Philosophy Portal

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New publication, new course, and more coming soon

Theory Underground EU Tour, Absolute Salon, and more...

This past weekend Philosophy Portal helped launch the Theory Underground EU Book Tour in Paris. We hosted Theory Underground in collaboration with psychoanalyst Sinziana Ravini in The Absolute Salon. You can find a summary and some background for that event here:

Seminars for the School of Thinking Year Upsilon 2023-24

Dialectical, Unconscious, Portal Thinking

Towards the end of my doctorate at the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), I was involved in a project that became the School of Thinking (SOT). The School of Thinking had the goal of opening up a new relationship to thinking, through the institutionalisation of what we might call an “ecology of thought/concept”. The ecology of thought/concept is a process whereby students are exposed to different forms of thinking as such (e.g. cognitivist, systems, complexity, ethical, etc.). Each teacher in the School of Thinking is responsible for teaching a different form of thinking. Since its inception, my role has been to teach dialectical thinking. So far there have been four iterations of the program. This year, not only did I divide up my sessions at the School of Thinking into Dialectical Thinking, Unconscious Thinking and Portal Thinking, but I recorded the audio to make it available to a general audience on Philosophy Portal. 1. The seminar on dialectical thinking explores the nature of this form of thinking as a move from “worldview” to “ecology of concept” to “structure of ancient philosophical thinking” to the “structure of modern philosophical thinking”.

with Barry Taylor, Nina Power, Pamela von Sabljar

Month of Jouissance

The first three months at The Portal have been a blast and a huge learning experience. We have the foundations for a fantastic learning and thinking community, and I could not be more grateful to those of you who have made that possible. Moreover, in this first three months, I was able to surprise myself in deriving the same concept scheme that ended up structuring my original dialogos sessions with Kevin Orosz and Daniel Dick in the creation of the book: Sex, Masculinity, God. In other words, the first three months were organised under the themes Libido, Communism, Sacred; and I recognised the similarity with the structure Sex, Masculinity, God. In order to make this a little more reflexive and in service of The Portal project, I have decided to move forward in The Portal with the repetition of this triadic structure, as opposed to just designing months with different themes in a spurious open-ended way. So moving forward, the meta-thematic structure of The Portal will repeat the following categories:

The next Philosophy Portal course starts May 18th

Special Announcement: Hegel's Philosophy of Right

Philosophy Portal has taught five courses in its first 2.5 years of operation. This year we launch our first course of the year focused on Hegel's Philosophy of Right. This course teaching will be extending our Hegelian curriculum, which currently includes the Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic. The Philosophy of Right is important for us today because it represents Hegel's most mature political notion, and specifically his theory of the State as it relates to both World Spirit and Absolute Freedom.

and a collaboration with the Center for Process Studies

Month of the Sacred

We are two months into The Portal experiment. In the first two months we explored the theme of libido and the theme of communism with very special guests and a growing thinking community which is a joy to think with. You can find some of our public livestreams below if you are interested in getting to know some of our core members.

Special Announcement!: Écrits Conference 

Writing For (a) First Cause

I am excited to announce that the fourth Philosophy Portal conference will be hosted in less than 2 weeks. On Saturday February 24th and Sunday February 25th we invite many of the students, assistants, teachers, and special guests of Philosophy Portal's Lacan's Écrits course to present on themes related to Lacanian psychoanalysis and his Écrits. To attend the event, please visit the conference page for the event, click the registration button, and submit your name and email information. I will be creating a special mailing list for the conference weekend so I can send protected links for the different major sections of the event.

The second month at The Portal begins February 4th

The Month of Communism

A close friend told me that he doesn't want to be associated with the word "communism".

The first month of the Philosophy Portal live event space

The Month of Libido

Last month I announced the launch of the live event space. This month I am happy to announce the first active month of the live event space! (To learn more, or to sign up for January, see: The Month of Libido)

Membership for 2024 gives access to four monthly live events designed to learn core concepts, explore ideas with great thinkers, and open new discursive spaces 

Announcing: Philosophy Portal Live Events

Philosophy Portal is 2 years old! Throughout this time we have been focused on a certain design that serves a great purpose: teaching foundational philosophical texts oriented towards collective conferences and anthologies that can impact our larger cultural moment.

Philosophy Portal is celebrating its 2nd birthday, some reflections on what has been achieved, and hopes for the future from the new present.

Philosophy Portal is a 2 Year Old!

In November of 2021 I launched Philosophy Portal in an announcement for an online course focused on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Since then I have been hard at work building out what to my mind would represent an ideal philosophical curriculum. So far we have focused our efforts on teaching Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Hegel's Science of Logic, Zupančič's What Is Sex? and Lacan's Écrits (on-going). The result looks something like this!: