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 all vehemence, just like Number You-Know-Who.
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.”
SADHO’s Guest Experts
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 Mark Bernstein-Anderson 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
7
Jewish Thinkers of Otherness ⟩ Martin Buber
·OnlineOnlineApology
Last time our Buber event was destroyed by the twin tsunamis of Intro and Overview. But the spirit of Buber had other plans. “If you strike me down,” it said, “I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”
And so we orbited Buber with heartfelt pining to understand his deal even as our hosts pretended to do their introduction and overview. Even after explicitly forbidding the discussion of Buber, people were still raring to talk and opine about him. It was almost as if people seriously thought that Buber was as exciting and important as a major philosopher, such as the members of the College Sixteen (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein) or the Lavine Six (Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Sartre).
And so the spirit of Buber entered and spoke through various of us for hours. And in such a way we ended up having a Buber event anyways, thanks to the actual discarnate living person of Buber herself.
Incidentally, after the event we sent out that poll that asked —
“If you didn’t know anything about Buber—which you don’t—which thinker would you use as a stand-in when you pretended to expound on him at an event where you assumed everyone else knew even less than you, and thus felt safe?”
88.3% of participants said, “Rabbi [Harold] Kushner.”
Our interpretation committee hashed this out to mean that people acutally hoped to learn something useful and important about suffering from K’Bubshner. Some said that they “believe” that insight into the generation of selfhood can affect feeling, friendship, and happiness. Others seemed to actually believe that some religious or psychedelic dimension would open for them by understanding the Hegel–Heidegger–Buber current. Others silently stared with hurting Paul-McCartney eyes of hope that the strange murmurings were true.
What can happen? Can the congealing power of understanding really enter into reality and make a diff? Will reading Rabbi Kushner with the absorbing neediness of a traumatized person who wants to experience the pain-annihilating solace of God cause deep change?
The tone had changed. And it made me wonder. And I wanted to ask everyone, like Arthur Fleck’s father did when trying to make young Arthur smile, "Why so passionate?"
The answer to that stirring question is an event—our next one.
We are now finally having an actual official Martin Buber event. Knowing that his spirit actually materialized in the last one has invigorated many of our older members and inspired the younger ones.
THIS TIME: MARTIN BUBER
Our first event in the Jewish Thinkers of Otherness series covers on Martin Buber (1878 – 1965) and advances the “controversial” thesis that the self is not merely socially constructed, but originally and ontologically generated by being addressed.
Friends, we are beginning a series many of us have been circling for years: intimacy, vulnerability, authenticity, love, sex, and the structure of human species-being as such, if we can radicalize Marx’s term to mean “relationally realized capacity that exists only in enactment.” The unsettling thesis of our first episode—on Buber—is not the familiar thesis that “selves are socially constructed.” It is something far more interesting and radical:
- The self does not exist prior to relation.
- The self exists only in being addressed.
Buber’s theory is about what it takes for a self to come into existence at all. The “I” is not a ready-made thing that later enters relationships; the “I” is an event that occurs only in certain modes of encounter. The self is essentially relational—i.e., different modes of relation do not express the same self differently, they generate different kinds of I.
That is good news for anyone who refuses the cynical rightist conclusion that, once degradation appears, the only rational move is to amplify it. It’s scary otherwise, in the way that good things are scary to people who mistake them.
This matters now because we live in a culture that has learned to metabolize other-pain as pleasure. Our public life rewards humiliation, degradation, and the conversion of persons into targets, abstractions, and spectacles. We are mind-manacled by (nearly) all our institutions to relate to others as intelligible objects.
Chomsky’s Moral Compass Axioms for 2026
Check out the following descriptors from our planet’s wisest man about our current situation:
- The suffering of the other is proof of one’s own power.
- Everyone outside the boundary of “us” is a latent rival or threat.
- The safest strategy is to reduce first, dominate first, dehumanize first.
