and Paul Celan". -

Presenter: Dr. Desmonda Lawrence. -

All welcome. - Zoom details: https://existentialistmelbourne.org/ . -

Weekly online Meetups: https://www.meetup.com/existentialist-society/ -

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@existentialistsociety8453

Interested in joining a Nietzsche Discord server? We're a growing server dedicated to the study, discussion, and debate of Friedrich Nietzsche and his ideas/works!

We are having a discussion on the Book 5 of Daybreak by Nietzsche on Nov 10th, 5pm CST, and would love to have you listen in and/ share your thoughts!

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Stop in by clicking here, and hop in general chat to introduce yourself - feel free to tell us a bit about yourself and your background, why you joined, and share with us your favorite book by Nietzsche or your favorite philosophers!

We look forward to seeing you!

Dr. Lavine transports you to Athens at its peak.

[JOIN HERE]

Join us for the most gripping introduction to Plato that you’ve ever heard as we dine with the divine Dr. Lavine as she lays out the Plato banquet in the most exciting and relevant way possible.

Lavine opens by jolting us with a mighty remembrance of the Great Before Time:

No one must have any private property whatsoever, except what is absolutely necessary. Secondly, no one must have any lodging or storehouse at all which is not open to all comers … They must live in common, attending in messes as if they were in the field … They alone of all in the city dare not have any dealings with gold or silver or even touch them or come under the same roof with them.

What is this? A religious order? A communist cell preparing for a covert mission? A sci-fi utopia bracing for interplanetary conflict? No—it’s actually Plato’s prescription for the ruling class in his Republic.

Plato Like Never Before

Plato’s name has echoed through every corner of the Western intellectual tradition. Dubbed the father of Western philosophy, he has been revered as a mystical visionary, a moralist without peer, and a dramatist whose insight shaped millennia of thought:

• Alfred North Whitehead famously quipped that all of Western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson was even bolder: “Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato.”
• His biographers revealed him to be the Son of Apollo.
• 400 years before Saint Paul and his Christ, Plato beheld a transcendent realm of goodness, love, and beauty accessible by consciousness directly through epistemic acts.
• Anticipating Kant, Plato identified the essence of objects with the very conditions that make them intelligible to the understanding. A man ahead of his time!

Fun Highlights

• Socrates’ Trial and Death: Why Socrates accepted death over escape—and how his choice exposes the fault lines between philosophy and democracy.
• The Knowledge-Virtue Connection: If knowing the good ensures doing the good, how do we explain human weakness and moral failure?
• Athens in Chaos: From the glittering glory of Pericles’ Athens—where democracy reigned, philosophers roamed, and the wine flowed like water—to the crushing boot of Spartan rule, where dreams of equality died screaming. And yet, from the wreckage of defeated ideals and shattered egos, Plato's philosophy rose like a phoenix, crafting a vision of order so audacious it makes modern utopians look like kratom addicts.

Lavine is BRAT and will leave you feeling great. Plato isn’t just for scholars—his questions about virtue, knowledge, and power resonate in today’s world with today’s people—today.

METHOD

Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:

• Thelma Lavine: From Socrates to Sartre EP02 ⟩ Plato 01 – Virtue is Knowledge

Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:

• THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE

Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Memberaward while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.

She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism. She really walked the walk.

View all of our coming episodes here.

[JOIN HERE]

Hi, this is Matt Konig (Ph.D. Brown University), director of The Socratic Circle on Patreon. I am offering a live chat, open to all members, on the topic of cultural relativism next Wednesday from 7:30 - 8:30pm. There is no reading to do; just show up and we'll chat about cultural relativism as a form of moral relativism. Cultural relativism is the source of much confusion for introductory students, and so the goal is for us to get clear about the basics during our chat.

If you're not yet a member, please join us on Patreon (there is free membership in addition to tier-level support options): www.Patreon.com/TheSocraticCircle

I'll send out the Zoom information a day or two before.

--Matt :)

Join us for a reading and discussion of The Other Shore by Thich Nhat Hanh! We will be reading and discussing Chapters 12, 13, and 14. The Other Shore is a new translation and commentary on the Heart Sutra, which is a classic Mahayana Buddhist text.

The discussion takes place on our server - link in the comments.

RSVP here: The Book of Job, Sun, Nov 10, 2024, 4:00 PM | Meetup

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The book of Job has been called the greatest poem ever written. It is both central to and transcendent of the biblical tradition, universal in its influence on Western literature and civilization. It is a polyphonic text, featuring a complex of perspectives and genres, probing profound existential issues: the nature of good and evil, humanity and divinity, justice and piety, innocence and suffering. There is hardly a person who has not confronted the questions posed by the text, and countless are the artists and thinkers whose imaginations have been gripped by it.

