About us
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
11
Modernism EP01 ⟩ “The Mechanical Paradise”
·OnlineOnlineWhat IS Modernism?
We are doing Robert Hughes’ eight-part BBC series The Shock of the New.
The series is another epoch-making BBC2 masterpiece. (BBC2 masterpieces is why our Meetup group was originally started.)
Each thesis will excite a thousand revelations in you. You’ll be pausing it so often to take notes that the sun will rise and set before you can finish a single episode.
The reason for doing art history in a philosophy group is that, when you do art history from a philosophy mindset, you’re forced to drag in the whole causal swamp: technology, war, sex, cities, empire, boredom, money, advertising, religion, machines, the unconscious, political fantasy, the body, the museum, the market. All of it comes in, because art is the best diagnostic surface for reading the Zeitgeist. To do phenomenology well, you have to know what metaphors are currently holding our fake reality together. Art history gets us closest to the metaphorical infrastructure that philosophy needs to articulate anything at all.
Hughes is the peerless shockographer of Modernism. See him show us the moment around 1880–1914, when the old world began losing its obviousness. The Eiffel Tower, electric light, cars, planes, radio, cinema, mass newspapers, and the modern city did not merely add use values. They changed how space, time, movement, publicity, and distance were perceived, and so were.
People suddenly could travel farther, know faster, compare more, see more, want more, and imagine more possible lives. As Karl Marx said, capitalism was the best thing that ever happened. For us today, who are already schizoid and dissociated beyond repair, it’s old hat. But to be alive then and experience this transformation of cognition-perception-experience-reality was massively disorienting—hence “shocking.”
The older situation — stable place, inherited manners, religious or civic continuity, recognizable craft, realist depiction, perspectival space — no longer held the same authority. Inherited locality and realism weakened. People became less securely situated in any single world. All that was solid melted into air. The old reality husks (the old certainties of perspective and narration) still existed, but they had been exposed as BS—i.e., they had become historical. And once an intersubjective hallucination becomes historical, it can be broken, parodied, rebuilt, accelerated, abstracted, or sold back to you as spectacle.
Fredric Jameson gives us a useful way to read that transformation. Modernist art belongs to the moment when artists can no longer treat form as a neutral container for content. The old trusty idioms became less relevant to the reality people were now living in. So the modernists start messing with the idiom itself. The canvas, the sentence, the camera, the building, the machine, the stage, the grid, the commodity image, temporal atom, the act of construction itself, the medium itself.
The goal was no longer accurate perception and duplication of something real. The artist becomes mason, engineer, saboteur, medium, machine-lover, machine-hater, and sometimes priest of pure form. Something weird had started.
Cubism and abstraction will be especially important for us, because they change the level of the problem. Cubism still cares about the object, but the object has to be built, not merely copied. Abstract art asks where value can live when there is no recognizable object left at all. That is already philosophy, whether anyone wants to call it that or not.
For Heidegger and Gadamer, art is the event in which truth appears. Plato wanted to exile the artists, but then had to use myth anyway. That old embarrassment—the reliance of science on myth—has never gone away.
My private reason for doing this is old and embarrassing. When I was twenty, I arrived at Duke as a cultural illiterate. The list of books I had voluntarily read was the following:
- The Hobbit.
- Dick Smith’s Do-It-Yourself Monster Make-Up Handbook
But Duke had Jameson — the smartest, most important, and most scandalous professor in the country. The Duke Review and the Young Republicans could not understand why he was there, except as a civilizational emergency. “Why so serious?” I wondered. So I forced myself to take a LIT class to see what the fuss was all about.
It was a nightmare. I was surrounded by a sea of cocky black turtlenecks who snickered at all my stupid questions and answers. Many of these people were reading Mallarmé when they were infants. Meanwhile, there I was struggling to understand how anyone in their right mind could take literature seriously, especially America’s smartest human.
The answer, of course, is that we humans are mere fruiting bodies. Underneath us run the real stuff—the mycelia: the buried automating logics of culture. Art is one of the places where those logics expose themselves. A culture begins to find out what its world has become by making images, forms, rhythms, buildings, stories, and monsters long before it knows how to explain them.
Modernism matters because the world it tried to picture was no longer the old world built on the Fallacies Three (majority, authority, and tradition). Enter machines, mass cities, great speed, new media, empire, capitalist culture, war, the mind industry, mall zombies, fractured time, and, eventually, the unmappable Bonaventure Hotel. Why and how did these weird things happen in just the ways they did?
Hughes will tell us. But the real work is to use the series as a way of asking what kind of material-felt-perceived world of earnestness and substantial life needed Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and the architecture of power.
We are officially doing art history, but we are really doing meta-philosophy: looking at the images, metaphors, machines, and fantasies that feed theory.
So hop aboard the Hughes train and learn a thing or two about where your desires, tastes, values, and reality tunnel were manufactured.
METHOD
- Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.
- As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)
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.
15 attendees
Modernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Modernization
·OnlineOnlineWhat is Modernism?
[TBP]
METHOD
- Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.
- As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)
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.
4 attendeesModernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Modernization
·OnlineOnlineWhat is Modernism?
[TBP]
METHOD
- Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.
- As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)
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.
4 attendeesModernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Modernization
·OnlineOnlineWhat is Modernism?
[TBP]
METHOD
- Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.
- As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)
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.
4 attendees
Past events
155
