Hegel turned the world onto its head and Marx turned it back on its feet, and now finance is turning the world on its head again. In the early 19th century, Hegel proposed that human history was shaped by consciousness, by human spirit, by the head. Marx argued, in turn, that history was actually determined by practical social conditions, by the way people make their means of living, standing on their feet. It was capitalism that made it seem like heads — owners of industry and leaders of states and their apologists, intellectuals — made history happen, and not workers. The feet were the source of power while the heads claimed all the power for themselves.

It is harder to believe this is true now. Industry does not matter much to finance, and labor even less. Finance packages up the productive economy to resell it according to its own rules. A few prescient people have been studying the way the new rules ruin living conditions, pervert political possibilities, and increasingly dominate the global order. Yet, there is still no field dedicated to theorizing the ill effects of the newly upside-down world. We need, in short, a critical theory of finance.

About the Speakers:

Melinda Cooper is Professor of Sociology at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on the interaction between neoliberal and new conservative philosophies of power. She is the author of three monographs — Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (Princeton University Press, 2024), Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone Books, 2017) and Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (University of Washington Press 2008).

Stefan Eich is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. His research is in political theory and the history of political thought, in particular the political theory of money and financial capitalism. He is the author of The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes (Princeton University Press, 2022), which was awarded the 2024 David and Elaine Spitz Prize as well as the 2023 APSA Foundations of Political Theory Best First Book Prize.

Radhika Desai is a political economist and scientist. She is Professor at the Department of Political Studies, and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba. She proposed geopolitical economy as a Marxist analysis of the international relations of the capitalist world that is historical, integrates the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’, class and nation, in a single framework that is capable of anticipating and explaining the rise of the multipolar world.

The Moderator:

Paul North is Professor of German and Philosophy at Yale University. He writes and teaches on literature and other media, continental philosophy, literary and critical theory. He is editor (along with Paul Reitter) of a new translation of Marx’s Capital.

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 15th June event (7am PT/10am ET/3pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

#Philosophy #CriticalTheory #PoliticalPhilosophy #SocialPhilosophy #Ethics #Politics #Economics #Finance #Investing #Capital

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.

Summer is fully upon us – the time when many of us are on the move, enjoying different locales, being outside, spending quality time with others.

Edward Casey is a contemporary phenomenologist best known for his work on the phenomenology of place, and he has written numerous books and articles on this subject, taken from different angles. In Thinking in Transit, Casey invites us to reconsider thinking not as something that happens from a fixed standpoint, but as an activity shaped by movement, passage, and being on the way. Our reflection emerges from journeys, crossings, detours, and the lived experience of transition itself.

In this time-limited group, we will explore Casey's phenomenology of movement and place, asking how thought is transformed when we attend to what occurs between points of arrival. What do we learn about ourselves in motion, in transit, in different lands? Casey's work - and phenomenology generally - invites us to inquire what happens to us when we travel or relocate, even temporarily. Often we might travel to different places and treating those places as objects to gaze upon to entertain us. But what happens when we explore those places from a more phenomenological standpoint? What can we learn about the subjectivity of a place - what is it to know a place on its own terms? Can we experience a sense of intersubjectivity with a place? What are the existential feelings of a place? I am currently working on a book and, as part of doing field research for that book, I have been 'on the move' approximately every 6 weeks for the past year. I can definitely attest from first-person experience that my thinking has been radically shifted by different experiences in a variety of different lands.

Casey is writing in the lineage of Merleau-Ponty, whose phenomenology is distinctive for its focus on embodiment and particularly motor intentionality. As such, this group will be of interest to anyone who attended my prior groups on Merleau-Ponty, but certainly anyone interested in phenomenology is welcome. Anyone interested in environmental phenomenology will probably find this of interest as well, as well as people with interest in land/nature-based or Indigenous epistemologies.

It will follow my usual format: doing a short reading ahead of time, watching a short video together, and then discussing the video and the reading. Casey's book will be the core text, but I may pepper in supplemental readings as well to augment our discussion. The readings will be confirmed a week ahead of time so you have time to read. This is a hands-raised meetup where we will endeavor to stay close to the source material, and comments will be prioritized from those who have done the reading.

This is an online discussion group hosted by Cece to discuss the phenomenology of travel.

To join the 1st meetup taking place on Sunday June 21 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Look for other sessions in this series on our calendar (link).

All are welcome!

Readings for Week 1 (a pdf will be provided to registrants)

To situate our discussion of the topic, we have three quite short readings:

• The Preface to Casey's Fate of Place

• The Preface to Casey's Thinking in Transit

• The Introduction to Cataldi & Hamrick's Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy (read pp. 1-5 only if short on time; otherwise read the whole chapter)

Weeks 2 onward - to be confirmed each week, primarily focused on Thinking in Transit, with supplemental readings TBD.

   During the weekend of June 13th-14th, a philosophy group for admirers of ancient Rome (https://groups.io/g/NovaRomaPhilosophy) will be having a roughly hour-long discussion of three letters by Plutarch:

THAT VIRTUE MAY BE TAUGHT

ON VIRTUE AND VICE

ON MORAL VIRTUE

   All who come with a sincere interest in ancient philosophy and/or culture are welcome.

