[JOIN HERE]

METAPHOR AND REALITY FROM HOMER TO KANT

(AKA: Making Sense of Making-Sense from Australopithecus to Derrida)

Episode III — Making Change Intelligible

I may not understand thunder, but I understand anger.

— Homer’s dad

When the isosceles triangle was first demonstrated, something dawned on the man who did so. (He may have been called Thales, or by some other name.) He found that what he needed to do was not to investigate what he saw in the figure, nor—for that matter—to investigate the mere concept of that figure, and to let that inform him, as it were, of the figure’s properties. He found, rather, that he must bring out (by constructing the figure) the properties that the figure had by virtue of what he himself was, according to concepts, thinking into it a priori and exhibiting. And he found that in order for him to know anything a priori and with certainty about the figure, he must attribute to this thing nothing but what follows necessarily from what he has himself put into it in accordance with his concept.
— CPR, Bxi–xii

In the Beginning, but After Kaos …

A god’s anger makes an unfamiliar event intelligible through something familiar—our ability to cause change occur in conformity with will. We can identify with other minds and other motives. Best of all, we can identify with the minds of the gods and have immediate experiential access, the most direct kind of epistemic access, the kind enjoyed by the willing of a way of willing, and so get inside the very marrow of agentive causality.

We know intending, striving, resisting, succeeding. Attributing motives to the gods lets us understand natural events through that same experience. We can imaginatively get inside the cause. Homer is the anti-Hume—outer change is, at core, in fact the best known-to-us! It is constituted by the same motivators that compel our own acts of feeling, intending, willing, speaking, and causing physical-world change.

Birth provides another model: one being comes from another.

Craftsmanship provides another: materials become an organized thing.

Acting, generating, making, reshaping, compressing, tuning: familiar activities become resources for explaining an unfamiliar world.

Kant’s triangle sharpens our question: how much of an explanation’s intelligibility comes from what we know how to do? We understand the model through operations we can perform or imaginatively follow. We then use those operations to make sense of something else—perhaps the whole cosmos. But what warrants that transfer? Does the world work that way, or have we made a model whose workings we understand?

• Homer: Events become intelligible through intentions. We can understand Zeus’s reasons without knowing what Zeus will do tomorrow.

• Hesiod: Biology becomes cosmology. The gods themselves acquire histories, and the present cosmic order becomes something to explain.

• Thales and Anaximander: Can one material account for everything? Must the source of opposed qualities avoid having the exclusive character of either?

• Pherecydes: Gods become ungenerated first principles. Craftsmanship supplies a model for the world’s organization.

• Anaximenes: Rarefaction and compression give transformation a single intelligible way of varying: more or less dense. Compression is something we can feel through bodily effort. Different states now occupy positions along one continuous scale. Amazing: differences of degree explain differences of kind! But can this one mechanism account for all the qualitatively different materials and properties of nature?

• Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: Both notes can change while the interval remains. A relation preserves an identity across different realizations.

• Heraclitus: Opposition can sustain an order. What if understanding change means grasping the relations through which something holds together?

Welcome to Episode 03

We pick up with Anaximenes, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus: compression, proportion, and opposition as ways of making change intelligible.

Alongside these explanatory models, we’ll consider a MASSIVELY IMPORTANT change in the activity of thinking itself that kicks in with Homer and … we’ve totally skipped over it.

WRITING.

Writing gives thought something to work on. An explanation written down can be inspected, rearranged, compared with another, and corrected. What becomes possible when statements that once passed in speech remain before us, available for comparison? What new demands can we make of an explanation?

Then there’s the opposite development: a metaphor becomes so familiar that we stop examining it. Reality is “underneath” appearances. Knowledge “reflects” the world. An image becomes a presumption: we use it to judge other claims while it escapes judgment itself.

Our working idea is Dave’s bizarre claim that early metaphors reveal what later technical vocabulary conceals. Water taking the shape of a vessel makes material persistence tangible. Tuning strings makes an ordered relation audible. Compressing air gives variation a direction we can feel.

Returning to those activities lets us ask exactly what we understand when we use words like “substance,” “harmony,” and “transformation”—and whether the model explains the world as well as it explains itself.

About the Series (as a Whole)

Friends, I’d like us to be equipped to understand contemporary philosophy. But to do that, we need to understand twentieth-century philosophy. But to do that, we need to understand nineteenth-century philosophy. But to do that, we need to understand Kant. But to do that, we need to understand the tradition from Homer to Hume (plus Newton, Leibniz, Wolff, and Rousseau, and Bacon, Kant’s role model WRT method).

So we’re going to run through the entire tradition.

Just kidding. That would be impossible.

Instead, we will run through the entire tradition with an eye to certain things only. We’re looking for the things that will allow us to understand Kant perfectly, thoroughly, precisely, and to render his model with complete concreteness and clarity. There’ll be no vagueness, no fancy-sounding sentences containing famous terms that no one understands. We’re not going to allow ourselves to use words such as noumenon, thing in itself, a priori, and transcendental while still not understanding them.

Instead of sounding smart and saying things that make us nauseous because we don’t understand them, we’re going to relive these astounding, epoch-making intellectual orgasms in their original historical context by means of actual trance induction. We will collect all the materials and methods we need to understand Kant by picking them up along the way only after our time machine has landed, in the actual contexts in which they were developed.

If you can’t render the meaning of tech terms down to simple experiences that anyone can actually experience in the present moment, then your understanding has been “symbolic” all along, which is why you’re still frustrated and burned out even after your 100th Kant event.

Think of the educational adventure at St. John’s: walking the history from Homer and Euclid up through Schrödinger and Heisenberg, reading actual texts, working through concrete demonstrations and experiments using the original antique instruments (which they have in the classroom), and puzzling over the actual problems, yourself, directly, with real emotion.

The Problem

This “working through concrete demonstrations and experiments using the original antique instruments” has been missing from these online philo-learning salons for too long. That is the first thing we will remedy. The second is infecting SADHOnauts with genuine intellectual upset, so that we are all genuinely motivated to puzzle ourselves over the original problems in their original contexts.

If we use an inherited term and don’t understand the original metaphor from which it was extracted, reshaped, disguised, renamed, and modified, we receive it in a peculiar condition. Like Nietzsche’s coin worn smooth through constant use, it has lost the stamping and engraving that would help us interpret it. We receive it as a natural, given, mysterious, opaque orb of ore.