When pious Job becomes the subject of a wager between God and Satan, he is inflicted with a series of catastrophic pains, losses, and grief. In mourning and utter debasement, he dons an outfit of sackcloth and ashes, by which he symbolically regresses into a state of worthless dust. But his misery is only compounded by his would-be comforters (friends provoking him into theological debate) before God mysteriously confronts Job from out of the whirlwind.

"The traditional expectation of narrative history in China has been to find a central meaning that could effectively master chaos. Can Xue's stories are like a piece of dynamite at the foundation of this elaborate edifice..."

Can Xue (殘雪) is the pen name of contemporary Chinese writer Deng Xiaohua (鄧小華), internationally acclaimed for her unconventional, surreal, philosophical stories. Born in 1953 in Changsha, she grew up during the Cultural Revolution in China which profoundly influenced her outlook. Her parents, like many intellectuals of the time, were persecuted and forced into manual labour in the countryside. Can Xue has said her entire family was on "the verge of death" and she was deprived of a formal education. Can Xue is the author of more than a dozen novels, over a hundred novellas and short stories, many works of literary criticism, and a libretto. In recent years she has been regarded by many as the world's top contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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This is an online reading group to discuss Can Xue's surreal, experimental, philosophical short stories. We will be meeting on most Sundays, but check the group's calendar for the final schedule (meetings will be posted 1-2 weeks before they take place.)

For the 1st meeting on Sunday October 20 we will be discussing Can Xue's "Vertical Motion", from her 2011 short story collection of the same title. You can sign up for the 1st meeting here (link). The Zoom link will be available to registrants.

The story about a community of underground creatures who live deep below the surface and ponder what lies above them. Note that Can Xue's stories are often considered "experimental".

Please read the story in advance (17 pages) and bring your thoughts, queries, and favourite passages to share with us at the discussion. A pdf of an English translation is available when you sign up.

All future meetings can be found on the group's calendar (link).

All are welcome!

If you have not done the reading you're welcome to join and listen in at our meetups.

More about Can Xue:

• Global Studies and Languages at MIT (collection of resources but seems quite out of date)
• "The Chinese author who returned to writing at 30"
• Asymptote interview with Can Xue

THE SOCRATIC CIRCLE on PATREON Announcement: www.patreon.com/TheSocraticCircle

The Philosophy of Science Discussion Group will hold its first meeting on Wednesday, October 23rd, from 7:30-8:30pm ET. (Reminder: Discussion Groups are open to all tier-level members; membership begins at $3/month.)

We will discuss chapters 1-3 of Carl Hempel's classic Philosophy of Natural Science. Here's a link to a free PDF of the book:

http://www.thatmarcusfamily.org/philosophy/Course_Websites/Readings/Hempel%20-%20Philosophy%20of%20Natural%20Science.pdf

After we read Hempel's book (probably three to four meetings) to get a sense of what the philosophy of science was like circa 1966, we will read Thomas Kuhn's famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Below, you will find the link to a PDF of a philosophy of science anthology of readings. I'm sure we will dip into it at some point, as well.

https://ebookppsunp.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/46121900-the-philosophy-of-science-1.pdf

--Matt :)

The Prince (1532) by Niccolò Machiavelli is a 16th century political treatise that explores the acquisition, maintenance, and consolidation of power. It is one of the most influential works of political theory and is often considered a foundational text for modern political philosophy. The text emphasizes pragmatic governance, arguing that rulers may need to employ morally ambiguous tactics to achieve stability and success. Machiavelli's work rejected the traditional Christian ethics of his time and focused instead on realism over idealism. His ideas are often seen as a form of realpolitik — politics based on practical and material factors rather than moral or ethical ideals.

For this discussion, please read in advance Chapters 15-19 of The Prince which get into the complexities of statecraft, examining the necessity of pragmatic and sometimes ruthless strategies for effective leadership and governance. Machiavelli discusses the importance of adaptability, the role of fortune, and the balance between being feared and loved.

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This is an online meeting hosted by Yorgo on Thursday, October 17 (EDT) to discuss Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince (1532).

To join the discussion, RSVP in advance on the main event page here (link); the video conferencing link will be available to registrants.

You can find the book here (you can use other editions if you want!)

Please read in advance Chapters 15-19.