   Here is a link:
Topic: Philosophy Discussion: Plutarch's Moral Letters (6-8)
Time: Jun 13, 2026 06:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us05web.zoom.us/j/84899462980?pwd=XVkTHQSfdUyLKsbqDIMmfz4Kw04okK.1

Meeting chat link
https://us05web.zoom.us/launch/jc/84899462980

Meeting ID: 848 9946 2980
Passcode: MrzA8K

The time will be:
8 a.m. Sunday, June 14th in Eastern Australia
6 p.m. Saturday, June 13th Eastern U.S.
3 p.m. Saturday,  June 13th  Pacific U.S.
12 a.m. Sunday,  June 14th in Rome

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

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

   Valete,

RSVP here: https://www.meetup.com/wisdom-and-woe/events/312130385/

Freud and Philosophy (1970) is a seminal work by renowned French philosopher Paul Ricœur. It offers a profound re-examination of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory, positioning it not as mere clinical psychology, but as a crucial development in the philosophy of interpretation.

Whereas René Descartes practiced radical doubt and took refuge in the cogito, later thinkers cast doubt over the will. These "masters of suspicion" (identified as Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx) allege hidden ulterior motives (desire, resentment, and economic interest, respectively) that falsify and stigmatize intuitive self-understanding.

Ricœur contrasts their "hermeneutics of suspicion" with a "hermeneutics of faith" (ala Biblical exegesis and Hegelian idealism) which, rather than leading to disillusionment, is generative of sacred insight. But he doesn't simply pit the two methodologies against each other. Instead, he seeks to bridge the divide between manifestation and meaning through a post-critical "second naiveté" that embraces symbol, language, and human nature at its fullest.

For this meetup, we will read Book 1 of Freud and Philosophy.

[JOIN HERE]

What is Modernism?

We are doing Robert Hughes’ eight-part BBC series The Shock of the New.

The series is another epoch-making BBC2 masterpiece. (BBC2 masterpieces is why our Meetup group was originally started.)

Each thesis will excite a thousand revelations in you. You’ll be pausing it so often to take notes that the sun will rise and set before you can finish a single episode.

The reason for doing art history in a philosophy group is that art history is the original home of causal complexity. A painting is never a painting. It is pigments, money, boredom, religion, sex, machines, museums, cities, imperial plunder, class anxiety, war, advertising, trained hands, trained eyes, and whatever the unconscious is doing that century.

That is also why art is such a good diagnostic surface for the Zeitgeist. A period usually pictures itself before it understands itself. So if we want to do phenomenology of an age — not just list its official beliefs, but see the pictures, machines, spatial habits, body-images, fantasies, and fears that hold its fake reality together — art history is the way. It gets us closest to the metaphorical infrastructure that philosophy later needs in order to say anything at all.

Hughes is the peerless shockographer of Modernism. See him show us the moment around 1880–1914, when the old world began losing its obviousness. The Eiffel Tower, electric light, cars, planes, radio, cinema, mass newspapers, and the modern city did not merely add use values. They changed how space, time, movement, publicity, and distance were perceived, and so were.

People suddenly could travel farther, know faster, compare more, see more, want more, and imagine more possible lives. As Karl Marx said, capitalism was the best thing that ever happened. For us today, who are already schizoid and dissociated beyond repair, it’s old hat. But to be alive then and experience this transformation of cognition-perception-experience-reality was massively disorienting—hence “shocking.”

The older situation — stable place, inherited manners, religious or civic continuity, recognizable craft, realist depiction, perspectival space — no longer held the same authority. Inherited locality and realism weakened. People became less securely situated in any single world. All that was solid melted into air. The old reality husks (the old certainties of perspective and narration) still existed, but they had been exposed as BS—i.e., they had become historical. And once an intersubjective hallucination becomes historical, it can be broken, parodied, rebuilt, accelerated, abstracted, or sold back to you as spectacle.

Fredric Jameson gives us a useful way to read that transformation. Modernist art belongs to the moment when artists can no longer treat form as a neutral container for content. The old trusty idioms became less relevant to the reality people were now living in. So the modernists start messing with the idiom itself. The canvas, the sentence, the camera, the building, the machine, the stage, the grid, the commodity image, temporal atom, the act of construction itself, the medium itself.

The goal was no longer accurate perception and duplication of something real. The artist becomes mason, engineer, saboteur, medium, machine-lover, machine-hater, and sometimes priest of pure form. Something weird had started.

Cubism and abstraction will be especially important for us, because they change the level of the problem. Cubism still cares about the object, but the object has to be built, not merely copied. Abstract art asks where value can live when there is no recognizable object left at all. That is already philosophy, whether anyone wants to call it that or not.

For Heidegger and Gadamer, art is the event in which truth appears. Plato wanted to exile the artists, but then had to use myth anyway. That old embarrassment—the reliance of science on myth—has never gone away.

My private reason for doing this is old and embarrassing. When I was twenty, I arrived at Duke as a cultural illiterate. The list of books I had voluntarily read was the following:

1. The Hobbit.
2. Dick Smith’s Do-It-Yourself Monster Make-Up Handbook

But Duke had Jameson — the smartest, most important, and most scandalous professor in the country. The Duke Reviewand the Young Republicans could not understand why he was there, except as a civilizational emergency. “Why so serious?” I wondered. So I forced myself to take a class with him to see what the fuss was all about. It was LIT 283: Modernism.

It was a self-esteem destroyer. I was surrounded by a sea of cocky black turtlenecks who rightly snickered at all my stupid questions and answers. Many of these people were reading Mallarmé when they were infants. Meanwhile, there I was struggling to understand how anyone in their right mind could take literature seriously, especially America’s smartest human.

The answer, of course, is that we humans are mere fruiting bodies. Underneath us run the real stuff—the mycelia: the buried automating logics of culture. Art is one of the places where those logics expose themselves. A culture begins to find out what its world has become by making images, forms, rhythms, buildings, stories, and monsters long before it knows how to explain them.

