How are you here? You’re like an idea. A great idea. Sasha assumes, like most of us, that ideas are impoverished abstractions of material reality. Plato, however, held the opposite view—called idealism—in which ideas are more real than their mere material instantiations. In his dialogue Phaedo, set as a last discussion with Socrates before his execution, Plato…
Are you striving to live someone else's definition of a good life? When you've got an atypical brain, you got to have atypical ambitions. Too often we unintentionally inherit an idea of a good life from our parents, cultural background, peers, and institutions. But it is always possible to reconnect with what would be most…
About Robin Hanson's book Elephant In the Brain (co-written by Kevin Simler): "Human beings are primates, and primates are political animals. Our brains are therefore designed not just to hunt…
In 2023, Kiubon Kokko was awarded a $100,000 fellowship grant by O'Shaughnessy Ventures to create a feature documentary about his father's 10-12 hour swim from communist China to Hong Kong in 1973. In this salon, Kiubon will talk about what led to him undertake this project: the challenges he and his family faced in the…
Join us for an in-person Interintellect gathering where curiosity leads the way! As fall settles in and the seasons change, it’s the perfect time to come together in beautiful Old Town Alexandria. We’ll kick things off by exploring the themes of seasonality, friendships, and community, but as always, the conversation can go anywhere—from philosophy and…
Writer Henry Oliver continues the Western Canon Book Club series with a salon about the birth of Romanticism. Turgenev's greatest novel is one of the greatest Russian novels of the nineteenth century. A response to the new generation of nihilists, who saw the world very differently from their liberal fathers, this is a very resonant…
Join Gina for a return of the Self-Compassion series this October! We will continue discussing Self-Compassion tips, insights, theories and more, diving more deeply into the relationships between Self-Compassion and Performance (physical, career and social!) For our first session, I encourage you to bring a piece of poetry or writing you adore or have written…
This year marked the 40th anniversary of the death of Michel Foucault, by some measures the most widely cited academic of the past hundred years. Often vilified on the right and celebrated—though arguably poorly understood—on the left, Foucault has cast a shadow over recent debates ranging from gender and sexuality and pandemic policy to policing…
Join host Thomas Arnold with your questions, scenarios, hopes, and fears about AI, as we explore with Julian Togelius author of "Artificial General Intelligence", what the horizon of AI looks like today and what his book might help us notice. Amid so much hype about Artificial General Intelligence (whose arrival is now cast in thousands…
Hollywood screenwriter Michael Sonnenschein, The Common Reader essayist, literary critic, and Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life writer Henry Oliver, and former screenwriter-playwright and now…
Solidarity is often invoked, but it is rarely analyzed and poorly understood. Leah and Astra together developed the first in-depth examination and intellectual history of solidarity. We will discuss the…
Join hosts Alaka Halder and Benjamin Woosley for a casual meetup at Easy Tiger in North Austin! This Interintellect offline gathering is a casual meetups devoted to open group discussions of the topics that interest participants the most. From philosophy to science and art, there is nothing that escapes our inquiries! Come, forge new friendships,…