People who have not read the text are welcome to join and participate, but priority in the discussion will be given to people who have done the reading.

All are welcome!

Disclaimer: 

These discussions take place purely for historical, educational, and analytical purposes. By analyzing movies and texts our objective is to understand; we do not necessarily endorse or support any of the ideologies or messages conveyed in them.

These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.

[JOIN HERE]

This week we start our brand new series … from ground Zeno.

Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.

When I first saw one of her broadcasts on Public Access, I scoffed and jeered at the odd elements—for about 90 seconds. Then it hit me: her clarity and precision delivered a more powerful impact than anything I’d ever encountered.

Her unmatched ability to distill foundational ideas with almost psychedelic transformative clarity turns what might otherwise be dismissed as clichés into insights so profound they catch in your throat. While Magee is, as Eric Clapton once said, “by far and without a doubt the most gifted philosophical conversationalist alive today,” Lavine’s hypnotic delivery, along with her genius for crafting perfect metaphors and examples, makes her the most masterful foundation-demystifier in Anglophone philosophy. She’s one of a kind and I’m sure you’ll fall in love with her.

Like a Virgin, Seeing Foundations for the Very First Time

Professor Lavine is the tough-love mom I wish I had as a child. And she has a message for all of us non-, partial-, and pseudo-grokkers: foundational mastery in philosophy isn’t about delivering smooth confusionist performances or stringing together philosophical buzzwords. True mastery—the kind Lavine demands—requires effort on the level of authentic self-reinventive cultural immersion or learning a second language. Philosophy, approached seriously, means internalizing the metaphysical and epistemic assumptions of the great thinkers we read and letting them infect and possess us.

Philosophical understanding isn't normal. It requires something not dissimilar to religious conversion—a wholesale transformation of how you see and think about the world. To truly grok Descartes, for example, you cannot simply study his arguments, you have to induce a kind of trance. You have to inhabit the core of his thought, down to the foundations, in the same way an actor might embody a role—not just the personality, but the underlying worldview and backstory that motivates it.

The same goes for Hume’s radical empiricism. Entering into his world means actually experiencing life as a flux of flashing sense data and questioning the coherence of our everyday projections. It’s disconcerting, even disorienting. But if you can immerse yourself in these frameworks, the rewards will be profound. You will see the clarity and brilliance of the thinkers in a way that mere conceptual understanding can’t provide.

In her stunningly clear lectures—as clear as a chrome airhorn on a bright winter day—the preternatural Lavine guides us through just these kinds of transformative experiences. She exposes the core commitments and hidden absurdities within each system, and demands that we confront the real stakes behind the systems we study and take them absolutely seriously. This is not philosophy as intellectual gymnastics—it’s philosophy as immersive and experiential and I dare say devotional.

Join us for a series of sessions that will push us to engage with the true depth of all the fundamental and foundational stuff that everyone loves to skip over and replace with popular caricatures. Lavine will cure you of that real quick. She doesn’t just present ideas; she forces you to method-act the systems from the inside and take a stand.

METHOD

Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:

• Thelma Lavine: From Socrates to Sartre EP00 ⟩ Introduction

Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:

• THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE

Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.

She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism. She really walked the walk.

View all of our coming episodes here.

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This week, we will be exploring the concepts of resentment and forgiveness from Christian, Buddhist, and philosophical perspectives and what we can learn from them about our mental health. Our discussion will be based on three insightful texts (book chapters):

Readings (Available for download on sign-up page):

1. C.S. Lewis – Mere Christianity (Chapter: "Forgiveness"): Lewis believes that resentment is corrosive to one’s spirit and prevents full communion with God; forgiveness is a moral obligation central to Christian teaching, even if it is difficult.
2. The Dalai Lama – The Art of Happiness (Chapter: "Dealing with Anger and Hatred"): In Buddhism, forgiveness is about letting go one's own negativities in order to attain happiness and inner peace. Forgiven can be done through the cultivation of compassion for others, recognizing that those who hurt us, too, suffer their own ignorance or pain.
3. Robert C. Solomon – Living with Nietzsche (Section from Chapter: "Nietzsche on Resentment, Love and Pity"): For Nietzsche (as explained by Solomon), resentment is a sign of weakness, while forgiveness is an act of strength, of overcoming the victim mentality, of affirming life as it is.

Each text is around 5-6 pages long. You are encouraged to read them before the meeting for more fulfilling engagement.