Buber gives a name to the condition that makes these axioms feel obvious rather than monstrous. He calls it the I–It mode. But—and this is crucial—he does not say that I–It is immoral, or that we should simply be kinder. Then what is he saying?
Two Illuminating Parallels
Marx
Marx’s analogous move is not “capitalism is immoral.” It is more diagnostic. He argues that capitalist social relations come to appear as natural facts rather than agentive historical arrangements. Under capitalism, exploitation does not feel cruel, domination does not feel chosen, and alienation does not feel imposed. They feel normal, inevitable—and for schadenfreude majoritarians, a source of sweet tears.
How did this weirdness come about? Marx does not say that capitalism is bad because people are selfish. He says that capitalism is bad because it dulls and reorganizes perception so that social relations appear as relations between things.
Jameson
Here’s another parallel. Jameson argues that the deepest ideological effect is not false belief, but the disappearance of historicity. Ideology works best when the present no longer appears historical at all—when it feels necessary because it feels natural or eternal.
Jameson’s maxim to Always Historicize! doesn’t mean “Add some backstorical context!” or “Recall its origins!” but “Reconstruct the historically engineered conditions of possibility that make the present feel inevitable.”
All that is to say that Buber makes a structurally identical move in the domain of relating. The I–It mode is the enabling condition that makes objectification feel unavoidable rather than catastrophic. Buber does not say I–It is immoral, or that we should be kinder. He says that a world disclosed entirely in I–It is one in which nothing ever addresses us—and therefore one in which our selves never fully comes into being at all!
Buber’s Greatest Hits
- There is no self prior to relation. The “I” of I–Thou and the “I” of I–It are not the same subject adopting different attitudes. They are onto-distinct modes of being. There is no neutral ego shared by both!
- The Other is metaphysically prior to the self. For Levinas, the subject exists and is ethically interrupted. For Buber, the subject comes into being only in address. That’s really strong. (We will return to this difference in Episode Three.)
- The self is second, not first. You do not first exist and then become responsible, as with Levinas. Rather, you exist because you have been addressed. In Scientology and Landmark they tell you, “The self exists entirely in the listening of others; and you are entirely responsible for how you land inside their listening.” The Buber parallel might be, “The self exists in being addressed by the other.” Unsettling!
- Objectification is inevitable—but total objectification is death. A life lived entirely in I–It is a life without a real self.
- Hatred is not the primary evil, replacement is. Turning the Other into something fully intelligible—role, type, enemy—destroys relation before hatred even begins.
- God is not behind the Thou. God is the eternal Thou present only in finite encounters, never possessed, never guaranteed.
Why This Matters for Love, Sex, Loneliness, and Authenticity
Nothing is more important for your love life, your social life, or for having anything like a self, than the capacity for presence without use.
As Robert never tires of reminding us in all his various Meetup events, to the extent that you do not exist for others, you do not exist at all.
Buber’s radical message is that the self isn’t merely shaped by others, it flows from them.
What This Talk Actually Is
Everything above is really just the name of the problem.
In this session, our own dear host David Sternman will situate Martin Buber’s life and work within his intellectual formation—especially his deep engagement with Hegel and Heidegger—and show what Buber accepts, resists, and decisively transforms in that inheritance.
Against dialectical absorption and ontological solitude alike, Buber insists on something stranger and more demanding: a mode of relation that cannot be reduced to use, cognition, identity, or domination.
Outro
Buber is not a comfort philosopher. He offers no reconciliation or assurance. He identifies what divides all encounters with other minds: either the world appears as an object of perception, or it interrupts that stance by addressing you.
The self exists only in such moments of address. Outside them, there is no self to cultivate, repair, or optimize.
Willing the presence of a Thou does not improve the world. It does not persist, and it cannot be retained or accumulated. It merely produces—briefly—an “I” that disappears as soon as the encounter hardens into reflection or use. That may sound negligible. But without such moments, no self ever appears at all.
METHOD
Our Website 2.0 Is Here!
