Scott & Dave’s High Ontology

SADHO is a curiosity-driven philosophy Meetup devoted to difficult ideas, exceptionally well explained. This, as those in-the-know know, is intrinsically pleasurable and is the core pleasure of philosophizing.

Our interests range across philosophy, intellectual history, (history of) science, art (history), the political unconscious, and critical theory, with a recurring fascination for the largely automatic, socially shared ways in which human beings construct meaning and value and thereby make their world(s).

Here at humble SADHO, we follow a simple, simple-minded, and simpletonian motto:

• What can be said at all can be said clearly; and what cannot be said clearly must not be padded with twenty minutes of biography, inferential cheating, semantic fog, and delivered in the soothing slime of pretended knowingness.

This is our Regulative Ideal.

Concerning the Goddess PERSPICUITAS

Recall now Hans Küng’s reconstruction of Christian soteriology:

“Our hearts have been torn from us by robot claws mounted on long lazy tongs extending from the CMB. They rip our hearts out and then retract! Thus our hearts go flying out before us, pulled backward by the receding lazy tongs into the CMB, which is, for us, the spiritual body of the conjoined twin-god, the One True God, PERSPICUITAS.”

This founding myth is necessary because ordinary prose cannot adequately express how intensely we dislike bad explanations of interesting things that can be understood when you choose the right metaphor, model, idiom, formalism, and angle of attack.

You’d be surprised by how deep your understanding can penetrate, and how subtle the energies you can intuit.

What We Actually Do

SADHO meetings normally combine three things:

1. A superb audiovisual exposition of some major philosophical, scientific, historical, artistic, or political problem;
2. A serious but convivial discussion of it; and
3. A philosophy professor, PhD, or other Guest Expert.

SADHO makes scholarship fun by serving up the greatest embodied minds of all time in bite-sized, Technicolor, beautifully arranged morsels, and by bringing bona fide experts to the table for special lectures and Q&A.

In a word, SADHO is a fun, friendly, frolicsome, fleet-footed, (non-)free-form* forum for philosophizing, fostering fellowship alongside and under the tutelage of (sometimes) famous professional and practicing philosophers.

Our Method

The designers of The Villiage left us two immortal pedagogical principles:

1. Questions are a burden to others; answers are a prison for oneself.
2. A still tongue makes a happy life.

We follow these principles only on Opposite Day.
At every other meeting, we violate them vigorously.

SADHO’s First Promise

• SADHO’s First Promise — Our excursions and tangents will never stray outside the event’s topical Kuiper Belt.

Unlike other philosophy Meetup groups, whose discussions drift all over the Solar System, our high-quality discussions remain firmly within the Kuiper Belt. That’s our promise to you.

Sound impossible? It’s not. The reason is that SADHO Meetups are … not actually free-form. They are anchored and constrained by a force.

A great force.

A force more powerful than even Vader …

The all-conquering force of radical insight, expressed vividly and clearly, by a master teacher.

There is nothing better than an illuminating and meticulously lucid discourse delivered by a riveting and intensely expressive person. Add to this a great video, diagram, or model, and you have the makings of peak experience.

This force flows neither from Scott & Dave, nor from the great topics we choose, but from the the expository virtuosos that elucidate these topics—i.e., from our Guest Experts and the BBC2 Four.

SADHO’s Second Promise

• SADHO’s Second Promise — Our meetings will always include either a qualified Guest Expert or a member of the BBC2 Four.

If SADHO worships anything, it’s clear speaking. That’s it. That’s the big overarching theme and First Principle that drives all our decision making. Consequently, we spotlight the crème de la crème of English-speaking educators and dive into skillfully (or manically) curated discussions, underpinned by top-tier production values and rigorous preparation. Said educators include both (a) living professional philosophers and (b) those pedagogical giants known as the “BBC2 Four.”

SADHO’s Guest Experts

Our Guest Experts are top professors from the North Americas. So far, we have hosted the likes of:

1. Harry Cleaver
2. Douglas Kellner
3. Cory Juhl
4. Ian Proops
5. Steven Taubeneck
6. Stephen Phillips

The BBC2 Four

SADHO meetings also (and almost always) revolve around recorded performances by the greatest scientific, historical, and philosophical exegetes of all time. While incarnated on the Prime Material plane, these lofty ones were known as Jacob Bronowski, James Burke, Kenneth Clark, and Bryan Magee. These pedagogical saints, these BBC2 Four (aka the British Broadcasting Bards, the Philosophical Fab Four, the BBC-M, etc.) will be our guides.

Here they are again in list view:

1. Jacob Bronowski
2. James Burke
3. Kenneth Clark
4. Bryan Magee
5. Thelma Zeno Lavine
6. Robert Hughes

What can one say about the BBC2 Four that hasn’t already been said? If you’re American, you may recognize them as those insanely great explainers who somehow appeared on American television only because PBS had the good sense to import British civilization through its licensing and distribution arrangements with the BBC.

Their work is so widely acclaimed and so manifestly magnificent that finding new words of praise feels like an almost impossible task. I feel compelled to return to Shakespeare, who took great pains to describe the BBC2 Four in that memorable passage from Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1, lines 45–65 (as interpreted by Dave Thomas):

“These engrossing masters of elegant exposition; these dexterous wordsmiths of rhetorical Fabergé eggs; these benevolent ministers of restorative mind-tonics; these tireless disciples of skillful means; these master-architects of felicitous visual models, diagrams, and schemas; these altruistic wielders of knot-cutting logicks; these humble and plain-speaking sweepers of cobwebs; these irreverent deflators of metaphysical extravagance; these fortresses of excellence, built by Oxford for England against intellectual infection; these view-transforming founts of illuminating metaphor; these poetic alchemists of feeling and idea; these massively multi-channel pedagogical improvisors; these fascinating bards of scientific and philosophical history; this happy breed of men; this little world; this precious stone set in the TV-static sea, which serves it in the office of a wall or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier programmes; this nurse; this teaming womb of royal elocutionists, feared by their breed and famous by their birth, renownèd for their deeds as far from home; this blessèd plot, this earth, THIS REALM, THIS BBC2 FOUR!!!”

Even when exalted by the Sweet Swan of Avon himself, mere words seem insufficient to capture the full essence of the BBC2 Four. Now, with the sad passing of three of its luminaries, we realize the depth of our loss. It is, indeed, the second-greatest blessing to humanity that they devoted their talents to the world through BBC2 in the 70s, leaving us with a treasure trove of audiovisual records of their magnificent performances.

Surely, it is these performances, and not the writings of LRH, that should have been engraved on stainless steel tablets and encased in titanium capsules beneath Trementina Base.

Join Us

You can join us …

1. Here, on Meetup.
2. By wandering around our massively overproduced Notion page, here.
3. By lurking around our embryonic YouTube channel. Video for our events will be uploaded here (if possible) as will videos of our events (eventually, some day, once Dave has finished composing our new theme music).

Thank-Yous

Special Thanks to Ingrid Kronenberg for the clean and readable event posters and to Mark Bernstein-Anderson for the nicely toggled-tucked interactive transcripts that let you literally unfold your way to understanding.

SADHO is organized and managed by David Sternman, with financial support provided by the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia, under SADHO COB Professor Steven Taubeneck.