Guiding Questions:

• Which text resonated with you the most? What about it stood out to you?
• What similarities or differences did you observe between the Christian, Buddhist, and Nietzschean views on resentment and forgiveness?
• What major insights did you gain from these readings with regards to your own issues of resentment and forgiveness?

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This is an online meeting hosted by Leanna on Sunday October 13 — to join the discussion, RSVP in advance on the main event page here {link); the video conferencing link will be available to registrants.

People who have not read the text are welcome to join and participate, but priority in the discussion will be given to people who have done the reading.

All are welcome!

Following Up:

This meeting is the second part of a three-part series, with each session building on the last:

• (1) Self-alienation as Original Sin (completed)
• (2) Resentment and Forgiveness (this session)
• (3) Call of Conscience and Self-Love (upcoming)

Therefore, we’ll be referring to the key points from our previous session on "Self-Alienation as Original Sin" and explore how they are related to this week's topic. If you attended the previous session, we encourage you to continue the journey with us. If you didn’t attend, don’t worry! We will provide a brief recap at the start to ensure everyone is on the same page.

#sin #selfalienation #resentment #anger #forgiveness #Christianity #Buddhism #lettinggo #innerpeace #authenticity #spirituality #mentalhealth

Stay in Touch:

Feel free to contact Leanna if you want to suggest or request a topic for group discussion. You are also welcome to send her a DM for personal opinions or questions you don't feel comfortable sharing in the group.

This event is brought to you by Leanna, a philosophical counsellor in training for spiritually integrated psychotherapy. She has a Master’s degree in philosophy and is a meditator in the Theravada Buddhist/Vipassana tradition.

Please join us even if you missed the first two sessions and even if you have not had a chance to read the material. The discussion will still be worthwhile and enjoyable. -- Matt :)

Open to free and tier-level members of The Socratic Circle. Join us on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/TheSocraticCircle

Here's the link to the Zoom info and more (accessible to members):

https://www.patreon.com/posts/meditations-of-3-113544901

Arthur Schopenhauer's essay On Women expresses his deeply negative views on human nature, with a particular focus on women, reflecting his broader pessimism.

Written in the early 19th century, Schopenhauer's essay is often seen as controversial for its derogatory remarks toward women, whom he considered inherently inferior to men, both intellectually and morally. His arguments stem from his broader philosophical system, which emphasizes the will to life as the driving force of human existence, and how women, in his view, serve primarily biological purposes.

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This is an online meeting hosted by Yorgo on Thursday, October 10 (EDT) to discuss Arthur Schopenhauer's short essay "On Women".

To join the discussion, RSVP in advance on the main event page here {link); the video conferencing link will be available to registrants.

Please read the essay in advance here.

People who have not read the text are welcome to join and participate, but priority in the discussion will be given to people who have done the reading.

All are welcome!

Disclaimer: 

These discussions take place purely for historical, educational, and analytical purposes. By analyzing movies and texts our objective is to understand; we do not necessarily endorse or support any of the ideologies or messages conveyed in them.

Hello everyone!

Tomorrow evening The Socratic Circle on Patreon will hold its first meeting of the Social & Political Philosophy discussion group. Unlike our book club program, it is open only to tier-level members (please consider supporting the TSC by becoming a tier-level member). Here's the link to the post which contains the readings:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/social-political-111374501

Please visit the Patreon for the Zoom info: www.Patreon.com/TheSocraticCircle

--Matt :)

EXISTENTIALIST SOCIETY - Online Lecture/Discussion:
"How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration". Presenter: Dr. Russell Blackford (Newcastle University, Australia).
All are welcome. Zoom details: https://existentialistmelbourne.org/ -

Weekly online Meetups: https://www.meetup.com/existentialist-society/ - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@existentialistsociety8453

Belonging in the immortal company of the great works of literature, Dante Alighieri’s poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the infinite torment of Hell, up the arduous slopes of Purgatory, and on to the glorious realm of Paradise—the sphere of universal harmony and eternal salvation. Crystallizing the power and beauty inherent in the great poet’s immortal conception of the aspiring soul, The Divine Comedy is a dazzling work of sublime truth and mystical intensity.

Part 2, Purgatorio uniquely emphasizes themes of redemption, constructive suffering, temporal progression, and psychological struggle. These elements create a distinct narrative that serves as a bridge between the despair found in Inferno and the blissful resolution in Paradiso.

Purgatorio is depicted as a towering mountain divided into seven rings, each representing one of the seven deadly sins. This physical ascent allows for a variety of landscapes and scenes, from the dark, somber shores where souls arrive to the lush, vibrant Garden of Eden at the summit. The mountain's structure facilitates a more diverse array of visual experiences compared to the more uniform celestial spheres of Paradiso.