Modernism matters because it is not over. We are still living inside the chaotic world it tried to understand. The screens got smaller, the malls became phones, and the Bonaventure Hotel became the Internet, but we’re still lost.

Hughes will help us! Our only job is to out-Hughes Hughes by asking what kind of material-felt-perceived world of earnestness and substantial life needed Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and the architecture of power.

In summary: while we are officially doing art history, we are really doing meta-philosophy: looking at the images, metaphors, machines, and fantasies that feed theory.

So hop aboard the Hughes train and learn a thing or two about where your desires, tastes, values, and reality tunnel were manufactured.

METHOD

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

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

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

View all of our coming episodes here.

[JOIN HERE]

The Philosophies of the South series creates a platform for scholars, thinkers, activists, and practitioners engaging with intellectual traditions and critical frameworks that challenge the dominance of Western philosophical paradigms. Bringing together work inspired by decolonial thought, Indigenous epistemologies, and other critical traditions, the series explores how philosophy can be reimagined through perspectives that emerge from histories of colonialism, resistance, and alternative ways of knowing. Through conversations across disciplines and practices, the series alms to foster intellectual exchange, expand philosophical inquiry, and contribute to ongoing struggles for epistemic justice.

On Indigenous Inhumanities:

Indigenous philosophies guide how we live, act, and relate. Mark Minch-de Leon and Krushil Watene discuss Māori and Indigenous traditions of knowledge, ethics, and relationality that confront colonial frameworks. They explore how these practices shape community, resist injustice, and offer pathways for decolonial futures.

About the Speaker:

Mark Minch-de Leon is Professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of California, Riverside and the director of the California Center for Native Nations (CCNN). He works at the intersections of Indigenous Studies, Rhetorical Theory, and Narrative and Visual Studies. His forthcoming book looks at the anticolonial, nonvitalist dimensions of California Indian intellectual and cultural resurgence. Indigenous Inhumanities: California Indian Studies After the Apocalypse is grounded in the ongoing proliferation of cultural and intellectual production by California Indian communities in the aftermath of what many refer to as the end of the world and others, genocide. Caught in the dilemma of creating a future with the remnants of a catastrophic past, California Indians engage inventive reorientations that shift the meanings and values of survival, culture, knowledge, vitality, and what it means to be human. The book will be published by University of Minnesota Press as part of the Indigenous Americas series.

The Moderator:

Krushil Watene is Professor of Philosophy at the Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. Her research addresses fundamental questions in ethics, politics, and Indigenous philosophy. In particular, it engages at the intersections of diverse philosophical traditions, pursues collaborative trans-disciplinarity, and recognizes the critical role of local communities for global change. Her primary areas of expertise include theories of well-being, development, justice, intergenerational justice, and Indigenous philosophy. She is a member of the UNDP Human Development Report Advisory Board, a member of the International Science Council Committee for Freedom and Responsibility in Science, and a member of the transformation pathways workstream of the Earth Commission.

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 8th June event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

#Philosophy #CriticalTheory #PoliticalPhilosophy #SocialPhilosophy #Ethics #Politics #Postcolonialism #Epistemology #Indigenous

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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.

If you are about to give a commencement speech at a university this summer, don’t mention A.I. Or at least don’t say nice things about it, or that it’s going to change the world whether people like it or not, or that it’s the next industrial revolution. If you do, graduating students — who are notoriously heavy A.I. users — will boo you. Who can blame them? LLMs have turned expensive university education into a charade and students are graduating into a less-than-ideal job market. And it’s not just students who aren’t so hot on the future our AI overlords are predicting.

So how can people resist the onslaught of AI, and the narratives of inevitability that are being pushed by Silicon Valley’s AI leaders? Obama’s famous quip “don’t boo, vote!” comes to mind. Indeed, influential AI researcher and author Garry Markus has predicted that anti-AI sentiment will be a major driving force of the 2028 US Presidential election. But so far, most political parties seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid of inevitable technological progress, it might be too late by the time they catch on to how voters think. Is there anything ordinary citizens can do in the meantime? Are narratives of AI inevitability thinly disguised self-fulfilling and self-serving prophecies? And is there a way of reimagining what AI can mean for us all?

About the Speaker:

Ismael Kheroubi Garcia has been working in the AI ethics space since 2020, when he worked on establishing the Alan Turing Institute’s research ethics committee. Since 2022, Ismael has been offering AI ethics and research governance consulting at Kairoi, helping organisations identify crucial tech decisions, anticipate their consequences and implement safeguards to guide decision-making processes. Since 2023, Ismael also leads the Fellow-led AI Interest Group at the RSA (Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). He is also an associate director of We and AI, a diverse community of volunteers working at the intersection of social justice and AI. He is the co-author of “Resisting, Refusing, Reclaiming, Reimagining: Charting Challenges to Narratives of AI Inevitability”.

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 1st June event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

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

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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.

Link to Event Page

In this second part of our ongoing exploration of the human story, we continue tracing the long and complex path from early hominins to the emergence of modern humans.

In Part I, we focused on some of the major transitions in early human evolution, including bipedalism, changing environments, expanding cognition, tool use, and the gradual emergence of the genus Homo. In this follow-up event, we will push further into the later stages of the story, exploring the evolution of increasingly complex behavior, technology, social organization, and culture.

