What we’re about
SADHO is a curiosity-driven philosophy Meetup—with a critical-theoretical interest in automatic and shared ways of worldmaking—that follows the timeless wisdom of the designers of The Village:
> Questions are a burden to others; answers are a prison for oneself.
> A still tongue makes a happy life.
Just kidding. Obviously, we strive to violate both with gusto—with the calm hostility of Number Six at a cocktail party full of Number Twos.
Method
- We present audiovisual surveys of Western philosophy and of the history and philosophy of science—surveys that are masterpieces of illuminating exposition—performed by the “BBC2 Four” (Bronowski, Burke, Clark, and Magee) and
- discuss them, with
- a philosophy PhD, philosophy professor, or other Guest Expert.
SADHO makes scholarship fun by serving up the greatest embodied minds of all time in bite-sized, Technicolor, beautifully arranged morsels, and by bringing bona fide experts to the table for special lectures and Q&A.
In a word, SADHO is a fun, friendly, frolicsome, fleet-footed, (non-)free-form* forum for philosophizing, fostering fellowship alongside and under the tutelage of (sometimes) famous professional and practicing philosophers.
SADHO’s First Promise
- SADHO’s First Promise — Our excursions and tangents will never stray outside the event’s topical Kuiper Belt.
Unlike other philosophy Meetup groups, whose discussions drift all over the Solar System, our high-quality discussions remain firmly within the Kuiper Belt. That’s our promise to you.
Sound impossible? It’s not. The reason is that SADHO Meetups are … not actually free-form. They are anchored and constrained by a force.
A great force.
A force more powerful than even Vader …
The all-conquering force of radical insight, expressed vividly and clearly, by a master teacher.
There is nothing better than an illuminating and meticulously lucid discourse delivered by a riveting and intensely expressive person. Add to this a great video, diagram, or model, and you have the makings of peak experience.
This force flows neither from Scott & Dave, nor from the great topics we choose, but from the the expository virtuosos that elucidate these topics—i.e., from our Guest Experts and the BBC2 Four.
SADHO’s Second Promise
- SADHO’s Second Promise — Our meetings will always include either a qualified Guest Expert or a member of the BBC2 Four.
If SADHO worships anything, it’s clear speaking. That’s it. That’s the big overarching theme and First Principle that drives all our decision making. Consequently, we spotlight the crème de la crème of English-speaking educators and dive into skillfully (or manically) curated discussions, underpinned by top-tier production values and rigorous preparation. Said educators include both (a) living professional philosophers and (b) those pedagogical giants known as the “BBC2 Four.”
Professional philosophers
Our Guest Experts are top professors from the North Americas. So far, we have hosted the likes of:
The BBC2 Four
SADHO meetings also (and almost always) revolve around recorded performances by the greatest scientific, historical, and philosophical exegetes of all time. While incarnated on the Prime Material plane, these lofty ones were known as Jacob Bronowski, James Burke, Kenneth Clark, and Bryan Magee. These pedagogical saints, these BBC2 Four (aka the British Broadcasting Bards, the Philosophical Fab Four, the BBC-M, etc.) will be our guides.
Here they are again in list view:
What can one say about the BBC2 Four that hasn't already been said? Their work is so widely acclaimed and thoroughly appreciated that finding new words of praise feels like an almost impossible task. I feel compelled to return to Shakespeare, who took great pains to describe the BBC2 Four in that memorable passage from Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1, lines 45–65 (as interpreted by Dave Thomas):
“These engrossing masters of elegant exposition; these dexterous wordsmiths of rhetorical Fabergé eggs; these benevolent ministers of restorative mind-tonics; these tireless disciples of skillful means; these master-architects of felicitous visual models, diagrams, and schemas; these altruistic wielders of knot-cutting logicks; these humble and plain-speaking sweepers of cobwebs; these irreverent deflators of metaphysical extravagance; these fortresses of excellence, built by Oxford for England against intellectual infection; these view-transforming founts of illuminating metaphor; these poetic alchemists of feeling and idea; these massively multi-channel pedagogical improvisors; these fascinating bards of scientific and philosophical history; this happy breed of men; this little world; this precious stone set in the TV-static sea, which serves it in the office of a wall or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier programmes; this nurse; this teaming womb of royal elocutionists, feared by their breed and famous by their birth, renownèd for their deeds as far from home; this blessèd plot, this earth, THIS REALM, THIS BBC2 FOUR!!!”
