How to Live Philosophically: Round Two on Love

We’ve had a terrific first workshop in our “How to Live Philosophically” series on the Ancient Greeks! 

Focusing on the figure of Socrates, we've unpacked some key features of living a philosophical life. We learned what it means to genuinely dialogue with others, and how to examine popular values to find out for ourselves what the good life is really all about. We learned the importance of pursuing truth in the face of those who aim to manipulate and distract us, and we started to see how the very process of philosophizing is a transformation of the soul – an enlightenment for the mind, a liberation from the chains of conformity, and a therapy for the suffering brought on by pursuing false goods or self-destructive paths. In our three weeks together in workshop one, we jumped right into the very practice of the philosophical dialogue that sparks such transformations.

Now we're gearing up for our second workshop that focuses on Plato's philosophy of love, as it emerges in his Symposium and Phaedrus. In this workshop we will discover how living the philosophical life has everything to do with the way we handle desire.  Plato will invite us to examine which sorts of objects we love most, the ways in which we relate to those objects, the sorts of partnerships we create in our journey of love, and what sorts of creativity love yields.  We will consider whether we are obsessing about low level love-objects while missing out on a higher kind of love, whether we are attaching ourselves to our beloved in problematic ways, and how we can harness desire to develop the most genuine forms of love.

We hope you will join us for the next round! It is not necessary to have taken workshop one in order to jump in with us for workshop two.  We will meet for three Thursday evenings, July 20th, 27th, and August 3rd, 6:30-8:30 p.m. at Palio Dessert and Espresso House in SE Portland. 

Learn more and register for workshop two called "Plato: Harnessing Desire"  here.