LitPDX seeks to amplify marginalized voices, and welcomes all, their ideas, their events, and their words.

For details regarding specific events please contact the organizers or venues. If you are an organizer or venue and would like to reach out to us please feel free to contact us or submit an event using our submission form. We’d love to hear from you!

bennett gilbert

  1. Events
  2. bennett gilbert

Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

Delve Fall 2019: The Pre-Socratic Thinkers: The Greeks on Gods, Humanity, and Nature Before Socrates

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

The Pre-Socratic thinkers lived from about 650 to about 450 B.C.E. in the towns along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, and many of the Greek islands, throughout Thrace and Pelopenesos on the Greek mainland, and in the Greek colonies of Sicily and southern Italy. Their world included the heroes of Homer and the hard virtues of the archaic life of farming, warfare, and trade, as well the arts and music of the Greek peoples. A precious group of fragmented passages from the first thinkers in what became the Western tradition of philosophy and science have survived as an inspired and marvelously varied set of views on human life and ethics, on nature, on the gods, and on the question of what reality itself is. Their…

Continue readingDelve Fall 2019: The Pre-Socratic Thinkers: The Greeks on Gods, Humanity, and Nature Before Socrates
$220

Delve Readers Seminars: William James: Inventing an American Philosophy

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The philosophy of William James (1842–1910) has had world-wide influence, and yet it is in many ways an essentially American view of the nature and humanity. James was a psychologist by training. This study led him to develop his unique view of human experience, out of which grew his profound concept of the nature of knowledge and reality as the way in which we act in the world and experience life. In this seminar, we will discuss a few of James’s most important essays in general philosophy, ethics, psychology, and religion in order to grasp the force of his simple but revolutionary ideas. The Will to Believe by William James Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James Delve Access Program We want Delve seminars to…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminars: William James: Inventing an American Philosophy
$220

Delve Readers Seminars Online Fall 2020: The Essays of Michel de Montaigne

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

There are few things more pleasurable than conversing with the great master of the essay, Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592). Sarah Bakewill’s excellent How to Live: A life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer (2011) has inspired wide current interest in Montaigne as a writer whom readers uncannily feel they know—our contemporary. He lived in a deeply contested and divided society, to which his answer was to become the greatest reader of his age. His essays, among the best ever written, bring all of life into discussion: from birth to death, from his hometown to the New World being explored and exploited in his day, all the virtues and the vices, cannibals and cats, drunkenness, books he read, names, thumbs, coaches,…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminars Online Fall 2020: The Essays of Michel de Montaigne
$150

Delve Readers Seminar: Søren Kierkegaard: What is Our Situation?

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In the six meetings of our Delve seminar we will read selections from books by Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), a philosopher of the highest importance and influence in general philosophy, moral philosophy, and religious thought. In Western philosophy, he stands with Plato and Nietzsche alone as a literary stylist of the greatest genius. The most familiar characterization of Kierkegaard is that he is the founder of existentialism. In this seminar we will try as best we can to look at him with fresh eyes. Most of us have never met a person like him. We’ve known lots of rebels, and lots of amazingly human and loving persons, lots of intense cranks and some brilliant conversationalists, and probably a few geniuses. But a person who combines all…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Søren Kierkegaard: What is Our Situation?
$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Tove Jansson: The Summer Book

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

If you already know Tove Jansson as the author and illustrator of the Moominfamily stories and comic strips, you will meet her in this Delve seminar as the author of her superb The Summer Book. This is a novel that is so deep and yet so apparently casual that it will repay the close reading we will give it in this four-week seminar. We will also observe her imagination for fiction in her short stories, letters, and other works. But we won’t forget the Moomins, for life on the island in The Summer Book echoes life in the Moominvalley. These books and a look at Jansson’s artwork will help us understand the fascinating account of the passages of life that The Summer Book gives us.…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Tove Jansson: The Summer Book
$160

Delve Readers Seminar: Henri Bergson and the Revolution in Time

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

In 1889 Henri Bergson’s (1858-1941) bestseller Time and Free Will inaugurated a vast revolution of the understanding of time in world philosophy that was a keystone in the literature, art, and philosophy of the modern world. After an eclipse of his reputation for some decades, Bergson’s ideas have returned as one of the most powerful forces in the renewal of our attitudes toward nature and the cosmos today. We will read his startlingly elegant, clear, and persuasive expositions of these appealing concepts in Time and Free Will, Creative Evolution, and other works. We will also explore the thought of the scientists and philosophers who have continued to develop his seminal insights. In-Person Seminar Note: This seminar meets in-person at Literary Arts, 925 SW Washington. Access…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Henri Bergson and the Revolution in Time
$245

Delve Readers Seminar: Plato On Love

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

The Symposium by Plato asks: what is love? It is the story of a banquet in classical Athens, attended by Socrates and his friends, at which each person tells a story about the origin of Love. These stories are full of deep psychological insight, powerful mythic imagination, and profound philosophical reflection that have made The Symposium one of the masterpieces of world literature and a crowning work of philosophy. Bawdy and sentimental, drunk and wise by turns, with a surprising turn of events near the end, each story illuminates a striking part of the human condition. The event is crowned by Socrates’ own story, telling us the origin of his gift and portraying the nature of the world in terms of Love. Throughout the night,…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Plato On Love
$245
Click a category label below to view the calendar with only events in that specific category.