Come into THORR—where summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs await! It’s like paradise, on a webpage:
Something to Read
After 25 hours of deliberation we have finally stocked our Jewish Thinkers of Otherness Book Vault with books. They are transcluded inside our series page:
Something to Watch
Check out “The power of vulnerability” (2010), which has been cued up for you to the Buber part. If you hate inspiring videos, here are two good blurbs you can read:
- 03:16 — By the time you’re a social worker for 10 years, what you realize is that connection is why we’re here. It’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. This is what it’s all about. It doesn’t matter whether you talk to people who work in social justice, mental health and abuse and neglect, what we know is that connection, the ability to feel connected, is — neurobiologically that’s how we’re wired — it’s why we’re here.
- 04:06 — When you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak. When you ask people about belonging, they’ll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. And when you ask people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection.
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.18 attendees
Jewish Thinkers of Otherness ⟩ Hanna Arendt
·OnlineOnlineOur lovely family gatherings with Thelma have now concluded. The prospect of leaving her warm yellow room behind fills me with dread; I suspect many of you feel the same way. We are fledgling birds leaving the nest—and, as such birds do, flailing not only outward but downward.
What better way to steel ourselves for the coming year’s horrors than by increasing our powers of confrontation? Trump and his self-benefiting cronies have turned otherizing schadenfreude into the feel-good drug of the decade. What philosophical topic could possibly help us train as warriors for the light side of the Force in such a crucial, absurdly evil-celebrating time?
I sought counsel from my friends Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Steven Taubeneck, and they offered three stark injunctions:
- Don’t slack off now. Stay strong.
- Don’t escape into opioid entertainments. If you want to recharge, do it by immersing yourself in the pain of rigor and clarity about ultimate concerns. Feel deeply—but keep the critical-intelligence lights on.
- Where possible, shift from Thelma’s panoramic history of Western philosophy to a cohort of Otherness Specialists—researchers who placed otherness at the center of their philosophical work.
Hearing these admonitions set the standard alchemical Great Work process in motion. Recognizing the immensity of the task induced the Nigredo. Digesting it and discovering the common hub brought on the Albedo. Now, as I write, I find myself entering Citrinitas.
In the coming weeks, if fortune smiles, I will reach the Rubedo—together with all of you.
Behold our interim four-part miniseries:
Jewish Thinkers of Otherness: Buber – Arendt – Levinas – Derrida
This series will examine four distinct ways whereby the Other becomes a decisive philosophical event: as presence, as plurality, as ethical asymmetry, and as structural difference.
Each session focuses on one thinker and one conceptual pathway, presented by a brave member of our community—currently experiencing performance anxiety about presenting to a group of critical Others. But they have no need to worry, because Jedi Master Professor Steven Taubeneck will be on hand to answer the hard hard questions and prevent us from cheating, lying, fabricating, speculating, and bluffing.
This generic placeholder description will be updated once our courageous presenters send in their outlines. For now, mark your calendars, join the discussion, and prepare for a series that explores how twentieth-century thought reconceived relation, responsibility, and alterity at the deepest and most disquieting levels.
METHOD
TBA
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs of the episodes we cover can be found here:
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.7 attendees
Jewish Thinkers of Otherness ⟩ Emmanuel Levinas
·OnlineOnlineOur lovely family gatherings with Thelma have now concluded. The prospect of leaving her warm yellow room behind fills me with dread; I suspect many of you feel the same way. We are fledgling birds leaving the nest—and, as such birds do, flailing not only outward but downward.
What better way to steel ourselves for the coming year’s horrors than by increasing our powers of confrontation? Trump and his self-benefiting cronies have turned otherizing schadenfreude into the feel-good drug of the decade. What philosophical topic could possibly help us train as warriors for the light side of the Force in such a crucial, absurdly evil-celebrating time?
I sought counsel from my friends Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Steven Taubeneck, and they offered three stark injunctions:
- Don’t slack off now. Stay strong.