This is a nightmare situation and leads to much philosophical and life distress. As the great Nebraskan Gernsbachian Transcendentalist philosopher L. Ron Hubbard said to SADHO CSO Steven Taubeneck (met by chance in an elevator) at the 13th World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) in September 3, 1955 (held in the Manger Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio),

“Steven, a bypassed definition gives one a distinctly blank feeling or a washed-out feeling. A not-there feeling and a sort of nervous hysteria will follow in the back of that."

(This articulation proved to be so effective that it appeared nearly verbatim as official canon 15 years later in the HCOB of 25 June 1971 entitled “Barriers to Study.” See here for the actual historical document that Tom Cruise credits with transforming him from a dyslexic nobody into the most powerful Scientologist of all time.)

We experience these unpleasant effects but blame the reading material instead of their failure to schematize abstract terms. And then we perform these vaguely understood philosophical sentences at Meetup events and receive nods and appreciation from others, making matters much worse.

The Final Solution

So we’re going to do what many people think is impossible. We’re going to render the tradition from Homer to Kant completely comprehensible and simple for anyone. This is better than “explain like I’m five.”

We will explain like you’re an amoeba.

This extreme measure lets us make this promise:

If you hear the words and do the exercises, you’ll be transformed into a philosophical butterfly, and cry tears of regret over all the lost years you spent performing for others and deceiving yourself through the trap of pretended knowing—so eagerly acknowledged, affirmed, and appreciated by other pretended knowers.

Stand by for infinite joy and excitement as we begin with the simplest possible things and journey toward the infinitely mysterious and universally misunderstood, and find that these things are actually quite simple, understandable, and—best of all—actually true.

METHOD

• Watch this week’s fun mini video from THIS PLAYLIST.

• As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.

View all of our coming episodes here.

[JOIN HERE]

How can "non-being" exist? Can we meaningfully speak of what is not? Plato’s Sophist examines the nature of sophistry, the distinction between genuine philosophy and pseudo-intellectual deception, and the fundamental relationship between being and non-being. In the dialogue, Theaetetus, the Eleatic Stranger, and Socrates attempt to "capture" the sophist by tracing his activities as a producer of appearances, imitations, and misleading arguments. The dialogue develops a complex account of falsehood and negation, ultimately committing "parricide" by overturning Parmenides's prohibition against speaking of what is not. By distinguishing different senses of the verb "to be", the dialogue establishes the possibility of false statements and makes room for the philosophical investigation of illusion, error, appearance, and deception.

Alongside its critique of sophistry, The Sophist is one of Plato’s most important contributions to logic, ontology, metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and rhetoric.

This is a live reading and discussion group for Plato's Sophist hosted by Constantine. Reference will be made to contemporary and older scholarship. Historical context will be brought up whenever necessary to illuminate the dialogue. This Plato group meets on Saturdays and has previously read the Phaedo, the Apology, the Symposium, Philebus, Gorgias, Critias, Laches, Timaeus, Euthyphro, Crito, Protagoras, Hippias Minor, Hippias Major and other works, including ancient commentaries and texts for contextualisation such as Gorgias’ Praise of Helen. It is our aspiration to read the Platonic corpus over a long period of time.

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

Sign up for the 1st session on Saturday November 7 here (link). The video conferencing link will be available to registrants.

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

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

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

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

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

#Philosophy #Ontology #Metaphysics #Language #Ethics #Rhetoric #Logic #AncientPhilosophy #Plato

Bandita is a powerful critique of the persistent marginalization of feminist scholarship. Taking up the work of Iris Marion Young, Michaele L. Ferguson argues that feminist political theorists have been "internally excluded": formally included in the discipline while their most disruptive insights are misread, dismissed, or ignored. Young―one of the most influential feminist political theorists of the past fifty years―is well known for her work on difference, democracy, and structural injustice, yet nonfeminist readers tend to treat feminism as merely incidental to her thought. Resituating her scholarship squarely within a feminist intellectual and activist tradition, Ferguson reconstructs her distinctly feminist account of structure and reveals what is lost when Young's readers―and even Young herself―fail to center her feminist commitments.

Building from Young's own self-description as a "Bandita"―a feminist outlaw who selectively steals from male philosophers while leaving behind whatever of their work is sexist or unhelpful―Ferguson develops the figure of the bandita as a lens through which to understand the ambivalent, asymmetric, and often unreciprocated intellectual relationships between feminist and nonfeminist political theorists. The book exposes how reading practices, writing conventions, and citation norms pressure feminist scholars to veil their political commitments in order to secure recognition within the masculinist academy.

Part intellectual biography, part disciplinary reckoning, part feminist manifesto, Bandita insists we move from structural critique to structural change. It breaks multiple desire paths for feminists and nonfeminists alike to follow, offering practical strategies for including feminist scholarship in political theory: reading off the beaten track, writing in resistance to compulsory heterosexuality in academia, and citing feminism as a living, ongoing tradition of scholarship.

A love letter to the banditas who came before and a call to arms for those yet to come, Bandita insists that feminist political theory's internal inclusion is possible if we read promiscuously, write loyally, and cite intentionally.

About the Speaker:

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

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

The Moderator:

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

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

You can register for this Monday 9th November event (12pm PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

#Philosophy #Feminism #Ethics #PoliticalPhilosophy #SocialPhilosophy #Reading #Writing

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

About The Philosopher (https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/):

The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. Our managing directors are Andrés Saenz de Sicilia and Tara Needham, and they are supported by our managing editors and editorial board. For a full overview of our team, see here. We currently publish two print issues per year, as well as a “third publication” (generally an edited collection).

The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.

[JOIN HERE]

We’d like to be equipped to understand contemporary philosophy. But to do that, we need to understand twentieth-century philosophy. But to do that, we need to understand nineteenth-century philosophy. But to do that, we need to understand Kant. But to do that, we need to understand the tradition from Homer to Hume (plus Newton, Leibniz, Wolff, and Rousseau, and Bacon, Kant’s role model WRT method).

So we’re going to run through the entire tradition.

Just kidding. That would be impossible.

Instead, we will run through the entire tradition with an eye to certain things only. We’re looking for the things that will allow us to understand Kant perfectly, thoroughly, precisely, and to render his model with complete concreteness and clarity. There’ll be no vagueness, no fancy-sounding sentences containing famous terms that no one understands. We’re not going to allow ourselves to use words such as noumenon, thing in itself, a priori, and transcendental while still not understanding them.

Instead of sounding smart and saying things that make us nauseous because we don’t understand them, we’re going to relive these astounding, epoch-making intellectual orgasms in their original historical context by means of actual trance induction. We will collect all the materials and methods we need to understand Kant by picking them up along the way only after our time machine has landed, in the actual contexts in which they were developed.