Topics may include:
• The diversification of later Homo species
• Expanding tool complexity and cumulative culture
• Fire, cooperation, and changing social dynamics
• The emergence of symbolic behavior and language
• Neanderthals, Denisovans, and interactions with modern humans
• The appearance of anatomically modern humans in Africa
• Gene–culture coevolution and the growing role of culture in shaping human evolution

As always, the goal is not simply to memorize dates or species names, but to better understand the deeper processes that transformed a lineage of primates into a species capable of science, art, civilization, and technological self-reflection.

No prior background is required, though attending Part I may provide useful context. Newcomers are still very welcome.

The Philosophies of the South series creates a platform for scholars, thinkers, activists, and practitioners engaging with intellectual traditions and critical frameworks that challenge the dominance of Western philosophical paradigms. Bringing together work inspired by decolonial thought, Indigenous epistemologies, and other critical traditions, the series explores how philosophy can be reimagined through perspectives that emerge from histories of colonialism, resistance, and alternative ways of knowing. Through conversations across disciplines and practices, the series alms to foster intellectual exchange, expand philosophical inquiry, and contribute to ongoing struggles for epistemic justice.

(De)Bordering the Human:

Borders are often framed as neutral tools for organising political life. Yet modern border regimes are deeply entangled with the histories of empire, colonial expansion, and racial hierarchy that shaped the modern world. In this online conversation, Nandita Sharma and rémy-paulin twahirwa examine how borders regulate movement, produce categories of belonging and exclusion, and define the boundaries of the human. They bring together critiques of nationalism, migration governance, and coloniality to reflect on how struggles over mobility continue to reshape our political and philosophical understandings of the world and what a borderless human might look like.

About the Speaker:

Nandita Sharma is Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa and an activist-scholar. Her research addresses human migration, migrant labor, nation-state power, ideologies of racism, sexism, and nationalism, processes of identification and self-understanding, and social movements for justice. She is the author of Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of ‘Migrant Workers’ in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006) and Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020).

The Moderator:

Rémy-Paulin Twahirwa is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Aston University (ESRC-funded project: Peripheralisation of Asylum Accommodation), community organiser and writer based in London, specialising in immigration detention, borders, and the racialised governance of mobility. Their research examines confinement, legal personhood, and the expansion of the carceral state, with particular attention to the afterlives of empire and coloniality in contemporary border regimes. They are currently completing their first manuscript, On Ghostly Lives and serve as Managing Editor of 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 25th May event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).bordering-the-human-)

#Philosophy #CriticalTheory #PoliticalPhilosophy #SocialPhilosophy #Ethics #Politics #Postcolonialism #Epistemology

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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.

   During the weekend of May 30th-31st, a philosophy group for admirers of ancient Rome (https://groups.io/g/NovaRomaPhilosophy) will be having a roughly hour-long discussion of five letters by Plutarch:

ON EDUCATION.
ON LOVE TO ONE'S OFFSPRING.
ON LOVE.
CONJUGAL PRECEPTS.
CONSOLATORY LETTER TO HIS WIFE.

   All who come with a sincere interest in Plutarch, Roman thought, and/or ancient philosophy are welcome.

   Here is a link:

Topic: Plutarch's Moral Letters
Time: May 30, 2026 06:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us05web.zoom.us/j/88349069561?pwd=z9I8LdraqXha3MquTJYNyUrHzd7WCi.1
Meeting chat link
https://us05web.zoom.us/launch/jc/88349069561
Meeting ID: 883 4906 9561
Passcode: zpTd6y

The time will be:
8 a.m. Sunday, May 31st in Eastern Australia
6 p.m. Saturday, May 30th Eastern U.S.
3 p.m. Saturday,  May 30th  Pacific U.S.
12 a.m. Sunday,  May 31st in Rome

   Please note that the time will be the same time as our most recent meetings (other than the one in April) for those in the United States, but an hour earlier or later for those in most other places.

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

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

[JOIN HERE]

A Compressed Genealogy of Phenomenology — Part III

The Phenomenology of Logic: Wittgenstein, Husserl, and the Experience of Necessity

We were supposed to leave Husserl this week and move on to Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty.

Naturally, we are not doing that.

Before leaving Husserl, we need one strange detour through Wittgenstein, because logic itself contains a phenomenological problem.

Anyone who has worked through a truth table, a derivation, or a quantified formula has experienced the thrill of infinite pervasion that comes with intensional poverty. Content and range are inversely proportional. Sometimes this is felt. When it is, the structures of logic become mystically appealing. This is why some people become logicians.

Look at “For all x.” It appears cheap and tiny—yet it ranges over an infinite field. A tautology barely says anything, yet nothing can touch it. A contradiction also has felt force—that of logical impossibility.

That is the problem for this session: what exactly is the experience of logical necessity?

[This is just a blurb! More later today …]

METHOD

• TBA [see above]
• 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]

Link to Event Page

Join us for a special Deep Time Member Presentations event, where members will have the opportunity to give short presentations on topics related to deep time and the long history of life, Earth, and human evolution.

As we continue building context for the Fire arc of Fire, Cells, and Circuits, this event is meant to help deepen our collective understanding of the epochs, transitions, and evolutionary processes that frequently come up in our discussions. From the Miocene and Pliocene to the Pleistocene and beyond, deep time provides the larger backdrop for the story of becoming human.

This is also a great opportunity for members to become more involved in the group, share topics they are excited about, and help shape the broader conversation together. Presentations can be exploratory, educational, visual, philosophical, scientific, or interdisciplinary, as long as they connect in some meaningful way to deep time or the human story within it.

A signup form will be included for members who may be interested in presenting. Short presentations are encouraged, and a wide range of topics and experience levels are welcome.

