Sydney’s Philosophy in the Café - Philo Agora.

We meet at the Fair Trade Coffee Company, 33 Glebe Point Road, Glebe, at 7.30pm on alternate Tuesdays.

A fortnightly exchange of ideas on the issues facing ourselves and our world within a philosophical format. A talk relating to a philosopher, philosophy or philosophical theme.

The Philo Agora committee wishes you all a belated Merry Christmas and hopes that your coming year is all you can wish for. We also pass on our thanks to Cara who is leaving the committee because of her increased work comittments. However, do not despair, she still intends to stay on as an attendee.

As a consequence, we are looking for willing members who can lend a hand on our Tuesday nights, either chairing, collecting money, or the subliminal meet and greet. Please let us know if you are interested either by return email or seeing any of us the next time we get together.

On this note, as we won't be kicking off until the first Tuesday in March with Dorothy Rowe at Gleebooks, some members have exoressed an interest in getting together on Tuesday the 12th of January. The cafe will only be opening 7 to 7 during January, but Roger is prepared to stay open that night if sufficient people committ to coming along. Can you please respond to this email and we'll tick tack with everyone if it is viable. Maybe a 6:30 start with the night simply being a discussion group.

Finally, as a Christmas gift to you, following is the article, Socratic Dialogues, by Alan Saunders published in the October Monthly. He has given us permission to reproduce his original piece.

Regards,

Hazel, Peter and Sam.

Socratic Dialogues 

“My idea of heaven is sitting in my garden with the sun on my back, a cup of tea and someone I love,” says a woman at the back of the room.  It’s a marginally philosophical claim and, like many such, invites more questions than it answers.  Is she saying that heaven is just a blissful moment?  Or a series of blissful moments?  Is it not possible, though, that heaven, if it must be on earth, will be found not in the single, joyous instant but in a whole life well lived?  Should we, though, call that heaven, rather than, say, just a good life?

Well, at the very least, it does no harm to kick these ideas around.  And people do like this sort of thing.  These days, there are philosophy cafes in Melbourne, in Sydney, throughout the English-speaking world and, naturally, in France, where they started.  France, I suspect, is behind it all, which is why we tend to prefer our philosophy in cafes rather than pubs or parks.  Lurking in the minds of those of us who attend these gatherings is a romantic folk memory of the cafes of Paris: the Procope, where Voltaire might drink forty cups of coffee a day, or the Deux Magots, where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir talked existentialism.

I bet it wasn’t philosophy all the way in these places.  Some nights it was probably just Voltaire talking about the purgatives he took or Simone telling Jean-Paul off for eyeing up Juliet Greco, but these days we’re more focussed.  Philosophy is no longer just a by-product of our gatherings and we rely on the people who get us together to swap ideas.

For three years, Philoagora has been doing this every fortnight.  (The name derives from the ancient Athenian agora, where you could shop for ideas as well as commodities, though, actually, if it means anything. ‘Philoagora’ means love of the market place.)  They take over a large homely room - walls covered with matting, baskets of flowers dangling from the corrugated metal ceiling - which seems to have been tacked on at the back of an inner-city café.  A modest fee gets you a seat at a table and there’s a short philosophical talk followed by responses from the audience.

And the audience?  Who goes to this sort of event, when they could be at the place opposite eating tapas or up the road at the pub?  The ages range from young to old, though bulging, it should be said, in the middle or just beyond it.  There are one or two willowy young women in long dresses with floaty hair, but, these people are, by and large, dressed for comfort: these are not your groovy, inner-city latte types.
 
“I would guess they’re 95% university educated,” says Peter Bowden, one of the founders of Philoagora, who teaches ethics at the University of Sydney. “We try to be a philosophy café for the people.  We try to talk about how we lead our lives, so we discourage actively people who get too academic.  We’ve turned down a talker who can’t relate philosophy to ordinary people.”
 
In pursuit of ideas that are about us, they’ve recently had talks on suicide, hypocrisy in politics and the relevance of philosophy of science to real science, but there’s one subjects that never fails: “Anything on God and religion brings them out,” Peter Bowden tells me. “We had one on Dawkins and we had them flowing out into the streets.”
 
Religion in on the agenda tonight, though the numbers present do not consitute a hazard to traffic.  The question is whether heaven is an effectual reward and our speaker thinks that it isn’t.  There are many conflicting descriptions of Heaven in religious texts, but what could the place be like?  It possibly wouldn’t be all that interesting, especially if you were stuck there for all eternity, and the promise of it is probably an insufficient incentive to exemplary behaviour

The talk is, it has to be said, a bit light on philosophical detail (which perhaps is fair enough, given that few philosophers have had much to say about what eternal life would be like).  The audience, though, is attentive and enthusiastic.

A hand-held microphone is passed around and everybody, more or less, has something to say, giving testimony as though this were a revivalist religious meeting.  “We try to encourage the more shy people,” explains Peter Bowden.  “We jokingly say they’re not invited back if they don’t pick up the microphone.”

There are rules here.  Each contribution is limited to a couple of minutes, nobody is allowed to dominate, and there is no conversation, because we have to be out by nine.  The philosophers who gather at Café Thang in Melbourne have gone so far as to publish a set of rules: “Listen for the wisdom in simple ideas.  Above all never demean or insult anyone.  Be reasonable, and provide as far as you can, reasons for your viewpoint.  Examine others’ reasoning and help them reason more clearly.  Avoid unnecessary sidetracking.”

Tonight, we hear about somebody’s near-death experience and there’s a woman who thinks that the idea of heaven is a way of helping us deal with loss.  One man says that his dog cringes when there’s lighting: perhaps once we all cringed when there was lighting and so invented Heaven and God as way of coping with life.

“A lot of simple souls need some concept of heaven to get through,” says someone with the air of an old -style leftie.  Governments, he thinks, use the idea of heaven to manipulate us and get us to fight in their wars.

Another man – and this is perhaps the most acutre observation of the evening – thinks that eternal life and eternal damnation are excessive rewards for a life lived well or badly.  Surely a millions dollars if you’re good or a day’s torture if you’re bad would be about right – but eternity?

There was bad news, though, in the world of ideas: the café’s kitchen was closed and, if you wanted to eat, you had to eat cake.  If you’re in need of a decent meal with your deep thoughts, you’ll probably have to go to London, where the ‘School of Life’ – whose ‘ambassadors’, their word, include the noted philosophical populariser Alain de Botton – offers regular dinners (£50 for three courses and wine) so that strangers can come together in some of London’s best restaurants for conversation menus designed to encourage chat about things that matter.

What, one wonders, would Socrates have made of it?  He thought that one should eat only to live, and certainly not eat to live.  This is not the only reason why he’s an unpromising hero for the modern philosophy café.  The Philoagora people may yearn for the days when you might be buttonholed by the old guy while you were strolling across the marketplace, but would they, would any of us, really enjoy the relentless questioning of everything we hold dear, made all the more annoying by his habit of protesting his own ignorance?  No wonder his fellow Athenians made him swallow the hemlock.  He really wasn’t a café sort of guy.