The Toronto Philosophy Meetup

06/01/2026

The 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize Readings are right around the corner! ✨

📅 June 3 | 🕖 7:00 PM ET
📍 Live in Toronto at Koerner Hall or via YouTube livestream
🎟️ Tickets: https://www.rcmusic.com/concert/2026-griffin-poetry-prize-readings-439801

With live readings by:

✨ Gbenga Adesina

✨ Daniel Borzutzky, Alec Schumacher, and Elvira Hernández

✨ Aracelis Girmay

✨ Joseph Kidney, the 2026 Canadian First Book Prize winner

✨ Ange Mlinko

✨ Kevin Young

✨ Raúl Zurita, this year’s Lifetime Recognition Award recipient

✨ Melody Ovuakporoyecha, a 2026 finalist from Poetry In Voice / Les voix de la poésie

Join us in celebrating excellence in poetry from across generations and around the world.

📖 Ticket includes a copy of the 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology.

🥂 Complimentary refreshments will be served from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., and during the book signings following the Readings.

✨ Raúl Zurita will participate in the Readings alongside his translator, Anna Deeny Morales, as part of a live performance by internationally acclaimed Armenian-Canadian pianist and composer Eve Egoyan, with filmmakers Lior Shamriz and Chloé Griffin paying homage to Zurita’s poetry throughout.

Not in Toronto? Tune into the livestream: https://youtube.com/live/h6ulfvE5aPA?feature=share

06/01/2026

Humanitarian journalism is a moral calling to document human suffering. But in practice, it’s an ethically murky undertaking

05/25/2026

Announcing: Philosophies of the South!!
Reimagining philosophy through alternative ways of knowing.

All events are free, Mondays at 2pm ET / 7pm UK

featuring Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Radha D'Souza, Nandita Sharma, Mark Minch-de Leon, Leny Mendoza Strobel, and so many more!

05/24/2026

“Who Is the Murderer?”🔪 Join us on Sunday May 24 to discuss Fritz 's enduringly relevant classic of cinema ! 💀

▶ Sign up for the meetup here – www.meetup.com/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/events/314696970/

🗓 Check out our calendar for daily events!

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A simple, haunting musical phrase whistled offscreen tells us that a young girl will be killed. “Who Is the Murderer?” pleads a nearby placard as serial child-killer Hans Beckert (played by a searing Peter Lorre) closes in on little Elsie Beckmann . . . In his harrowing masterwork M, the Austrian-German filmmaker Fritz Lang merges trenchant social and political commentary with chilling suspense, creating a panorama of inner depravity and collective panic that to this day remains the blueprint for the psychological thriller.

"One of cinema’s most convincing portraits of a sick society, in which the hapless Beckert is less an aberration, more the inevitable, even pitiable, end product. One can only imagine the ripples of unease it must have caused in an economically-ravaged nation teetering on the brink of totalitarian meltdown." (Time Out)

"M's urgency hasn't aged a day." (Slant)

"This astonishing movie represents an unsurpassed grand synthesis of storytelling... a masterpiece structured with the kind of perfection that calls to mind both poetry and architecture and that makes even his disciples' classics seem minor by comparison." (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader)

**A simple, haunting musical phrase whistled offscreen tells us that a young girl will be killed. “Who Is the Murderer?” pleads a nearby placard as serial child-killer Hans

05/24/2026

We shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the notion that AIs could possess some form of consciousness. If it sounds far-fetched, consider that the emergent qualities of AI systems have surprised even their creators. Until very recently, we underestimated the capacity for suffering in animals, infants, and people with brain injuries; and our own consciousness remains in many ways mysterious to us.

In this video, Jonathan Birch, professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that, while the ‘friendly assistant’ that LLMs often serve up is certainly not aware, it’s difficult – and perhaps even morally perilous – to write off the possibility of an ‘alien form of consciousness’ somewhere within these systems.

Watch here: https://aeon.co/videos/we-long-misjudged-animal-consciousness-could-ai-be-next

05/24/2026

There are certain things about the world that we think we know for sure, and yet philosophical reason tells us cannot be true. Can you fly? are you real? is the world a hallucination? The answers seem self-evident, but this week we're exploring philosophical thought experiments that pull the rug out...

05/20/2026

What is the relation between and ? Join us for a new reading group on John 's classic text! 🧠

👉 Sign up for the 1st meeting on Friday 5/22 here – https://www.meetup.com/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/events/314760263/

🗓 Check out our calendar for daily events!

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About the text:

Modern philosophy finds it difficult to give a satisfactory picture of the place of minds in the world. In Mind and World, based on the 1991 John Locke Lectures, one of the most distinguished philosophers writing today offers his diagnosis of this difficulty and points to a cure. In doing so, he delivers the most complete and ambitious statement to date of his own views, a statement that no one concerned with the future of philosophy can afford to ignore.

John McDowell amply illustrates a major problem of modern philosophy—the insidious persistence of dualism—in his discussion of empirical thought. Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and McDowell exposes these traps by exploiting the work of contemporary philosophers from Wilfrid Sellars to Donald Davidson. These difficulties, he contends, reflect an understandable—but surmountable—failure to see how we might integrate what Sellars calls the “logical space of reasons” into the natural world. What underlies this impasse is a conception of nature that has certain attractions for the modern age, a conception that McDowell proposes to put aside, thus circumventing these philosophical difficulties. By returning to a pre-modern conception of nature but retaining the intellectual advance of modernity that has mistakenly been viewed as dislodging it, he makes room for a fully satisfying conception of experience as a rational openness to independent reality. This approach also overcomes other obstacles that impede a generally satisfying understanding of how we are placed in the world.

John McDowell is widely considered to be the most important living philosopher; and **["Mind and World"](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674576100)** is widely consid

05/20/2026

The latest issue of JESP has just been published! Head over to www.jesp.org to read new articles about proxy responsibility, prospects for a progressive critique of rap music, grounding human rights, first-person authority over gender, politics and foreign donations, the cautionary approach to supererogation, and reparations.

05/20/2026

What is the place of in ? Join us on Friday May 22 for a reading group on Gabriel 's phenomenology! 🕯️

👉 RSVP for the meetup here – https://www.meetup.com/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/events/314833607/

🗓 Check out our calendar for daily events!

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About the reading:

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.

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 t

05/18/2026

Latest papers: Jasmine Wanjiru Onstad argues that CBT’s dominance contributes to hermeneutical injustice in psychiatry by limiting patients’ interpretive agency and restricting pathways for psychological healing in this open access article https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2025.2604598