Even when exalted by the Sweet Swan of Avon himself, mere words seem insufficient to capture the full essence of the BBC2 Four. Now, with the sad passing of three of its luminaries, we realize the depth of our loss. It is, indeed, the second-greatest blessing to humanity that they devoted their talents to the world through BBC2 in the 70s, leaving us with a treasure trove of audiovisual records of their magnificent performances.
Surely, it is these performances, and not the writings of LRH, that should have been engraved on stainless steel tablets and encased in titanium capsules beneath Trementina Base.
Join Us
You can join us …
- Here, on Meetup.
- By wandering around our massively overproduced Notion page, here.
- By lurking around our embryonic YouTube channel. Video for our events will be uploaded here (if possible) as will videos of our events (eventually, some day, once Dave has finished composing our new theme music).
Thank-Yous
Special Thanks to Ingrid Kronenberg for the clean and readable event posters and to Groucho Satanicus for the nicely toggled-tucked interactive transcripts that let you literally unfold your way to understanding.
SADHO is organized and managed by David Sternman, with financial support provided by the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia, under SADHO COB Professor Steven Taubeneck.
Upcoming events (4+)
See all- From Socrates to Sartre EP25 ⟩ “Sartre I: My Existence in Absurd”Link visible for attendees
These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.
Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.
We Will Demystify Existentialism
Come, drink from the cup of this episode, and experience a synoptic big-tent “Thelmiracle” like no other. All the essences of Existentialism demystified, integrated, and glowing with power drawn from a single principle.
And all the clichés we invoke whenever we talk about Existentialism finally get their day in court:
- “Existence precedes essence” (Thelma’s version is brilliant and simple)
- “God is dead” (and what Nietzsche really meant)
- “The leap of faith” (and why Kierkegaard said we have to lose everything to make it)
- “The absurd” (not the stupid mood-board version)
- “Authenticity” (and its frenemy, bad faith)
- “Being-toward-death” (the metal concept-album version)
- Alienation (Hegelian, Marxist, existentialist—all clarified)
- Anxiety / anguish as the universal human condition
This is the End
Welcome to the first day of the end of your life, and the first episode in the final cycle of our journey—Roger Corman’s Sartre Cycle.
And yet … Sartre is never mentioned!
Strong, Yet Over-the-Counter
I feel bad for having used hyperbole in the past, but I had no choice—my nature forces me to be authentic. Just forget all my past emphases and know this: this is the most delightful and impactful exhibition of Existentialism of all time.
Never before have joy and understanding been so intimately interpenetrating. Thelma’s explanations are so good that anyone who listens really will get the core of Existentialism—why it matters, why it’s true, and why it’s vitally important to understand.
There are, in the end, only two real motives for philosophizing:
- Transformation: You want to know whether the rumors are true—that certain questions, arranged just so, can flip a switch and induce new belief, new perception, even new willing. Philosophy as liberation (from bad faith, alienation) and empowerment (for freedom, authenticity).
- Praise, Fame, and Gain : You want to prove that you can do something hard, something that shows you deserve to sit at the adult table of intellect.
Thelma is here, and she’s second to none:
She came to make real Motive Number One.Existentialism is the most popular undergrad philosophy course for a reason. It speaks to the horror and vertigo you actually are—anxious, thrown, absurd, alienated—and it consoles you by saying, “This is not a bug; this is the starting point. Now see here …”
This is why Thelma’s presentation hits so hard: she uses word magic to get you to feel the meaning of “existence precedes essence.” Feeling is where soul rubber hits existential road.
Feel, and then see: your life has no built-in script; this moment right now is your chance to write one.
If you’ve ever wondered whether philosophy can actually change how you experience being alive, this is the episode where you find out.
Some Amazing Riffs
What would take the average person three three-hour seminars to explain, Thelma covers in 27 minutes. If a meetup person tried to do this, it would take five weeks, would be opaque, and still be wrong.
She does this clarity-n-brevity combo that’s hard to believe. Usually the briefer something is, the more obscure; usually the clearer, the longer. Thelma does clear yet brief using a Judo I cannot fathom. Listen to this line —
“Kierkegaard counsels us to sink into despair so that we can make the leap of faith to God; Nietzsche counsels us to become gods, joyous, hard, independent supermen. And Nietzsche tells us why he rejects a philosophy of despair: He is afraid that it would destroy him. To Nietzsche philosophies are not merely intellectual games; philosophies have psychological effects, the power to enhance and strengthen your life, and even health, or to weaken and destroy you. And Nietzsche says that he created his philosophy of the strong, life-arming superman ‘out of my will to be in good health, out of my will to live … self-preservation forbade me to practice a philosophy of wretchedness and discouragement.’”
And then she does the impossible: she brings these currents alongside Marx, showing that Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche are all crisis-diagnosticians and prescribers of transformation tech. Each identifies a crisis in the human spirit — whether social, existential, or cultural — and prescribes a radical cure. Marx reads consciousness as shaped by material relations and calls for revolutionary praxis; Nietzsche reads it as deformed by slave morality and calls for a revaluation of all values; Kierkegaard reads it as sedated by Christendom and calls for the solitary leap into authentic faith. Different diagnoses, different therapies — but all aimed at breaking the spell of the present condition and remaking the self.
If you had to name the general attitude uniting the three? How about the Philosophy of Crisis and Cure—each turns philosophy into a therapy for the epochal sickness of the soul.
We can lay this out inside the Buddha’s four-fold disease/cure model —
- there is a sickness (modern despair, alienation, nihilism)
- it has a cause (metaphysical illusion, social estrangement, historical deformation)
- there is a possible cessation (faith, revaluation of values, revolution)
- there is a path to actualize it (leap of faith, creation of new values, praxis).
(Lo and behold, this is why “Buddhism and Existentialism” is one of the top comparative topics in academic publishing: scholars love pointing out how Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre form a Western mirror of Ch’an/Zen’s insistence on breaking ordinary mind and rediscovering authentic being. Incidentally, Landmark/EST markets itself as “Heidegger and Zen.”)
More Exciting than a Historical Reenactment
Thelma is really in her element this time. This is Existentialism delivered by an Existentialist: clear, personal, oozing with Sorge.
There are things in this world worse than ordinary physical pain. Chief among them is a life not worth living. Looks like Existentialism is Socrates 2.0, a reenactment of the elenchus but now aimed at modern times, with the angst of modernity standing in for Athens’ Peloponnesian War trauma. It is the same question, “How shall we live?”, but now intensified by the awareness that meaning itself is contingent, constructed, fragile, abyssal, empty.
You’ve Always Been an Existentialist, but You Didn’t Know It
And you still don’t know now, even though you think you do. Why? Because we’ve all been taught Existentialism the wrong way. Just as “thesis–antithesis–synthesis” ruins Hegel, so also “existence precedes essence” ruins Sartre when not taken rightly.
Existentialism is so true and so important that you can’t even criticize it, much less understand it, until you have already agreed with it. So to all the selves reading this—congratulations on finally coming home. Because in this episode you will meet someone for the very first time. Someone you’ve never met before.
Yourself.
But you’re not going to meet this familiar stranger in the ordinary way you meet people. No—you’re going to learn Thelma’s way: the way of transformative understanding that combines pleasure, depth, and clarity in a simplicity that doesn’t conceal.