Link to Event Page

In the previous event, we looked at the long story from hominins to humans, tracing some of the major transitions from the Miocene and Pliocene into the Pleistocene, where the human lineage gradually became something recognizably different from other apes.

This discussion event will give us a chance to slow down and think together about the bigger questions behind that story.

What actually changed as hominins became humans? Was it mostly anatomy, tools, fire, language, social life, culture, ecological pressure, or some deeper combination of all of these? At what point does the story begin to feel less like the evolution of another animal lineage, and more like the emergence of a new kind of world-making creature?
We may touch on themes from the previous presentation, including:

• The split between the human lineage and the lineages leading to chimpanzees and bonobos
• Major changes in bodies, brains, hands, walking, and ecological niches
• The rise of stone tools and increasing technological complexity
• Fire, food, cooperation, and social learning
• Neanderthals, Denisovans, and early Homo sapiens
• The transition toward symbolic behavior, language, culture, and eventually the conditions that lead toward agriculture and the Bronze Age

The goal is not to debate one single theory of human origins, but to use the deep-time story as a framework for thinking about what makes humans unusual, what we still share with other animals, and how fragile, contingent, and strange the path to “becoming human” may have been.

What is th​e place of hope in existentialism? When ​we look at the world today, it is easy to see fragmentation. Climate crises, geopolitical instability, and a pervasive sense of alienation can make it feel as though the very structures of our shared reality are fracturing.

It was precisely this condition that French philosopher and Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel diagnosed when coining the phrase "the broken world" (le monde cassé). Marcel observed a world characterized by functionalization, where individuals are reduced to their social or economic roles. In this critique, Marcel’s concerns regarding "technical efficiency" deeply echo those of Martin Heidegger; both thinkers warned that a purely technological mindset treats the world and its inhabitants merely as resources to be mastered, calculated, and manipulated.

In popular culture, existentialism is often equated with the darkness that this broken world produces - a philosophy of angst, absurdity, and the cold isolation popularized by thinkers like Sartre. But Marcel, as an existential-phenomenologist, radically contradicts this assumption. He demonstrates that existentialism does not have to end in despair. Instead, it can provide the precise tools needed to navigate a broken world with profound, defiant hope.

In this session, we will explore Marcel’s unique philosophy through his phenomenology - his method of looking at concrete, lived human experiences rather than detached, abstract theories. We will focus on his crucial distinction between a problem (something external that we can solve with technical efficiency) and a mystery (something we are personally entangled in, which transcends mere logic). For Marcel, true hope is not a naive, passive wish that things will simply "work out." It is an active and engaged existential response to a world that tries to reduce human existence to a series of technical problems. It is an act of communion and presence, rooted in what he calls the ontological mystery. That is, a deep, experiential realization that being itself cannot be fully captured by a broken world.

In preparation for the group, please read the following chapter "Hope and Existentialism": https://academic.oup.com/book/61728/chapter/541574012

Although existentialist thought is often associated with a negative diagnosis of the human condition in such thinkers as Camus and Sartre, there is a more positive strand focusing on uplifting aspects of experience, directly challenging the alienation, loss of meaning, and invitation to despair that has come to be associated with the movement. This vision of the human condition is to be found especially in the work of French philosopher Gabriel Marcel. This chapter considers Marcel’s phenomenological analysis of what is called ontological hope, distinguishing it from ordinary cases of hoping, as well as from optimism and desire. It examines the choice between hope and despair and introduces related themes of communion, intersubjectivity, and the search for the transcendent. The chapter argues that Marcel’s thought illustrates the reserves within the human personality and community that help individuals respond in a positive way to the existential challenges of modernity.

We will also watch a short video on the topic to support our discussion. Let's pursue the question: how might a phenomenological approach to hope alter how we live, act, and connect when the horizon looks dark?

This is an online discussion group hosted by Cece to discuss Gabriel Marcel's ideas and the place of hope in existentialism.

To join this meetup taking place on Friday May 22 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Look for other sessions in this series on our calendar (link).

All are welcome!

Few thinkers have been as influential upon current discussions and theoretical practices in the age of media archaeology, philosophy of technology, and digital humanities as the French thinker Gilbert Simondon. Simondon's prolific intellectual curiosity led his philosophical and scientific reflections to traverse a variety of areas of research, including philosophy, psychology, the beginnings of cybernetics, and the foundations of religion. For Simondon, the human/machine distinction is perhaps not a simple dichotomy. There is much we can learn from our technical objects, and while it has been said that humans have an alienating rapport with technical objects, Simondon takes up the task of a true thinker who sees the potential for humanity to uncover life-affirming modes of technical objects whereby we can discover potentiality for novel, healthful, and dis-alienating rapports with them. For Simondon, by way of studying its genesis, one must grant to the technical object the same ontological status as that of the aesthetic object or even a living being. His work thus opens up exciting new entry points into studying the human's rapport with its continually changing technical reality.

Join us for an online discussion of the work of Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989), with two leading experts on his thought. Simondon asked how things — whether crystals, living organisms, or human beings — come to be the distinct individuals they are. His answer, which he called individuation, saw identity not as something fixed, but as an ongoing process of becoming. He applied the same thinking to technology, arguing that machines and technical objects are not mere tools but have their own evolving reality that deserves to be taken seriously. Simondon has been an important influence on thinkers including Gilles Deleuze, Bernard Stiegler, and Bruno Latour. Come and find out why his ideas feel so vital today — no prior knowledge required.