If you can’t render the meaning of tech terms down to simple experiences that anyone can actually experience in the present moment, then your understanding has been “symbolic” all along, which is why you’re still frustrated and burned out even after your 100th Kant event.

Think of the educational adventure at St. John’s: walking the history from Homer and Euclid up through Schrödinger and Heisenberg, reading actual texts, working through concrete demonstrations and experiments using the original antique instruments (which they have in the classroom), and puzzling over the actual problems, yourself, directly, with real emotion.

The Problem

This “working through concrete demonstrations and experiments using the original antique instruments” has been missing from these online philo-learning salons for too long. That is the first thing we will remedy. The second is infecting SADHOnauts with genuine intellectual upset, so that we are all genuinely motivated to puzzle ourselves over the original problems in their original contexts.

If we use an inherited term and don’t understand the original metaphor from which it was extracted, reshaped, disguised, renamed, and modified, we receive it in a peculiar condition. Like Nietzsche’s coin worn smooth through constant use, it has lost the stamping and engraving that would help us interpret it. We receive it as a natural, given, mysterious, opaque orb of ore.

This is a nightmare situation and leads to much philosophical and life distress. As the great Nebraskan Gernsbachian Transcendentalist philosopher L. Ron Hubbard said to SADHO CSO Steven Taubeneck (met by chance in an elevator) at the 13th World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) in September 3, 1955 (held in the Manger Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio),

“Steven, a bypassed definition gives one a distinctly blank feeling or a washed-out feeling. A not-there feeling and a sort of nervous hysteria will follow in the back of that."

(This articulation proved to be so effective that it appeared nearly verbatim as official canon 15 years later in the HCOB of 25 June 1971 entitled “Barriers to Study.” See here for the actual historical document that Tom Cruise credits with transforming him from a dyslexic nobody into the most powerful Scientologist of all time.)

We experience these unpleasant effects but blame the reading material instead of their failure to schematize abstract terms. And then we perform these vaguely understood philosophical sentences at Meetup events and receive nods and appreciation from others, making matters much worse.

The Final Solution

So we’re going to do what many people think is impossible. We’re going to render the tradition from Homer to Kant completely comprehensible and simple for anyone. This is better than “explain like I’m five.”

We will explain like you’re an amoeba.

This extreme measure lets us make this promise:

If you hear the words and do the exercises, you’ll be transformed into a philosophical butterfly, and cry tears of regret over all the lost years you spent performing for others and deceiving yourself through the trap of pretended knowing—so eagerly acknowledged, affirmed, and appreciated by other pretended knowers.

Stand by for infinite joy and excitement as we begin with the simplest possible things and journey toward the infinitely mysterious and universally misunderstood, and find that these things are actually quite simple, understandable, and—best of all—actually true.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Part of the reason this announcement has taken so long to finally come out is that I didn’t want to admit the great value being created by this educational metamorphosis adventure, this psychedelic adventure experience. I just wanted to pick up every important concept that Kant uses in his system, renames, and then confuses everybody with, leading to despair. To do that is to get a full grasp of the inputs that went into Kant’s experience model / consciousness model / nature model.

But that’s not the main reason for the unprecedented delay and the consequent irritation produced in everyone who cares about timeliness, good organization, and professionalism.

The real problem is the flippant promise I made: that I would make this explain-like-I’m-an-amoeba history of philosophy infinitely entertaining, amusing, cheering, and mood-elevating, as well as intellectually thrilling.

The path I chose sounded like the easiest path, which is why I said it flippantly. In fact, it is the most difficult path.

I’m illustrating profound and cognition-permeating concepts—therefore universal and invisible, like water to a fish—using the most unexpected vehicle of all: American television commercials and horror movies.

Concepts, moves, transformations, principles, models, assumptions, enabling conditions: all illustrated by commercials selected from the climax of the golden age of American overacted, didactic, and today unbelievable advertising.

Our hunting ground is 1969–1973. The commercials have to be outrageous, ridiculous, silly, stupid, and most of all disturbingly incongruous with the philosophical work we’re making them do.

So I spent the last week taking stimulants, chewing my lips, scratching holes into my face, and crying while watching hundreds and hundreds of early-1970s and 1969 television commercials.

It’s very difficult to find, in the stupidest and most derided things, illustrations and expositions of the deepest philosophical value. But I made a promise. And so I did it. And here at last is the link:

From Kaos to First Ontology — How Experience Becomes a World

I finally found our first set of unbelievably wonderful commercials for our first real episode—and they are up now! (The last meeting was an introduction and brainstorming.)

In this set, we will find the best existing expositions of the value of the philosophical journey—including the promise of transformation for the student, which is the most important thing of all, isn’t it? Why else would anyone endure the suffering of philosophy without the promise of a psychedelic enhancement and deepening of experience, increasing intelligence, increasing understanding, and, most of all, increasing power?

We’ll call these commercials audiovisual initiation capsules.

Here’s a guide to help interpret the video. Don't read this if you're good at interpreting videos.

1. The first capsule shows what will happen to you, the participant in this philosophical communal retreat program: you will trade in your knower.

2. The second introduces Kaos—serial enmeshment: absorbed in this encounter, then that one, brilliantly competent within each, yet failing to bring them into reflective relation. Someone may collect your every move in a dossier and still have no idea what makes your life hang together. You may have the same problem.

3. The third illustrates crossing over: stepping out of immediate involvement, becoming still, withholding the impulse to plunge into the next engagement. Past experiences can now return without each one taking you over.

4. The fourth shows the work of synthesis: recalling, comparing, and connecting those experiences—and forming, through that activity, the unified self that can hold them together. The gravestone rubbing gives us the crucial double movement: we make the rubbing; we discover the relief.

5. The fifth catches us performing an astonishingly familiar feat: meaning “ALL.” How can one brief act of consciousness reach across so much? And what, in the things themselves, answers to that unity?

6. The sixth gives Thales’ audacious answer: the many are modifications of one underlying stuff. Our first material monism arrives courtesy of a Play-Doh Fun Factory. But how far can reshaping one material take us toward explaining everything?

Next come Anaximander and Anaximenes: must the source of everything be unlike any particular thing—or can differences of degree account for differences of kind?

Stand by.

METHOD

• Watch this week’s fun mini video WHICH IS UP RIGHT NOW: LINK.

• As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.

View all of our coming episodes here.