How is Thelma’s psychedelic pedagogy, which culminates in authentic self-encounter, different from the ordinary boring way of teaching Existentialism? The difference is made clear by the founder of the Existentialist cult that successfully brainwashed me into working for them without pay for five years. Listen carefully to the wisdom in this leaked footage from an actual cult seminar here!
BTW, if you thought Thelma was skipping around when she went Hume → Hegel → Marx—rejoice! Nothing has been left behind. In this jaw-dropping True Miracle of a lecture she weaves together Kierkegaard’s despair, Nietzsche’s death of God, Hume’s empiricism, Descartes’ rationalism, Parmenides’ eternal being, Romanticism, German Idealism, World War I, Marx’s theory of alienation, Hegel’s dialectic, Heidegger’s being-toward-death, Pascal’s finitude, and Sartre’s absurdity—everything necessary to prepare us for the full existential confrontation with nothingness, freedom, and authenticity.
She scoops from the bottom of the thick bucket of Western philosophy so we get the whole flavor of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought. Amazingly thorough—never boring. Behold what she delivers in 27 minutes:
I. Philosophers
- Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) — anxiety, despair, leap of faith, restoration of Christianity.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) — death of God, Übermensch, life-affirmation.
- David Hume — empiricism, one of the blows to the belief in God.
- René Descartes — clear and distinct ideas, God as guarantor of truth.
- Parmenides — unchanging eternal being, used to clarify Nietzsche’s claim.
- Karl Marx — economic alienation, division of labor, social critique.
- G.W.F. Hegel — alienation, Absolute Spirit, Cunning of Reason, dialectic of history.
- Martin Heidegger — being-toward-death, authenticity, anxiety.
- Jean-Paul Sartre — death as absurdity, existence precedes essence, key existentialist themes.
- Blaise Pascal — finitude and fear of infinity, early forerunner of existentialist absurdity.
II. Historical Eras & Movements
- German Idealism (Kant, Hegel, post-Kantian developments).
- Romanticism — revolt against Enlightenment rationalism, focus on spirit and subjectivity.
- Enlightenment — its belief in progress, rationalism, and science as background foil.
- Modernity — crisis of meaning, loss of stable authorities, secularization.
- Industrial Revolution — mechanization and alienation of labor.
- Communist Revolution of 1917 — shattering of political stability.
- World War I — collapse of the myth of progress and European order.
- Great Depression (1920s–30s) — economic destabilization, failure of classical economics.
III. Intellectual Currents & Themes
- Empiricism — Hume’s assault on metaphysics and theology.
- Rationalism — criticized as “trap of essence.”
- Essentialism — opposed to existentialism’s priority of existence.
- Psychology / Psychologizing Philosophy — neurotic/psychotic states, subjective interiority.
- Alienation — individual from society, self from self, human from nature, lovers from each other.
- Absurdity & Nothingness — contingency of existence, existential void.
- Authenticity vs. Bad Faith — emerging from Kierkegaard/Heidegger/Sartre lineage.
Conclusion
Friends, life hurts. Many of us cry and say, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.” To this Abraham says, “Child, I will send Thelma.”
The world is on fire, but Thelma is come. Lay your anxiety, your despair, your bad faith, and your love of joy and clarity—and your hope that philosophy might finally live up to its promise to touch you in a way that actually matters—at her lotus feet. Hand in hand, we will discover together why existence really is absurd, and why that’s the best news you’ll hear all week.
METHOD
Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE
Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.
She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.
View all of our coming episodes here.
- From Socrates to Sartre ⟩ The Next EpisodeLink visible for attendees
These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.
Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.
When I first saw one of her broadcasts on Public Access, I scoffed and jeered at the odd elements—for about 90 seconds. Then it hit me: her clarity and precision delivered a more powerful impact than anything I’d ever encountered.
Her unmatched ability to transmute the foundational ideas—banalized into clichés by others—into potent, transformative psychedelics turns even the most familiar concepts into insights so profound they catch in your throat.