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Next, we resolve the profound problem of not reading Dante beyond the beguiling Inferno by starting with Volume Two of The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio. At last, we will journey past hell on our way through limbo to heaven.

Yes, after this cleansing volume, we'll reward ourselves with volume three, Paradiso.

You can sign up for the 1st (of 3?) meetings on Sunday October 20 (EDT) here (link). The Zoom link will be available to registrants.

• Future meetings can be found on the group's calendar (link).

Pre-Reading for each session [or, shall we take a slower pace, e.g.: 5-6 per session?]:

• Oct 20, 2024: Cantos 1 - 11
• Nov 04, 2024: Cantos 12 - 22
• Nov 18, 2024: Cantos 23 - 33

Recommended editions (available from libraries or online$)
Review this upload on Google Drive to help choose an edition.

• Jean and Robert Hollander, 2003, Purgatorio. Anchor Books. ISBN: 9780385497008. [It/En, 844 pp.] Used: $12+
• Robert Durling, 2003, Purgatorio. Oxford Univ. Press. ISBN: 9780195087451. [It/En, 720 pp.] Used: $11+

Outside sources are welcome if they help us understand the poems, here are three academic websites.

• https://digitaldante.columbia.edu
• http://dantelab.dartmouth.edu
• https://dante.princeton.edu

This will be a meetup series unlike any that David and Philip have done before. Starting on Monday October 7, we will be learning Ancient Greek by speaking it (as well as writing it and reading it). In other words, we will be learning ancient Greek just like we would learn a living language. We will meet on most Monday on Zoom for at least 36 sessions (see below.)

We will not exactly be using a book but will instead be using this video series by Prof. Hans-Friedrich Mueller, Greek 101:

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/greek-101-learning-an-ancient-language

The video course does come with a booklet, so in that sense there will be a book that people will consult during the meetup.

Please note that Hans-Friedrich Mueller's covers both Classical Greek and Biblical Greek.

Accessing Materials

Many of you will have access to this course for free through your public library (if your library provides a service called Kanopy). For example if you live in Toronto or Ottawa you can access this course for free. (Links to the Toronto Public Library and the Ottawa Public Library.)

If not, perhaps you have friends whose public library does have Kanopy and who will share their public library access with you.

Lastly, the course does go on sale for roughly $50 USD quite frequently. Check the link above every few weeks to see if it goes on sale.

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You can sign up for the 1st meeting on Monday October 7 (EDT) here (link). The Zoom link will be available to registrants.

All future meetings can be found on the group's calendar (link).

Please note that the schedule is a little bit different from what you have come to expect from David and Philip's meetups.

1. Starting on Monday October 8, this meetup will happen once per week, every week..... except
2. Frequently we will not meet on the last Monday of the month.

ABOUT THE MEETINGS

Please note that neither Philip nor David currently know Ancient Greek. So this meetup will be a language course without a teacher. Philip and David will guide the flow of the meetup as hosts typically do, but the only teacher we will have is Hans-Friedrich Mueller who did the video lecture series that will be our text. And of course we will all be teachers to each other.

Each time we get together we will cover one lesson from the video course. The video series has 36 lectures, so the meetup will last for 36 get-togethers (however long that takes). If that pace proves to be too quick, we will consider slowing things down a little bit and spending two sessions on some of the harder video lessons.

If we still have a few (dedicated!) people left in the meetup by the time we are finished with the video course, we will think about reading an ancient Greek work together (possibly Plato's Republic in the original Greek). Wouldn't it be wonderful to read Plato's Republic in the original Greek!

We are sure this is abundantly obvious to everyone, but each participant will have to do a lot of learning on their own. Please be realistic about this. Languages do not learn themselves; you have to work at it.

When we get together, we will be practicing what we have learned on our own throughout the week. Many philosophers end up learning a lot of Ancient Greek words, and for many purposes this might be all you need. We mention this so that no one is misled: This will not be a meetup where we just learn a bunch of ancient Greek words. If that is what you want, Philip would be happy to recommend some excellent books that list and describe a lot of Greek words that philosophers need to know.

Learning some philosophically significant Greek words is a great goal to have, but it is not our only goal in this meetup. In this meetup we will be learning ancient Greek as a language we will speak and read and write. And that means learning all aspects of the language (including the grammar) well enough that we can read Greek without a handy translation by our side and speak Greek without too much hesitation.