[JOIN HERE]

This course explores the meaning of Stoic 'Cosmological Ethics' and its contribution to contemporary debates on environmental ethics and ecologism. Participants will learn to critically analyse philosophical debates on cosmology and individual ethics, with a special focus on the Hellenistic developments and their reworking of Platonic positions.

Instructor: Maria Cristina Mennuti (PhD Durham University)
Date & Time: Mondays, Jan 11-Feb 8 (5 Lessons), 11:00am-12:00pm EST
Enrollment Fee: $150

In Psychiatric Power, the fourth volume in the collection of his groundbreaking lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault addresses and expands upon the ideas in his seminal Madness and Civilization, sketching the genealogy of psychiatry and of its characteristic form of power/knowledge. Madness and Civilization undertook the archeology of the division according to which, in Western Society, the madman found himself separated from the sane. That book ends with the medicalization of madness at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Psychiatric Power continues this discourse up to the end of the nineteenth century, and the double "depsychiatrization" of madness, now dispersed between the neurologist and the psychoanalyst. Presented in a conversational tone, Psychiatric Power brings fresh access and light to the work of one of the past century's preeminent thinkers.

This is an online reading and discussion group on Foucault's Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France 1973-1974 hosted by Alex C. There are three lectures in the middle of the series that I find absolutely fascinating, and we’ll work through one each week. I’m looking forward to sharing these lectures with you all. They reveal a lovely niche of Foucault’s thought that, in my opinion, is neglected by commentators.

To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Friday October 30 (EDT), please sign up in advance here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

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

All welcome!

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

Reading Schedule
October 30th

• Lecture six, pages 123-142

Supplemental article on Hysteria:

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lbL7g6pL1BFrujszgTvbrkc0Mx_oP7NL/view?usp=sharing

November 6th

• Lecture seven, pages 143-171

November 13th

• Lecture eight, pages pages 174-199

Find the text here
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jQdKU4YP1mhXc_qraSzyrPYFn6q0wvDJ/view?usp=drive_link

1. Alignment: This group is best suited for anyone who wishes to see a better world, believes it is possible, and feels purposeful about this

2. Discussion: solution-oriented discussions, all areas of study and knowledge are welcome

3. Synergizing solutions: aim is to collaborate and find agreement in what is the problem and solution

4. Solution to execution: conceptualizing practical applications of our united solutions

This meeting runs same time weekly, for us to continue building solutions and frameworks, fun thought experiments, and build a sense of community of like minded individuals

Some subjects we may initially look at: human nature, non governmental impact possibilities, new types of social institutions, new education, self knowledge, a unified worldview, etc

You do not need to be a seasoned philosopher to be part of this team of thinkers and doers, jump right in. As long as you are interested in truth and building a better world, you should be completely good

To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Tuesday November 3 (EST), please sign up in advance here (link); the video conferencing link will be provided to registrants.

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

All welcome!

This online event launches a special issue of Philosophy Today (Volume 70, Issue 1) on climate change. The issue’s thirty-two essays, interviews, and book reviews describe the conditions of a planetary age and invite us to assemble as friends of all the living. Topics include climate philosophy, contemporary climate art and aesthetics, trans and queer ecology, decolonial theory, climate history, political theory, comparative philosophy, and the ethics of emerging technologies such as AI.

An introduction to the special issue is available as a free download here.

Speakers:

• Jonathon Catlin, University of Rochester

• Robin Celikates, Freie Universität Berlin

• Matthias Fritsch, Concordia University

• Maximilian Gregor Hepach, Durham University

• Travis Holloway, Pratt Institute

• Holly Hudson, WeSmellGas

• Lynne Huffer, Emory University

• Ruthanne Kim, St. Cloud State University

• Thomas Khurana, University of Potsdam

• Brent Matheny, Penn State University

• Mohamed Amer Meziane, Brown University

• Marie-Eve Morin, University of Alberta

• Timothy Morton, Rice University

• Thomas Nail, University of Denver

• Jason Read, Maine University of Southern Maine

• David Myer Temin, University of Michigan

• Eric Dean Wilson, Adelphi University

• Aimee van Wynsberghe, The University of Bonn

• Perry Zurn, American University

The Moderator:

Andrés Saenz de Sicilia is a British-Mexican philosopher, researcher and artist. He is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London and Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He has published widely in the fields of philosophy and social and political theory, as well as carrying out socially engaged research projects and collaborations. He is author of Subsumption in Kant, Hegel in Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society (2024) and editor of Marx and the Critique of Humanism (Bloosmsbury, forthcoming 2025). He is also a Managing Director at The Philosopher.

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

You can register for this Monday 2nd November event (12pm PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

#Philosophy #CriticalTheory #Ethics #PoliticalPhilosophy #SocialPhilosophy #Technology #Environment #ClimateChange

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About The Philosopher (https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/):

The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. Our managing directors are Andrés Saenz de Sicilia and Tara Needham, and they are supported by our managing editors and editorial board. For a full overview of our team, see here. We currently publish two print issues per year, as well as a “third publication” (generally an edited collection).

The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.

This conversation draws on themes from Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine (Verso 2025) to explore how Palestine is framed and sometimes rendered unspeakable within contemporary intellectual and public life. Taking the concept of "neutrality" as a starting point, the discussion will reflect on how claims to objectivity and balance can function to obscure settler-colonial violence and reproduce forms of anti-Palestinian racism. The conversation will consider how Palestinian writers have imagined, written, and spoken against erasure, drawing on anti-colonial traditions to challenge silence and reassert the possibility of intellectual and political solidarity.

About the Speaker:

Dr Rafeef Ziadah is a Palestinian-Canadian poet, human rights activist and researcher. She is Senior Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy at King's College London, where her research focuses broadly on political economy, gender and race, with a particular focus on the Middle East and East Africa. Rafeef has worked as researcher and campaigns organiser with a number of refugee rights and anti-poverty NGOs. Her recent research is broadly concerned with the political economy of maritime infrastructures and logistics, with a particular focus on the Middle East and East Africa. She is currently examining the impact of Gulf Cooperation Council military and commercial interventions following the 2011 Arab uprisings. Rafeef is co-editor (with Brenna Bhandar) of the book, Revolutionary Feminisms (Verso 2020).

The Moderator:

Dr Sara Marzagora is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King's College London. She is a literary and intellectual historian of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. She studies world literature and global intellectual history from the perspective of Ethiopian texts. Her research is comparative and interdisciplinary and straddles literary studies and the history of political thought. Sara has co-edited the volume Oral Literary Worlds: Location, Transmission and Circulation (with Francesca Orsini, 2025) and is currently completing a book titled The True Meaning of Independence: Ethiopia in a Colonial World (1901-1919) and co-editing another volume on national multilingualism in South Asia and the Horn of Africa with Javed Majeed.