- Don’t escape into opioid entertainments. If you want to recharge, do it by immersing yourself in the pain of rigor and clarity about ultimate concerns. Feel deeply—but keep the critical-intelligence lights on.
- Where possible, shift from Thelma’s panoramic history of Western philosophy to a cohort of Otherness Specialists—researchers who placed otherness at the center of their philosophical work.
Hearing these admonitions set the standard alchemical Great Work process in motion. Recognizing the immensity of the task induced the Nigredo. Digesting it and discovering the common hub brought on the Albedo. Now, as I write, I find myself entering Citrinitas.
In the coming weeks, if fortune smiles, I will reach the Rubedo—together with all of you.
Behold our interim four-part miniseries:
Jewish Thinkers of Otherness: Buber – Arendt – Levinas – Derrida
This series will examine four distinct ways whereby the Other becomes a decisive philosophical event: as presence, as plurality, as ethical asymmetry, and as structural difference.
Each session focuses on one thinker and one conceptual pathway, presented by a brave member of our community—currently experiencing performance anxiety about presenting to a group of critical Others. But they have no need to worry, because Jedi Master Professor Steven Taubeneck will be on hand to answer the hard hard questions and prevent us from cheating, lying, fabricating, speculating, and bluffing.
This generic placeholder description will be updated once our courageous presenters send in their outlines. For now, mark your calendars, join the discussion, and prepare for a series that explores how twentieth-century thought reconceived relation, responsibility, and alterity at the deepest and most disquieting levels.
METHOD
TBA
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs of the episodes we cover can be found here:
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.8 attendees
Jewish Thinkers of Otherness ⟩ Our Time Comprehended in Thought
·OnlineOnlineOur lovely family gatherings with Thelma have now concluded. The prospect of leaving her warm yellow room behind fills me with dread; I suspect many of you feel the same way. We are fledgling birds leaving the nest—and, as such birds do, flailing not only outward but downward.
What better way to steel ourselves for the coming year’s horrors than by increasing our powers of confrontation? Trump and his self-benefiting cronies have turned otherizing schadenfreude into the feel-good drug of the decade. What philosophical topic could possibly help us train as warriors for the light side of the Force in such a crucial, absurdly evil-celebrating time?
I sought counsel from my friends Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Steven Taubeneck, and they offered three stark injunctions:
- Don’t slack off now. Stay strong.
- Don’t escape into opioid entertainments. If you want to recharge, do it by immersing yourself in the pain of rigor and clarity about ultimate concerns. Feel deeply—but keep the critical-intelligence lights on.
- Where possible, shift from Thelma’s panoramic history of Western philosophy to a cohort of Otherness Specialists—researchers who placed otherness at the center of their philosophical work.
Hearing these admonitions set the standard alchemical Great Work process in motion. Recognizing the immensity of the task induced the Nigredo. Digesting it and discovering the common hub brought on the Albedo. Now, as I write, I find myself entering Citrinitas.
In the coming weeks, if fortune smiles, I will reach the Rubedo—together with all of you.
Behold our interim four-part miniseries:
Jewish Thinkers of Otherness: Buber – Arendt – Levinas – Derrida
This series will examine four distinct ways whereby the Other becomes a decisive philosophical event: as presence, as plurality, as ethical asymmetry, and as structural difference.
Each session focuses on one thinker and one conceptual pathway, presented by a brave member of our community—currently experiencing performance anxiety about presenting to a group of critical Others. But they have no need to worry, because Jedi Master Professor Steven Taubeneck will be on hand to answer the hard hard questions and prevent us from cheating, lying, fabricating, speculating, and bluffing.
This generic placeholder description will be updated once our courageous presenters send in their outlines. For now, mark your calendars, join the discussion, and prepare for a series that explores how twentieth-century thought reconceived relation, responsibility, and alterity at the deepest and most disquieting levels.
METHOD
TBA
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs of the episodes we cover can be found here:
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.5 attendees
Past events
145