There are a lot of opinions and debates about how ancient Greek was actually pronounced. We will not be engaging in any of these debates in this meetup. In this meetup we will simply adopt Hans-Friedrich Mueller's way of pronouncing Greek.

Lastly, learning a language with other people is enormously fun and we expect that this meetup will be a huge amount of fun!

Interested in joining a Nietzsche Discord server? We're a growing server dedicated to the study, discussion, and debate of Friedrich Nietzsche and his ideas/works!

We are having a discussion on the Book 3 (32 pages) of Daybreak by Nietzsche on September 29th, 5pm CST, and would love to have you listen in and/ share your thoughts!

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Stop in by clicking here, and hop in general chat to introduce yourself - feel free to tell us a bit about yourself and your background, why you joined, and share with us your favorite book by Nietzsche or your favorite philosophers!

We look forward to seeing you!

Magee | Wittgenstein and co-host John Searle

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This is the end … my only friend, the end.

Yes, folks, this really is the end. Magee knows the philosophical clock has struck midnight, and he’s not holding back. We get Magee at his absolute finest—an opener with the gravitas of a neutron star.

Just like Hendrix, who lost the coin toss to Pete Townshend but still destroyed the qlippoth and freed all of humanity from the Six Realms at Monterey Pop in ’67, Magee pulls out all the stops — and delivers the most mind-blowing, crystal-clear explanation of Wittgenstein ever recorded in any Earthly language. The cherry on top is Searle. Finally, a guest as fired up about the material as Magee, with the uncanny ability to translate dense philosophy into everyday English, just like the Great One Himself.

Wittgenstein Has Entered the Chat

Any list of Greatest Philosophers of All Time had better end with the latest of the generally acclaimed dead. Today, for us, that is Wittgenstein.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889. His father, from whom he was to inherit a fortune, was the richest steel magnate in Austria. Wittgenstein was fascinated by machinery from boyhood, and his education was strongly weighted in the direction of mathematics, physics and engineering. After studying mechanical engineering in Berlin he spent three years at the University of Manchester as a postgraduate student in aeronautics.

His interest in engineering led to an interest in mathematics which in turn got him thinking about philosophical questions about the foundations of mathematics. He visited Gottlob Frege, who recommended that he study with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge. At Cambridge Wittgenstein greatly impressed Russell and G.E. Moore, and began work on logic. He soon learned all Russell had to teach—and then went on to do the original thinking that was to produce his first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921.

Wittgenstein in TLP he had solved the fundamental problems of philosophy, so he quit and did other things. Meanwhile the Tractatus acquired enormous influence, stimulating further developments in logic at Cambridge while on the Continent becoming the most admired text among the famous group of Logical Positivists known as ‘the Vienna Circle’. But Wittgenstein himself came to feel that it was fundamentally in error, so he returned to philosophy after all.

In 1929 he went back to Cambridge, where in 1939 he became Professor of Philosophy. During his second period in Cambridge he developed a wholly new approach, quite different from his earlier one. During the rest of his life the influence of this later approach spread only through personal contact, for apart from one very brief article he published nothing more before his death in 1951. But two years after his death, in 1953, his book Philosophical Investigations came out, and proved to be the most influential work of philosophy to have appeared in the English-speaking world since the Second World War.

To discuss Wittgenstein’s work with Magee is John Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California in Berkeley. Their conversation is the second best in the entire series.

METHOD

Please watch the episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A new high-def/pro-audio version of this episode can be found here:

• Bryan Magee: The Great Philosophers EP 15 ⟩ John Searle on Wittgenstein

Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the Magee Book Vault 2.0) of the episodes we cover can be found here:

• THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

Topics Covered in 15 Episodes

• Plato; Aristotle; Medieval Philosophy; Descartes; Spinoza and Leibniz; Locke and Berkeley; Hume; Kant; Hegel and Marx; Schopenhauer; Nietzsche; Husserl, Heidegger and Modern Existentialism; The American Pragmatists; Frege, Russell and Modern Logic; Wittgenstein.

View all of our coming episodes here.

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Author Jeffrey Rosen will be visiting Orlando Stoics for an interview Friday 9-27. His book is "The Pursuit of Happiness", and topics include how Stoicism and philosophical ideas shaped the Founders and other influential people from that time period (George Washington, Ben Franklin, John Quincey Adams, Abigail Adams, and many more). The author is President of the National Constitution Center. This meeting is open to the public and free. Starts 7PM Eastern on Friday. If you are a practicing Stoic, or just interested, please attend. RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/orlando-stoics/events/303572736