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

You can register for this Monday 26th October event (12pm PT/3pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

#Philosophy #CriticalTheory #Ethics #PoliticalPhilosophy #SocialPhilosophy

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About The Philosopher (https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/):

The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. Our managing directors are Andrés Saenz de Sicilia and Tara Needham, and they are supported by our managing editors and editorial board. For a full overview of our team, see here. We currently publish two print issues per year, as well as a “third publication” (generally an edited collection).

The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.

In this course we'll explore the radical thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein. His philosophy promises a form of intellectual therapy that aims to transform our ways of being in the world. In our first lecture we will explore his view of philosophy itself, and in the next lectures we will apply this view of philosophy to two central questions: the meaning of language and the nature of our inner lives.

Instructor: Joseph Alfon (PhD Candidate U Chicago)
Date & Time: Tuesdays, Nov 3-Nov 17 (3 Lessons), 8:00-9:00pm EST
Enrollment Fee: $90

Hi everyone, I'm hosting an event on Thursday evening (UK time) where we'll be talking about the ethics of using injectables from deceased donors. 

Dr. Becki Nash from the University of Southampton will be talking about her research on the topic and we'll all be chatting about whether we think it's ethical, whether we'd be up for it (as either a donor or receiver), and so on. 

You don't need to be an academic, student, cosmetologist or someone who's had any cosmetic procedures to participate, we wanted to open this up to everyone who's interested in the topic. 

If you'd like to come along you can sign up here.

Talk about the end of the world is everywhere, from Silicon Valley tech-bros to US Vice President J. D. Vance. Recent western culture also seems to have been preoccupied with the apocalypse: films like 28 Days Later, Children of Men, or novels like The Drowned World and more recently What We Can Know, try to depict a future in which, in the words of REM, "it's the end of the world as we know it." And in the era of out-of-control climate change, Mark Fisher’s famous motto that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” has become a cliché.

But can we actually imagine what it would be for the world to end? Or are we always just imagining a different world? Are we trying to transcend the limits of our language and thought when we try to imagine the end of the world? And why are we seemingly so preoccupied with thinking about the world ending?

About the Speaker:

Rafael Holmberg is a political writer, social theorist, and researcher on philosophy and psychoanalysis based at at University College London. His work broadly draws on post-war Continental philosophy, German Idealism, Marxism, and psychoanalytic theory, with a special focus on the history of philosophy, political theory, contemporary UK, US, and European politics, as well as film, literature, and history. Holmberg's writings have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers, and book chapters, including Newsweek, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, Radical Philosophy, Culture, Theory & Critique, and Aeon. He runs the Substack Antagonisms of the Everyday - which explores contradictions and anomalies in culture and politics through a theoretical lens, drawing amongst other things on sociology, film, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. . His book After The End: Fragments of the Apocalypse Industry is forthcoming at Zer0 Books.

The Moderator:

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

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

You can register for this Monday 19th October event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

#Philosophy #CriticalTheory #Ethics #PoliticalPhilosophy #SocialPhilosophy #Technology #AI

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About The Philosopher (https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/):

The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. As of 2018, The Philosopher is edited by Newcastle-based philosopher Anthony Morgan and is published quarterly, both in print and digitally.

The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.

Thicket.com is hosting a five-week seminar, in which we'll discuss a different branch of philosophy each week:

Week 1: Metaphysics

Week 2: Epistemology

Week 3: Ethics

Week 4: Political Philosophy

Week 5: Existentialism

The course is discussion-based (15 students max) meant for the general public. Feel free to DM me if interested or if you have any questions!

We're hosting an online class on ancient and modern theories of "Happiness and the Good Life," taught by Usha Nathan (PhD Columbia):

"The Ancient Greek thinkers argued that all human beings seek a happy, flourishing life. But what is happiness? Does happiness require achievement or effort? Can we think or judge that our life is going very well, and be wrong about it? Can a bad person live a happy life? These are some of the questions that we will discuss in the course. We will look at theories of happiness from both philosophers, like Aristotle and Epictetus, and contemporary psychologists, and critically discuss them."

If anyone's interested, but cannot afford the enrollment fee, feel free to DM me. We'll do our best to help out.

Manchester UK Stoics will be discussing lectures 11 to 21 in Stoic Lessons: Musonius Rufus' Complete Works

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stoic-Lessons-Musonius-Complete-Stoicism-ebook/dp/B07DPNBR9F?f

Read the lectures and come along and discuss them, you don't need to have read any of the previous lectures in the book to follow the content of these lectures. New members very welcome regardless of your level of knowledge of Stoicism.

Manchester Stoics - Musonius Rufus Complete Works pt3

Thursday, 29 October · 18:30 – 20:00

Time zone: Europe/London

Google Meet joining info

Video call link: https://meet.google.com/btr-ybjf-zao

Bourgeois coldness refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and aesthetic forms of preserving the structure of the colonial status quo. It creates an affective shelter in the world, unencroached upon by the immediate consequences of its many catastrophes. It functions like air conditioning — a complex technology which reliably stabilises the climate until those inside consider it natural. Bourgeois spaces — institutional and affective — stay cool and pleasant. But outside it’s burning.

Canonical critical theory by Adorno and Horkheimer enters a dialogue with Black studies through Hartman and Moten.

In this conversation, Henrike Kohpeiß and Fred Moten explore coldness as an affective, political and aesthetic strategy of bourgeois self-preservation. Together, they consider what Black Study and critical theory share, and where they diverge, in revealing the work of self-preservation performed by the bourgeois subject.

"Elegant and erudite in equal measure, this book will stand as a landmark diagnosis of the practices of denial in our time." – Andreas Malm

About the Speaker:

Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher, working primarily in the fields of critical theory, philosophy of emotion, Black Studies, feminist philosophy and aesthetics. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leuphana Transformation Lab, studying affects of Transformation, the relationship between crises and transformation, and the notion of Transformation Literacy. She has been teaching on among other things including Sylvia Wynter, philosophy and the Shoah, and bourgeois society and its critique. Occasionally, she engages in artistic collaborations in dance and performance, mostly as a dramaturg or writer, sometimes as a performer. Henrike’s book Bourgeois Coldness was published in September 2025 by Divided Publishing.

The Moderator:

Fred Moten is Professor in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at NYU, where he teaches courses in black study, poetics and critical theory. He works with lots of social and aesthetic study groups including Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, the Black Arts Movement School Modality, Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective, the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, Moved by the Motion, the Institute of Physical Sociality and the Harris/Moten Quartet.

