The Toronto Philosophy Meetup

Welcome everyone to the next series that Philip and David are hosting! This time around we will be doing a book by Heidegger called History of the Concept of Time. This book was written right before Heidegger wrote Being and Time (his Magnum Opus). The sad but unavoidable fact is that both of the English translations of Being and Time are so deeply flawed that it is virtually impossible to reconstruct Heidegger's early philosophy by reading one of these English translations.

Fortunately the English translation of History of the Concept of Time is of a VERY high quality. Also, even in German History of the Concept of Time is a much more clearly written book than Being and Time. If a good translation of Being and Time ever appears, Philip and David will certainly do a meetup on it. But for now, reading History of the Concept of Time is the best way for the English reader to access Heidegger's early philosophy.

This meetup will start out as a live read. We will read each and every paragraph together until we have gotten roughly 40 pages into the book. Once we have gotten a basic sense of what early Heidegger is all about, we will switch the meetup to a pre-read. When we are in the pre-read phase, participants will be expected to read the assigned reading in advance, and pick paragraphs that they especially want to focus on. In the meetup we will read out loud the paragraphs that the participants selected and we will talk about these paragraphs after we read them out loud.

Philip and David will be happy to recommend good quality secondary sources on Heidegger to anyone who asks.

Link to the German translation
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RahTLhJhwEfDtaac0wM-TgLV7VELXdlY/view?usp=sharing

Here is a description of the book:

• Heidegger's lecture course at the University of Marburg in the summer of 1925, an early version of Being and Time (1927), offers a unique glimpse into the motivations that prompted the writing of this great philosopher's master work and the presuppositions that gave shape to it. The book embarks upon a provisional description of what Heidegger calls "Dasein," the field in which both being and time become manifest. Heidegger analyzes Dasein in its everydayness in a deepening sequence of terms: being-in-the-world, worldhood, and care as the being of Dasein. The course ends by sketching the themes of death and conscience and their relevance to an ontology that makes the phenomenon of time central. Theodore Kisiel's outstanding translation permits English-speaking readers to appreciate the central importance of this text in the development of Heidegger's thought.

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Philip and David feel that it is important to be clear up front about how the topic of Heidegger's racist politics will be dealt with in this meetup. Throughout his life (starting as a very young man) Heidegger was drawn to far right wing, nationalist, racist views which any reasonable person should find loathsome. Yet when it comes to thinking about the way the world is and what it means to be a human in that world, Heidegger is arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century. Some meetups rule out any discussion of Heidegger's politics, even though this is a core aspect of Heidegger's way of thinking. This meetup will not do that. In this meetup, we will make room for discussion of how Heidegger's politics may relate to his ideas on ontology and being human. Also, it will be possible in this meetup to consider whether Heidegger's ideas on ontology and being human shaped his politics. These questions will certainly not be the main focus of the meetup (far from it). But these questions will not be ignored either.

Here's a link to an online copy: The Basic Problems of Phenomenology | Martin Heidegger | download (b-ok.global)

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

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

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

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

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

Accessing Materials

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

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

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

About the Meetings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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