While Magee is, as Eric Clapton once said, “by far and without a doubt the most gifted philosophical conversationalist alive today,” Lavine’s hypnotic delivery, along with her genius for crafting perfect metaphors and examples, makes her the most masterful foundation-demystifier in Anglophone philosophy. She’s one of a kind and I’m sure you’ll fall in love with her.
Like a Virgin, Seeing Foundations for the Very First Time
Professor Lavine is the tough-love mom I wish I had as a child. And she has a message for all of us non-, partial-, and pseudo-grokkers: foundational mastery in philosophy isn’t about delivering smooth confusionist performances or stringing together philosophical buzzwords. True mastery—the kind Lavine demands—requires effort on the level of authentic self-reinventive cultural immersion or learning a second language. Philosophy, approached seriously, means internalizing the metaphysical and epistemic assumptions of the great thinkers we read and letting them infect and possess us.
Philosophical understanding isn't normal. It requires something not dissimilar to religious conversion—a wholesale transformation of how you see and think about the world. To truly grok Descartes, for example, you cannot simply study his arguments, you have to induce a kind of trance. You have to inhabit the core of his thought, down to the foundations, in the same way an actor might embody a role—not just the personality, but the underlying worldview and backstory that motivates it.
The same goes for Hume’s radical empiricism. Entering into his world means actuallyexperiencing life as a flux of flashing sense data and questioning the coherence of our everyday projections. It’s disconcerting, even disorienting. But if you can immerse yourself in these frameworks, the rewards will be profound. You will see the clarity and brilliance of the thinkers in a way that mere conceptual understanding can’t provide.
In her stunningly clear lectures—as clear as a chrome airhorn on a bright winter day—the preternatural Lavine guides us through just these kinds of transformative experiences. She exposes the core commitments and hidden absurdities within each system, and demands that we confront the real stakes behind the systems we study and take them absolutely seriously. This is not philosophy as intellectual gymnastics—it’s philosophy as immersive and experiential and I dare say devotional.
Join us for a series of sessions that will push us to engage with the true depth of all the fundamental and foundational stuff that everyone loves to skip over and replace with popular caricatures. Lavine will cure you of that real quick. She doesn’t just present ideas; she forces you to method-act the systems from the inside and take a stand.
METHOD
Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE
Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.
She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.
View all of our coming episodes here.
- From Socrates to Sartre ⟩ The Next EpisodeLink visible for attendees
These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.
Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.
When I first saw one of her broadcasts on Public Access, I scoffed and jeered at the odd elements—for about 90 seconds. Then it hit me: her clarity and precision delivered a more powerful impact than anything I’d ever encountered.
Her unmatched ability to transmute the foundational ideas—banalized into clichés by others—into potent, transformative psychedelics turns even the most familiar concepts into insights so profound they catch in your throat.
While Magee is, as Eric Clapton once said, “by far and without a doubt the most gifted philosophical conversationalist alive today,” Lavine’s hypnotic delivery, along with her genius for crafting perfect metaphors and examples, makes her the most masterful foundation-demystifier in Anglophone philosophy. She’s one of a kind and I’m sure you’ll fall in love with her.
Like a Virgin, Seeing Foundations for the Very First Time
Professor Lavine is the tough-love mom I wish I had as a child. And she has a message for all of us non-, partial-, and pseudo-grokkers: foundational mastery in philosophy isn’t about delivering smooth confusionist performances or stringing together philosophical buzzwords. True mastery—the kind Lavine demands—requires effort on the level of authentic self-reinventive cultural immersion or learning a second language. Philosophy, approached seriously, means internalizing the metaphysical and epistemic assumptions of the great thinkers we read and letting them infect and possess us.
Philosophical understanding isn't normal. It requires something not dissimilar to religious conversion—a wholesale transformation of how you see and think about the world. To truly grok Descartes, for example, you cannot simply study his arguments, you have to induce a kind of trance. You have to inhabit the core of his thought, down to the foundations, in the same way an actor might embody a role—not just the personality, but the underlying worldview and backstory that motivates it.
