NESTLING a pint of lager while contemplating the ills of the world might sound a little like drowning your sorrows at the bar, but the Perth Philosophy Circle has a different take on things.
They’ve been running wildly successful Pub Philosophy lectures at Clancy’s Fish Pub in Fremantle, with the next one getting underway this Monday, August 19 from 6.30pm.
PhD candidate and event organiser Kyle Gleadell said he and his fellow philosophy students started the circle in 2018 to address, understand and question the contemporary crises of self and society in an accessible environment.
“The mark of a healthy society is one that can question itself,” he said.
“It is crucial that we leave time to critically question the world we live in.”
“It is this penchant to critically question that makes us human. And it is this questioning that we hope to nurture in our evenings of philosophical engagement.”
Mr Gleadell said he has been overwhelmed by the lectures’ popularity.
“The first lecture saw a line of 150 people trailing out of the front door. The venue was capped at 90 people and so we had to turn people away,” he said.
The upcoming lecture Left-Wing Melancholia is part of a broader series on “Daring to think for oneself”.
The Circle’s website says it tackles the dangers that “rabbit holes”, “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles” pose to critical thinking, especially in the digital sphere.
Murdoch University philosophy professor Lubica Ucnik’s gave this year’s first lecture on The Enlightenment and said its emphasis on educating people about the inner workings of their civic state so they could more effectively participate was still valid.
Prof Ucnik said education was viewed more like a business enterprise in the current age.
“This needs to be questioned,” she said.
“It is the problem of consumer culture replacing all other ‘values’ that we have inherited from the tradition, while reducing everything into business transactions.”
Prof Ucnik said the issue was tied to today’s flood of information.
“Information is not knowledge, it is context-less, or context-free, and it is not giving us the ‘general’ and historic understanding of the present.
“You can have an onslaught of information, without understand anything at all.”
by JOEL HALL