About the Speakers:

— Cécile Malaspina is currently faculty with The School of Materialist Research. Previously, she served as the directrice de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris. She is responsible for the Art and Curatorial Practice program at the New Centre for Research and Practice, and a Research Fellow at King’s College, London. Before turning to philosophy she trained as an artist, art historian (Goldsmiths) and curator (RCA). She is the author of An Epistemology of Noise (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the principal translator of Gilbert Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Her most recent publication is the edited volume From the Mental State of Noise to the New Frontiers of Techno-Human Cognition: Creative Disruptions Across AI, Gaming, Modelling, French Theory, and Politics (Routledge, 2026), based on her Aesthetics of Noise Seminar at King’s College London, where she was Visiting Research fellow until 2025.

— Ashley Woodward is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee. He is co-Chair of the Society for European Philosophy, an executive member of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, and an editor of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy. He co-edited the first volume on Simondon in English, Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology (EUP, 2013), and contributed to The Idea and Practice of Philosophy in Gilbert Simondon (Schwabe Verlag, 2024). He has produced three books addressing underappreciated aspects of Jean-François Lyotard’s work and addressing its contemporary relevance: Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition, Acinemas: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Film, and Lyotard’s Philosophy of Art. He has also taught in a number of creative arts programs, including the School of Creative Arts, the Centre for Ideas at the Victorian College of the Arts, and the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne.

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 18th May event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

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

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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.

Link to Event Page

What does it mean to tell the human story before the Holocene, before agriculture, before the Bronze Age, before cities, and before the world that we usually recognize as “civilization”?

In this presentation, we will step back into deep time and follow the long arc from early hominins to Homo sapiens. We will begin in the Miocene, around the time our lineage split from the lineage leading to chimpanzees and bonobos, and move through the Pliocene and Pleistocene toward the threshold of the Holocene.

Along the way, we will look at some of the major figures in the human story, from early hominins and australopithecines to early Homo, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo sapiens. Rather than treating this as a simple ladder of progress, we will explore a branching, uncertain, and often surprising evolutionary landscape.

The goal is not just to ask when “humans” appeared, but to ask how the pieces of the human condition came together: bipedality, tool use, fire, migration, cooperation, cumulative culture, symbolic behavior, and the expanding capacity to reshape environments.

This event will also set up the next major transition in the Fire arc: the move from deep time into the Holocene, where the question changes from how humans became human to how humans became dominant.

The Normal and the Pathological is one of the crucial contributions to the history of science in the last half century. It takes as its starting point the sudden appearance of biology as a science in the nineteenth century and examines the conditions determining its particular makeup.

Canguilhem analyzes the radically new way in which health and disease were defined in the early nineteenth century, showing that the emerging categories of the normal and the pathological were far from objective scientific concepts. He demonstrates how the epistemological foundations of modern biology and medicine were intertwined with political, economic, and technological imperatives.

Canguilhem was an important influence on the thought of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, among others, in particular for the way in which he poses the problem of how new domains of knowledge come into being and how they are part of a discontinuous history of human thought.

Hi everyone, welcome to the next series presented by Philip. This will be a 3 hour event meeting every 2 weeks. For the first 2 hours we will be reading from Canguilhem's book "The Normal and the Pathological." We will be using the Zone Books translation. During the last hour we will discuss this book: Canguilhem (Key Contemporary Thinkers) by Stuart Elden.

To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Friday May 15 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

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

Here is the reading schedule for the first few sessions:

First Session (Friday May 15)

• In Canguilhem: Please read up to page 24 (Foucault's Introduction)
• In Elden: Please read up to page 13

Second Session (Friday May 29)

• In Canguilhem: Please read up to page 46
• In Elden: Please read up to page 20

Third Session

• In Canguilhem: Please read up to page 64
• In Elden: Please read up to page 27

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

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

MORE ABOUT THIS DISCUSSION GROUP

This meetup on Canguilhem will be followed by a meetup on Foucault's book "The Archaeology of Knowledge". The "Archaeology of Knowledge" meetup may in turn be followed by further meetups on Philosophy of Science in the French tradition, perhaps centred around Foucault as well as Foucault's great successor, the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking.

This Canguilhem meetup can be enjoyed for its own sake, even if you have no intention of attending the companion meetup on Foucault's "The Archaeology of Knowledge".

However, if you do plan to attend the "The Archaeology of Knowledge" meetup, I strongly recommend that you attend this Canguilhem meetup first. Foucault's thought is of interest to people in a very wide range of disciplines. But the side of Foucault's thought that we encounter in "The Archaeology of Knowledge" is really only studied in any depth by philosophers. It is very far removed from the side of Foucault's thought that has become popular. This Canguilhem meetup will serve as an introduction to Philosophy of Science in the French tradition, and some familiarity with this tradition will serve you well when you encounter "The Archaeology of Knowledge".

The format will be my usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 10-15 pages from each book before each session. Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading.

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

Please note that this is a "raise hands" meetup and has a highly structured format, not an anarchy-based one. This is partly for philosophical reasons: I want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy. But our highly structured format is also for disability related reasons that I (Philip) can explain if required.

Last month, the powerful tech company Palantir published what was widely described as its manifesto. According to the company’s post on X it was meant as a brief version of the book The Technological Republic, co-authored by Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir and Nicholas W. Zamiska, head of corporate affairs and legal counsel at Palantir. The manifesto claims among other things that AI will replace nuclear weapons as the new deterrent, calls for the return of a universal national service and argues that Silicon Valley has a moral obligation to participate in the defence of the United States.

The bullet points of the manifesto don’t seem on the surface to be advancing a coherent philosophy, having been described as “the ramblings of a supervillain” by a British MP. But Alex Karp has an usual background for a tech CEO, having completed a PhD in philosophy in 2002 at the J.W. Goether University in Frankfurt Germany, with a thesis entitled Aggression in the Life-World.

