Philosophical Communities

Connected Communities: Philosophical Communities A report for the Arts and Humanities Research Council, by Jules Evans, policy director of the Centre for the History of Emotions, at Queen Mary, University of London November 2012 The London Philosophy Club (photo by Greg Funnell) Contents Introduction: p.4 Part 1: A brief history of philosophical communities - p.11 Part 2: The rise of the mass intelligentsia - p.26 Part 3: The contemporary grassroots philosophy scene - p. 33 3.1: Applied ethics - p. 33 3.2: Matthew Lipman and Community Philosophy - p. 38 3.3: Philosophical Counseling and the Cafe Philo movement - p. 44 3.4: The revival of virtue ethics - p. 50 3.5: The Skeptic movement - p. 56 Part 4: What do philosophy clubs do for their members? - p. 59 4.1: For learning - p. 62 4.2: For sociability, conviviality and fun - p. 62 4.3: For belonging - p. 63 4.4: For empathy - p. 65 4.5: For well-being / resilience / flourishing - p. 66 4.6 for civic and political education and mobilisation - p. 70 Part 5: Possible ways forward - p. 72 5.1: Developing stronger links with academic philosophy - p. 72 5.2: Connecting grassroots philosophy to mental health services and the workplace - p. 72 5.3: Re-finding a sense of social mission and care - p. 76 5.4: Keeping the conversation going, and widening it - p. 79 Appendix: Oral history accounts of the rise of grassroots philosophy - p. 80 1: Melvyn Bragg, broadcaster - p. 80 2. Roman Krznaric, founding faculty member, School of Life - p. 81 3. Geoffrey Klempner, founder, Pathways school of philosophy - p. 87 4. Lizzy Lewis, development manager, SAPERE - p. 89 5. Paul Doran, national coordinator, Philosophy in Pubs - p. 90 6. Martha Nussbaum, professor of law and ethics, University of Chicago - p. 94 7. Rick Lewis, founder and editor, Philosophy Now - p. 99 8. Graeme Tiffany, independent education consultant - p. 101 9. Massimo Pigliucci, philosopher and organiser of NYC Philosophy Now meetup - p. 104 10. Scott Campbell, founder, Skeptics in the Pub - p. 106 11. Sid Rodrigues, organiser, London Skeptics in the Pub - p. 108 Bibliography - p. 111 © Jules Evans 2012. I hereby assert my right to be recognised as the author of this work. Introduction: the two aspects of philosophy “The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. This is what makes him a philosopher.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel 1 “The history of philosophy is to a considerable extent the history of groups.” Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies2 Philosophy has two aspects, destructive and creative. On the one hand, philosophy is socially destructive: it challenges social and religious conventions, and makes the philosopher leave their community to find a space to think for themselves. On the other hand, philosophy is socially creative: having destabilised traditional forms of community, the philosopher creates new forms of community. Ever since Socrates, philosophers have challenged traditional forms of community, particularly religious communities, while trying (not always successfully) to creative alternatives: the academy, the commune, the cult, the humanist group, the coffeehouse, the salon, the corresponding society, the consciousness-raising circle, all the way to the subject of this report: the grassroots philosophy clubs of today. There is, in fact, a social history of philosophy, which sociologists and philosophers are beginning to tell. You can tell the history of ideas two ways: as the history of great minds hatching ideas alone in their garrets (to some extent this is the approach of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy3), or as the history of groups, social networks and experiments in living together. This social network approach to the history of ideas is increasingly popular, thanks to the work of contemporary philosophers and sociologists like Randall Collins, Jurgen Habermas4, and, earlier, George Simmel 5. Collins, in particular, insisted that “the history of philosophy can be traced through a surprisingly small number of social circles”, which Collins attempted somewhat Quixotically to map, visually. This theoretical approach comes with its own epistemology, in which ideas emerge not in detached monads in people’s heads, but between people, in conversation. In this way of seeing things, it is not so much ‘me’ having this idea, but rather that ideas evolve out of networks and interactions, like a circuit-board lighting up in a particular configuration. If you accept this social networks approach to philosophy, then some of the more interesting questions in philosophy become questions of community organization: not just ‘how should 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007) section 455 2 Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Cambridge: Harvard, 2000) p.3 3 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1945) 4 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity 1989) 5 George Simmel, Conﬂict and the Web of Group Afﬁliations (Glencoe: Free Press, 1955); I would also suggest, within journalism, that both Tom Wolfe and Adam Curtis have a social network approach to the history of ideas. See for example Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1968) and Adam Curtis’ The Mayfair Set (BBC 2, 1999) I live?’ but ‘how should we live together?’ We become interested in what Randall Collins called the philosopher as “organizational leader”.6 La Nuit de Philosophie at L’Institut Francais in London That is why I am interested in the contemporary rise of philosophy clubs, and in the people who organize these clubs. I personally became interested in philosophy when it helped me overcome emotional problems in my early 20s. I was particularly helped by Stoicism, which is quite an individualist and self-reliant philosophy. However, in my 30s, I started to explore philosophy not just as self-help, but as group-help. I became actively involved in the New Stoa, a community of modern Stoics, and participated in the first gathering of Stoics for several centuries, in San Diego on April 26 2010 (Marcus Aurelius’ birthday).7 I also became interested in other contemporary philosophical communities - Socratic, Epicurean, Skeptic, Platonic.8 And this led me to explore the contemporary phenomenon of philosophy clubs, philosophy cafes, pub philosophy groups and other grassroots ideas clubs. In late 2010, I became co-organiser of the London Philosophy Club, a free meetup group that organises philosophical talks, debates, meals and film-screenings. The 6 Collins 2000, p.4; the great modern example of the philosopher as organizational leader is Paul Kurtz, the founder of secular humanism and the modern Skeptic movement. See my discussion of Kurtz on Radio 4’s Last Word: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ngrww 7 You can watch a video of the event here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqnCaQTqQQY 8 I describe my encounter with these communities in Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations (London: Rider, 2012) membership of that club doubled in size in a year, from 1000 members in January 2011 to over 2000 in January 2012, making me realise the extent of public demand for such clubs. And I became aware of just how fertile the ‘informal learning’ movement is today, from Skeptics In the Pub to Philosophy In Pubs, from Sci-Bars to Socrates Cafes.9 I also became aware of how little academic research had explored this philosophical underground. Informal learning has been described as the iceberg of adult education, in that so much of it happens below view. That’s certainly the case with philosophy groups, which have expanded below the horizon of most academic philosophers. Yet the underground is becoming easier to explore. Philosophy groups have flourished partly thanks to the internet, and to social network sites like meetup.com and Facebook. The snapshot such sites give of the grassroots philosophy scene is impressive: at the time of writing, there are 846 meetup groups that describe themselves as philosophy clubs, in 380 cities across 25 countries, with a combined membership of 125,000. Some groups might stretch the definition of ‘philosophy’, but it’s still a striking amount. There are 229 ethics meetups, 528 Skeptic meetups, 126 feminist meetups, 660 meetups dedicated to ‘intellectual discussion’, 1,020 environmental meetups, and 2,162 book club meetups, many of which read books of philosophy and ideas. And that’s just a snapshot: many philosophy clubs don’t use meetup.com. There are several Cafe Philosophique clubs on the continent. There are 41 Skeptics In the Pub around the UK. There are philosophical societies and ideas cafes at many universities. There are more radical learning groups, some connected with the Occupy movement, like the Bank of Ideas, Tent City University, Cuts Cafes, as well as grassroots learning and activism groups like Transition Towns or Food not Bombs. There are an increasing number of commercial organisers of ideas events, like the School of Life, TED, Brandstof and Intelligence Squared. And there are more and more philosophy events: nuits de philosophie at French Institutes, the Month of Philosophy in Amsterdam, How The Light Gets In and the Battle of Ideas in the UK, the Modena philosophy festival in Italy. Clearly, something is going on in grassroots philosophy, which has not yet received sufficient academic attention. The aim of this

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