The same goes for Hume’s radical empiricism. Entering into his world means actuallyexperiencing life as a flux of flashing sense data and questioning the coherence of our everyday projections. It’s disconcerting, even disorienting. But if you can immerse yourself in these frameworks, the rewards will be profound. You will see the clarity and brilliance of the thinkers in a way that mere conceptual understanding can’t provide.
In her stunningly clear lectures—as clear as a chrome airhorn on a bright winter day—the preternatural Lavine guides us through just these kinds of transformative experiences. She exposes the core commitments and hidden absurdities within each system, and demands that we confront the real stakes behind the systems we study and take them absolutely seriously. This is not philosophy as intellectual gymnastics—it’s philosophy as immersive and experiential and I dare say devotional.
Join us for a series of sessions that will push us to engage with the true depth of all the fundamental and foundational stuff that everyone loves to skip over and replace with popular caricatures. Lavine will cure you of that real quick. She doesn’t just present ideas; she forces you to method-act the systems from the inside and take a stand.
METHOD
Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE
Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.
She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.
View all of our coming episodes here.
- From Socrates to Sartre ⟩ The Next EpisodeLink visible for attendees
These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.
Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.
When I first saw one of her broadcasts on Public Access, I scoffed and jeered at the odd elements—for about 90 seconds. Then it hit me: her clarity and precision delivered a more powerful impact than anything I’d ever encountered.
Her unmatched ability to transmute the foundational ideas—banalized into clichés by others—into potent, transformative psychedelics turns even the most familiar concepts into insights so profound they catch in your throat.
While Magee is, as Eric Clapton once said, “by far and without a doubt the most gifted philosophical conversationalist alive today,” Lavine’s hypnotic delivery, along with her genius for crafting perfect metaphors and examples, makes her the most masterful foundation-demystifier in Anglophone philosophy. She’s one of a kind and I’m sure you’ll fall in love with her.
Like a Virgin, Seeing Foundations for the Very First Time
Professor Lavine is the tough-love mom I wish I had as a child. And she has a message for all of us non-, partial-, and pseudo-grokkers: foundational mastery in philosophy isn’t about delivering smooth confusionist performances or stringing together philosophical buzzwords. True mastery—the kind Lavine demands—requires effort on the level of authentic self-reinventive cultural immersion or learning a second language. Philosophy, approached seriously, means internalizing the metaphysical and epistemic assumptions of the great thinkers we read and letting them infect and possess us.
Philosophical understanding isn't normal. It requires something not dissimilar to religious conversion—a wholesale transformation of how you see and think about the world. To truly grok Descartes, for example, you cannot simply study his arguments, you have to induce a kind of trance. You have to inhabit the core of his thought, down to the foundations, in the same way an actor might embody a role—not just the personality, but the underlying worldview and backstory that motivates it.
The same goes for Hume’s radical empiricism. Entering into his world means actuallyexperiencing life as a flux of flashing sense data and questioning the coherence of our everyday projections. It’s disconcerting, even disorienting. But if you can immerse yourself in these frameworks, the rewards will be profound. You will see the clarity and brilliance of the thinkers in a way that mere conceptual understanding can’t provide.
In her stunningly clear lectures—as clear as a chrome airhorn on a bright winter day—the preternatural Lavine guides us through just these kinds of transformative experiences. She exposes the core commitments and hidden absurdities within each system, and demands that we confront the real stakes behind the systems we study and take them absolutely seriously. This is not philosophy as intellectual gymnastics—it’s philosophy as immersive and experiential and I dare say devotional.
Join us for a series of sessions that will push us to engage with the true depth of all the fundamental and foundational stuff that everyone loves to skip over and replace with popular caricatures. Lavine will cure you of that real quick. She doesn’t just present ideas; she forces you to method-act the systems from the inside and take a stand.
METHOD
Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE
Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.
She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.
View all of our coming episodes here.