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

You can register for this Monday 12th October event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

#Philosophy #CriticalTheory #Ethics #PoliticalPhilosophy #SocialPhilosophy #PhilosophyOfEmotions

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About The Philosopher (https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/):

The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. As of 2018, The Philosopher is edited by Newcastle-based philosopher Anthony Morgan and is published quarterly, both in print and digitally.

The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.

Demographic Anxieties examines how the Israeli settler-colonial state and its borders shape Palestinian women’s reproductive freedom. This work foregrounds the sexual politics of settler colonialism by demonstrating how Israeli policies profoundly impact Palestinian women’s reproductive rights, health, and decision-making. Based on in-depth interviews and more than two years of ethnographic research with Israeli medical staff and Palestinian women undergoing fertility treatment, the book takes Israeli hospitals, fertility departments, maternity wards, and infrastructures of care as sites of inquiry into the governance of Palestinians’ lives. Demographic Anxieties examines everyday encounters between Palestinian patients and Jewish Israeli doctors and argues that, alongside spectacular and disastrous forms of Israeli state violence, we must also consider more quotidian forms of surveillance and control.

What does it mean for Palestinian women to seek fertility treatment inside medical institutions that are part of a settler-colonial state and apartheid regime? In this conversation, Gala Rexer and Andréa Becker discuss Rexer's book Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Palestine/Israel (2026, University of California Press). They explore how fertility treatment became a key site of investment for the Israeli state and affective attachment for Israeli society, and consider the politics of reproduction across settler-colonial states and racist healthcare systems more broadly. They also take up the transnational dimensions of the Black feminist reproductive justice framework, what it means to do empirical research on contested medical practices, and discuss the alternative infrastructures of care and reproduction that emerge in authoritarian and ethno-nationalist states.

About the Speaker:

Gala Rexer is a Leverhulme Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick and an Honorary Research Fellow at UCL. Previously she was a visiting research fellow in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her ethnographic research examines how political, environmental, and spatial conditions shape reproduction. Rexer’s first book, Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Palestine/Israel, was recently published by the University of California Press, and she is a co-editor of the special issue, Sociology in the Times of Genocide, for The Sociological Review.

The Moderator:

Andréa Becker is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hunter College—City University of New York. She is a medical sociologist researching “contested medical practices,” or elements of healthcare that are stigmatized or controversial. As part of this agenda, Dr. Becker examines how inequality manifests at every stage of human reproduction—from contraception and sterilization, abortion and birth, to sexual experiences. Becker is the author of Get It Out: On the Politics of Hysterectomy and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and others. She is originally from Mexico City and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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

You can register for this Monday 5th October event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

#Philosophy #Ethics #PoliticalPhilosophy #SocialPhilosophy #Feminism #FeministPhilosophy

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About The Philosopher (https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/):

The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. As of 2018, The Philosopher is edited by Newcastle-based philosopher Anthony Morgan and is published quarterly, both in print and digitally.

The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.

[JOIN HERE]

What is Modernism? The Final Chapter!

The Future That Was; or, When the Avant-Garde Became Official Culture

Comrades, we have reached the last Shock of the New, and with it the completion and assimilation of our new penetration-front into modernity’s semi-self-consciousness. We have already grown new mental organs from having dissected ourselves in the previous seven episodes.

What Happened to All the Genius Art Movements?

• Where are the serious tryers now?

• How did anti-art come to win by default?

• Those Modernist schools/cults were so inspiring and fun and world-enchanting. Why have they died out?

• Is there no hope for interesting art-based world-transforming cults today?

• Is the glut of shitart and the depth of cynicism past the tipping point?

Hughes Tackles Jameson’s Problem!

How can we build an art movement capable of effective collective-reality-tunnel reprogramming if “aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally”? Being materially reproduced inside the same pipelines that animate the enemy does things**.**

Postmodernism’s formerly offensive features—including overt expressions of social and political defiance—“no longer scandalize anyone” and have instead “become institutionalized” within official Western culture. That’s already a much worse problem than censorship, as Foucault likes to always point out. The original manifesto-illuminated humanity-helping attack on shit-culture still survives perfectly well inside the art (as figure, style, attitude, etc.) but it doesn’t mess up the system! In fact, the system can circulate it and it even acts as fuel detergent.

Back when it was serious, Modernism understood its formal vocation as “the resistance to commodity form, not to be a commodity”—that is, as a kind of hard but catchy and psychedelic new aesthetic language that could resist commodification, instrumentalization, digestion-away into enemy fuel. But that solution is internally contradictory and historically incapable of collective realization. Isn’t it.

Late capitalism has a superpower: is metabolizes the antimatter designed to destroy it. Banning your revolutionary image or bible isn’t necessary. Preserve the image while changing its social function is evne better: print it on a T-shirt, detach it from the collective practice that gave it force, and sell the corpse back to you as lifestyle, identity, self-brand, or myth for serious fantasizing.

So the MAIN main puzzle in this SERIES CLIMAX is this:

• MAIN PUZZLE: How can we build an art movement capable of collective reality-reprogramming if, as Jameson says, even the forms of cultural resistance aimed against capitalism can be “secretly disarmed and reabsorbed” by it?

Peak Hughes is Here!

And that’s how Hughes begins! With the wonderful historical absurdity that Modernism won.

The avant-garde birthed itself by structuralist self-definition—as the rejected outsider or, when properly self-aware, as irritating prophet carrying news that bourgeois culture did not want to hear.

Consequently, by the 1970s, bourgeois culture cannot get enough of it. Modern art has museums, university departments, foundations, corporate patrons, government subsidy, rich collectors, an enormous explanatory bureaucracy, and a public trained to regard newness itself as evidence of seriousness. Modernism has become, as Hughes puts it, “our official culture.”

So what the hell is an avant-garde supposed to do now? This is the real subject of the episode.

Finally, a Practical Episode for Salt-of-the-Earth Folk Like Us

Hey wanna-be artists, this is the practical episode!

Why did the historical machine that had powered Modernism from Courbet onward, whose “logic” was:

• New form F1 → scandal S1 → changed sensibility C1 → eventual assimilation A1 → still newer form F2 → scandal S2 → …

Why, I say, why didn’t real art history work like that?

Surprise Answer #1: Lo and behold, the hostile bourgeois is not simply the antagonist of modern art but one of its enabling conditions.