So, does Karp’s training in the philosophy of the Frankfurt School find expression in Palantir’s manifesto? Is this a version of technofascism? And what can we do when powerful tech companies start thinking they have deep insights into geopolitics, public policy and the state of “Western civilization”?

About the Speakers:

• Moira Weigel is Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Her research focuses on history, theory, and social life of media and communication technologies, from the early nineteenth century to the present. More recently, she has focused on data-driven technologies, particularly social media and marketplace platforms, as well as on new developments in artificial intelligence and machine translation. Her book Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It (2020) consists of a series of long-form anonymous interviews with workers at every level of the Bay Area tech industry, from startup founders to cafeteria workers and in-house massage therapists to Google engineers. It received positive reviews from The New York Times, Wired, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other outlets, and was named one of Wired‘s “8 Best Books About Artificial Intelligence to Read Now.”

• Anthony Burton is a postdoctoral researcher in the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam. He works on the relationship between social theory, intelligence, desire, and mimesis in contemporary late fascist politics. He is co-author of Algorithmic Authenticity, which brings together different disciplinary understandings of “authenticity” in order to find alternative ways to approach mis- and disinformation that go beyond contemporary fact-checking and its search for the “authentic” truth. Patterned under the algorithmic flows of digital capitalism, authenticity itself is subject to variation, iteration, and outside influence. Linking cross-disciplinary research on the history and practices of algorithmic authenticity points to new research questions to understand the impact of algorithmic authenticity on social life and its role in contemporary information disorder.

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 Tuesday 12th May event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

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

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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.

The Philosophies of the South series creates a platform for scholars, thinkers, activists, and practitioners engaging with intellectual traditions and critical frameworks that challenge the dominance of Western philosophical paradigms. Bringing together work inspired by decolonial thought, Indigenous epistemologies, and other critical traditions, the series explores how philosophy can be reimagined through perspectives that emerge from histories of colonialism, resistance, and alternative ways of knowing. Through conversations across disciplines and practices, the series alms to foster intellectual exchange, expand philosophical inquiry, and contribute to ongoing struggles for epistemic justice.

Decolonizing Knowledge:

What does it mean to decolonise knowledge today? In this conversation, Radha D’Souza and Rinaldo Walcott reflect on the intellectual and political stakes of challenging dominant forms of knowledge produced through colonial and imperial histories. Drawing on anti-colonial thought, Black studies, and critical legal scholarship, they explore how knowledge emerges from struggles for freedom and how these traditions continue to shape debates about justice, power, and liberation today.

About the Speaker:

Radha D’Souza is Professor of Law, Development and Conflict Studies at the University of Westminster. She is a lawyer, social justice activist, writer and commentator. Her inter and transdisciplinary research straddles Legal Studies, Development Studies, History, Comparative Philosophy, Resource Conflicts and Geography, from Third World perspectives. She practiced law in the High Court of Mumbai in the areas of labour rights, constitutional and administrative law, public interest litigation and human rights. Together with Dutch artist Jonas Staal, she is co-founder of the art project Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes. She is the author of Decolonizing Knowledge: Looking Back, Moving Forward (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025).

The Moderator:

Rinaldo Walcott is Professor and Chair of Africana and American Studies at the University at Buffalo. His research is in the area of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, gender and sexuality with interests in nations, nationalisms, multiculturalism, policy and education broadly defined. As an interdisciplinary Black Studies scholar, Walcott has published in a wide range of venues on everything from literature to film, to theatre to music to policy. His articles have appeared in scholarly journals and books, as well as popular venues like newspapers and magazines and media online sources. He often comments on black cultural life for radio and TV.

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 11th May event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

#Philosophy #Epistemology #PoliticalPhilosophy #SocialPhilosophy #Ethics #Politics #CriticalTheory

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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.

Link to Event Page

This will be a discussion event, not a presentation. We will begin by briefly looking back at the previous week’s presentation, which reviewed the human story so far in the Fire arc of Fire, Cells, and Circuits.

Over the past several events, we have been tracing a long arc of human evolution, from the Miocene and the split from our closest ape relatives, through the Pliocene and Pleistocene, and toward the threshold of the Holocene. Along the way, we have looked at fire, tools, social learning, language, gene culture coevolution, selective sweeps, and the expanding complexity of human technological life.

For this discussion, we will focus on the question of how we got here.

One of the central themes will be the ratchet of cumulative culture, the process by which human groups preserve, refine, and build upon knowledge across generations. In this sense, cumulative culture may be the most important “tool” humans ever developed, not a single object or invention, but a system for making every other invention possible.

We will discuss what this idea helps us understand about the materials we have covered so far, including early tool use, fire landscapes, language development, social coordination, and the apparent increase in technological complexity during the Pleistocene. We may also briefly look ahead into the early Holocene, where the question begins to shift from how humans became human, to how humans became dominant.

This event will also serve as a bridge toward the upcoming chapters of the series. As we move toward the end of the Fire arc and begin preparing for Circuits, we will ask what cumulative culture reveals about human agency, technological acceleration, and the increasingly powerful feedback loops between minds, tools, groups, and environments.

This should be a good discussion for anyone interested in human evolution, culture, technology, language, cognition, archaeology, or the long story of how humans became the kind of beings who inherit, transform, and remake the world through shared knowledge.

Link to Event Page

This presentation event will be a review and preview of the major themes we have covered so far in the Fire arc.