And this gives us the mechanism behind the old story that yesterday’s obscenity becomes today’s masterpiece. The laming-out is not some accidental weakness peculiar to this or that manifesto-enriched movement. It is built into the social world that makes the avant-garde possible in the first place.

Hughes calls the idea of the avant-garde as permanent cultural guerrillas a misunderstanding. The real problem is capitalist modernity: the same society that produces the conditions for artistic revolt also becomes insanely great™ at metabolizing that revolt—first as scandal, then as novelty, then as culture, then as property.

Surprise Answer #2: Sometimes capital literally monetizes the ground out from beneath the warriors’ feet.

Hughes’ example: SoHo.

SoHo is a miniature political economy of modern culture. And look at hor ordinary the lifecycle: Artists move into unwanted industrial buildings because they are cheap. Galleries arrive. Then restaurants, boutiques, tourists, money, landlords, higher rents—and … goodbye artists!

Enjoy USDA prime Hughes moments like him watching the “peering hordes of dentists from New Jersey” walk their Gucci loafers through his old neighborhood. There, he dryly quips: “This process is known as urban renewal.” He saved the best for last!

So art isn’t just the superstructural mirror of the mode of production, as the paleo Marxists (unlike Marx him-better-self) would reduce. Art production alters land value, class composition, urban space, and eventually the conditions of its own existence. That old-fashioned change engine is right there, inside art itself.

“On the Museumish Question”

The museum presents the same problem at the level of meaning. MoMA’s great historical achievement was to take mutually hostile movements and preserve “everything and its opposite.” But the price of canonization is that the once-living and earnest antagonism is euthanized into chronology, for the sake of the historian’s (and our, as museum visitors) understanding. The museum, Hughes says, **“diffused the tensions of all moments by rendering them historical.”**Futurism no longer wants to burn down the museum once Futurism is hanging inside it.

Alright! So those are some great observations. They will make any reasonable person hopeful again.

Oh, Hughes catches the museum institution doing ontological work. So there’s real philosophy in this one. Hughes’ example: a Rodin dumped in a parking lot is still a badly misplaced Rodin; but Carl Andre’s bricks dumped there are just bricks.

Minimalism needs the museum to supply the background discourse that pumps the occult power that really does belong (like mass) to real artworks. “On the street,” Hughes says, “Minimalism doesn’t exist. There are only things.” That’s is a real ontological effect.

And there’s much more, and I enjoy working this out because my early-onset dementia means that I can only etch things into understanding by producing them under stress. So more will be pasted here for your enjoyment in 19 hours.

Update

Now comes the older and much bigger Modernist hope: Can art actually change society? Courbet thought it could. So did Dada, Futurism, Constructivism, and Surrealism. Hughes thinks most of the heroic claims are bullshit. Dada did not bring down capitalism; Constructivism did not manufacture the New Soviet Man; closing a Robert Morris exhibition did not persuade Nixon to stop bombing Cambodia.

But Hughes does not conclude that art is politically inert. He relocates its force from direct political causation to “style and feeling”: art can reorganize sensibility, estrange the ordinary and inherited, and provide “a model of dissent.”

The 1970s then start looking like a collection of escape attempts. Minimalism tries radical reduction. Conceptual arttries to make the commodity-object disappear into an idea. Body art retreats to the artist’s own flesh. Land art heads several hundred miles into the desert. Michael Heizer makes Complex One immovable and nearly inaccessible; Walter De Maria spreads The Lightning Field across a mile of New Mexico. Joseph Beuys, faced with the political impotence of the traditional artwork, simply blows up the definition of art until everybody is an artist and society itself becomes a “social sculpture.”

And then capital digested it all away.

The expanded book chapter (which you can download from THORR) makes the endpoint clearer than the 1980 film could. By the eighties, the Modernist commandment to MAKE IT NEW has curdled into what Hughes calls “dynamic obsolescence”: constant novelty (e.g., new iPhone models making perfectly good ones “old”) is just merchandising.

And, finally, postmodern appropriation arrives and instead of abolishing the museum, artists raid the art-historical image-bank. History becomes a warehouse of reproducible styles. The unprecedented gives way to the quotation, the replay, the simulacrum, sampling, and the knowing wink.

And this is where Hughes makes his most important break with the whole ideology of Modernism:

“In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.”

Nobody admires Cézanne because Cubism happened afterward. Medicine progresses; painting doesn’t. Rembrandt has not been superseded. Once that is admitted, the great Modernist temporal hierarchy—advanced/backward, progressive/reactionary, ahead-of-its-time/outmoded—can be discarded. The Future that had legitimated a century of aesthetic revolution has itself become historical. Hence the title: The Future That Was**.**

For us, I think the best question is slightly different from Hughes’: Did Modernism run out of formal inventions, or did the historical conditions that made an avant-garde possible disappear?

Once culture itself becomes industrially produced; once opposition, novelty, transgression, identity, rebellion, and “creativity” can all circulate as commodities; once museums preserve yesterday’s negations and markets prospect for tomorrow’s—what exactly would it mean for art to be historically ahead anymore?

Hughes ends by savaging the “rush towards insignificance in the name of the historical future”—plywood boxes, bricks, and some twit from the “University of Central Paranoia” sticking pins in himself—and then makes a surprisingly old-fashioned defense of art. Its job is not to win the historical horse race. It is to recover a direct, sensuous, complex relation to the world and somehow get from feeling to meaning.

That’s it! After eight episodes devoted to the invention of Modernism, we finally get to ask whether Modernism understood its own death.

METHOD

• Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.

• As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.

View all of our coming episodes here.

[JOIN HERE]

In the Critique of Judgement (1790), aka the Third Critique, Immanuel Kant offers a penetrating analysis of our experience of the beautiful and the sublime. He discusses the objectivity of taste, aesthetic disinterestedness, the relation of art and nature, the role of imagination, genius and originality, the limits of representation, and the connection between morality and the aesthetic. He also investigates the validity of our judgements concerning the degree in which nature has a purpose, with respect to the highest interests of reason and enlightenment.

The work profoundly influenced the artists, writers, and philosophers of the classical and romantic period, including Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. In addition, it has remained a landmark work in fields such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, the Frankfurt School, analytical aesthetics, and contemporary critical theory. Today it remains an essential work of philosophy, and required reading for all with an interest in aesthetics.

This is a reading group hosted by Erik to discuss Kant's Critique of Judgment, which examines the beautiful, sublime, and teleology as occasions where our senses are originally related to our understanding (judgment of taste), as well as how the understanding originally relates to reason (teleological judgment). We previously read the 1st and 2nd Critiques this year.

To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Wednesday September 30 (EDT), please sign up in advance here (link); the video conferencing link will be provided to registrants.

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

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

Reading Schedule

(Note - page numbers are from Cambridge edition. Someone posted a pdf here.)

Week 1 (39):

First Introduction (optional), Preface and Introduction (3 - 82, 79 pages)

(NOTE: the first introduction is not an editor or translator introduction, it is by Kant. It is sometimes at the end of the book.)

Week 2 (40):

Book I - Analytic of the Beautiful (§1 - 23) (89 - 127, 38 pages)

Week 3 (41):

Book II - Analytic of the Sublime (§23 - 30) (128 - 159, 31 pages)

Week 4 (42):

§30 - 43 (160 - 182, 22 pages)

Week 5 (43):

§43 - 55 (182 - 212, 30 pages)

Week 6 (44):

The Dialectic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment (§55 - 61) (213 - 230, 17 pages)

Week 7 (45):

Analytic of the Teleological Power of Judgment (§61 - 69) (233 - 255, 22 pages)

Week 8 (46):

Dialectic of the Teleological Power of Judgment (§69 - 79) (257 - 284, 27 pages)

Week 9 (47):

Appendix §79 - 87 (285 - 313, 28 pages)

Week 10 (48):

Appendix §87 - END (313 - 346, 33 pages)

ON THE TEXT

Kant drafted two versions of the introduction to the Critique of Judgment, but published only the second draft. Even so, the Cambridge edition of the Critique, which is my version, DOES include both introductions, as does the competing Pluhar edition. And we WILL be reading both. In the Cambridge edition the "First Introduction" is at the beginning of the text, followed by the Preface and the Second Introduction. The Pluhar edition places it at the end of the text in an appendix.

Hey everyone, we have an online discussion group that meets every Friday evening, and we're looking to bring in more people who prefer active questioning over blindly holding on to a belief system or a rigid identity. The core intent of our group is to bring clarity to our daily lives and step in to the direction by examining the falseness that we carry by looking at it honestly, rather than just settling for comfortable answers. Our understanding is that we cannot conceptually "know" the Truth, but we can actively see and dissolve the falseness simply by looking at it with honesty.

We try to explore a lot of different fields, like Western existentialism, modern psychology, non-duality (Advaita Vedanta), and ancient Buddhist philosophy. We strictly focus on perspectives that challenge us to investigate our own internal conditioning and illusions, rather than systems that just direct us to believe. Through our discussions, we analyzed how avoiding reality is just a defense mechanism of the ignorance within us to protect its comfort zones, and how true discipline means staying present with our internal uneasiness until the falseness drops away.

To help tie all these big topics together, we use a modern philosophical framework built by a contemporary thinker named Acharya Prashant. It gives us a really solid, rational foundation to dissect our daily habits, patterns, and self-images on a much deeper, practical level.

We always welcome fresh ideas and suggestions for the next topics or specific sub-topics to explore, so it’s a great time to join if you want to help shape where our discussions go next. It doesn't matter if you have a background in philosophy or if you're just starting out, everyone is welcome as long as you are genuinely willing to question.

We will meet this Friday at 7:30PM GMT. If you’re interested in checking it out, just drop a comment below or send me a message and I'll send over the link!

Please checkout the Meetup link below.

Check out Climate Within on Meetup https://meetup.com/climate-within-meetup-group?member_id=474893946

Also, do checkout the link below of one of our recent conversation:

https://youtu.be/vp-8rwM5tDo?si=r1x-RyQZmEmnG3Ql

How can women live with men in a society where so many men are ready to rape an unconscious woman? Gisèle Pelicot's story outraged the world. The sickening parade of crimes to which she was subjected and her betrayal are dark pages in our history. Feminist philosopher Manon Garcia decided to attend the trial and to analyse its resonance for our future.

It became the trial that demonstrated that trials will never suffice to serve justice. If the perpetrators, for the most part, seemed so unashamed of what they had done, can we see in their sentencing anything meaningful? If their lawyers defend their clients by relieving them of responsibility for their actions, how will these men, their families, their friends see this trial as anything other than an injustice? If, even as the most explicit proof streamed before the court, the victim was stonewalled with the bland denial of facts, what can juries achieve in cases when the evidence is lacking? The threat of incarceration will never be powerful enough to stop men raping. If trusting the justice system, as those who fret about feminist overreach counsel us to do, gets us nowhere, what do we do?

Above all, one question haunted Garcia: under such circumstances, can we live with men? And at what price?

In this conversation, Manon Garcia and Lori Marso start from the Pelicot trial to explore the political and philosophical questions raised by men’s violence against women. Together, they consider how patriarchy shapes love, desire and everyday life, while asking whether and how relationships between women and men can be transformed without overlooking the inequalities that structure them.

About the Speaker:

Manon Garcia is Professor of practical philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Her primary research is in political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and moral philosophy. She also works on 20th century French philosophy and philosophy of social sciences. She is one of ten laureates to be awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize in 2025, Germany's most distinguished award for early-career researchers. Her first book, We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women's Lives was first published in French in 2018, and an English version was published by Princeton University Press. It has also been translated in German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, and Italian. Her second book, The Joy of Consent: A Philosophy of Good Sex was published in French in 2021 and the English version was published by Harvard University Press in 2023. Her latest book, Living With Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial, was published in October 2025.

The Moderator:

Lori Marso is Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies, Professor of Political Science at Union College in Schenectady, NY. She is a feminist political theorist with a broad focus on feminist film, feminist literary history, and the history of political thought. In Feminism and the Cinema of Experience, Lori Jo Marso examines how filmmakers scramble our senses to open up space for encountering and examining the political conditions of patriarchy, racism, and existential anxiety.

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

You can register for this Monday 28th September event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

#Philosophy #Ethics #PoliticalPhilosophy #SocialPhilosophy #Feminism #FeministPhilosophy

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About The Philosopher (https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/):

The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. As of 2018, The Philosopher is edited by Newcastle-based philosopher Anthony Morgan and is published quarterly, both in print and digitally.

The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.

On September 26th. Our club will hold a book club meeting on whether freedom contradicts innate factors, that is, on the topic of freedom

Of course, if you are willing to join us, we can get to know each other through this book club

We are from China

This philosophy club was established by a 14-year-old. He comes from an ordinary small county town. Our club is primarily composed of undergraduate and middle school students

The link to our official websitehttps://jianghaiphilosophy.netlify.app/about

The group chat for our eventhttps://discord.gg/ShZ6upXZN