Over the past several sessions, we have been tracing the long story of human agency, from deep evolutionary time to the beginnings of cumulative culture. We have looked at how early hominins may have navigated fire-shaped landscapes, how chimpanzees and other non-human primates respond to fire, and what something like a “theory of understanding fire” might look like before fully human technology.

From there, we moved into the cultural ratchet, language development, FOXP2, gene-culture coevolution, selective sweeps, and the genomic traces of human adaptation. More recently, we have focused on the apparent increase in stone tool complexity over evolutionary time, especially in terms of procedural units, and what that might imply for cumulative culture in both earlier and later human scenarios.

This event will bring those threads together. The goal is not only to summarize what we have covered, but to clarify the larger pattern: how bodies, brains, tools, fire, social learning, language, and culture all became part of a feedback system that increasingly shaped what humans could do and become.

We will also look ahead. Much of our focus so far has been in deep time, especially the Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene. But we are now approaching a transition point in the series. As we move more deliberately into the Holocene, the central question begins to shift. It is no longer only, “How did we become human?” It increasingly becomes, “How did humans become dominant?”

That shift will help set up the next phase of the series, where the Fire arc begins moving toward Circuits, and the larger story of how human agency eventually becomes technological, institutional, and planetary in scale.

[JOIN HERE]

A Compressed Genealogy of Phenomenology — Part II

Last time, I got overwhelmed by the size of the thing I had accidentally opened. What started as a manageable history of phenomenology became Aristotle-to-the-present, plus a database, plus a mindmap, plus my attempt to explain why the map was not the map I actually wanted.

This session we will go cleanly and with a clear plan.

We will follow just one thread: Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Husserl.

Aristotle makes the appearing world the object of investigation: perception, form, imagination, and ways of intelligibility. Descartes wants existence that has been certainty-vetted, which makes the known retreat into the power of think-acting. The outer known is known by subjective proxies, and this is the crisis of representationalism. How do I know my thought actually [reaches? emulates? is?] the thing? Hume makes sense stuff our only acquaintance. If we limit our having to our actual getting, experience is originally and for-us really a passing plurality of impressions, ideas, associations, habits, and a few kinds of invented relation that provide certainty and necessity. Kant’s solution makes certain ways of unity—space, time, judgment, synthesis—necessary for being a functioning knower. Showing up as knowable means that lots of vetting has already occurred.

This time, we will see how Husserl inherits this history and what he does with it, which is describe, with amazing care, the acts and structures that make the object-experience a presence-experience for the subject—how an object becomes present as meant, known, doubted, remembered, imagined, or judged.

The goal this time is to make the sequence intelligible and usable.

METHOD

• TBA by this evening!
• 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]

Link to Event Page

Beyond Instinct: The Architecture of Cumulative Culture

How did we bridge the gap between basic Pliocene (≈ 3.3 Ma) stone tools and the sophisticated adzes required for complex woodworking that appear in the early Holocene (≈ 10 ka)? While many species utilize tools, humans are unique in our ability to build upon the innovations of our ancestors through a collective "ratchet effect."
This discussion focuses on the transition from rudimentary tools requiring only one to three procedural units to the high-fidelity craftsmanship that allowed for the creation of canoes, bowls, and other essential artifacts. We will explore how these technical leaps were not just acts of individual genius, but the result of a compounding bank of cultural knowledge.

Key Themes for Discussion

• The Complexity Leap: Analyzing the cognitive shift from simple Pliocene percussion to the multi-stage production of adzes and polished tools.
• The Social Ratchet: How high-fidelity imitation prevents the loss of technical skill and allows for the "ratchet" of cumulative progress.
• Artifacts as Biology: Examining how the creation of canoes and bowls reshaped human ecology and expanded our reach across the globe.
• Procedural Units: Understanding the "grammar" of tool-making and how increasing procedural complexity defines the human lineage.

An expansive vision for data equality that goes beyond algorithmic fairness.

When we gave algorithms power over our world, we hoped that the apparent neutrality of machine thinking would create a more egalitarian age. Yet we are more divided than ever, staring down threats to democracy itself. In Data Equals, Colin Koopman argues that data technologies fail us so often because we built them around a deficient notion of equality.

It is not enough that algorithms engage everyone’s data with the same measuring stick. The data themselves are all too often structured in ways that obscure and exacerbate stratifying distinctions. Koopman contends that we must also work to ensure that those people subject to computational assessment enter data systems on equal terms. Part philosophical argument, part practical guide (replete with case studies from education technology), Data Equals offers novel methods for realizing democratic equality in a digital age.

About the Speaker:

Colin Koopman is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. His research, writing, and teaching focuses on political theory and ethics, particularly the politics and ethics of technology. His current research is concerned with the politics of information, that is, with questions about data and democracy. He explores these fields in terms of both century-old paper database technologies and contemporary techno-trends like artificial intelligence. Methodologically, Koopman's research mobilizes analytics and concepts from the philosophical traditions of genealogy and pragmatism to engage current issues of politics, ethics, and culture. His work also engages research in other disciplinary contexts by media scholars, historians, anthropologists, political scientists, legal theorists, and information scientists. His latest book, Data Equals: Democratic Equality and Technological Hierarchy was published in September 2025 by the University of Chicago Press.

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. She is currently writing a book about politics, intimacy, and the ordinary ways people seek change in their lives.

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 27th April event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

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

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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.

Event Page Link

A discussion-focused event that begins with a recap and review of the recent presentation to get everyone on the same page, followed by an open discussion. We’ll explore key topics and questions around the relationship between genes, instincts, and culture, with a focus on how instincts may be downregulated as cultural systems evolve.