Seattle University’s philosophy club provides a forum for students to engage in philosophical discussion, debate, and study. Club meetings draw a range of students with differing interests in philosophy and familiarity with philosophical traditions—from first-term freshmen to seniors hoping to pursue graduate studies in philosophy; from those interested in the philosophy of mathematics to those sorting through the canon of Western Marxism.
As a small club at a small university, we are able to accommodate the interests and questions of club members. To alleviate beginners’ apprehensions about participating in philosophical inquiry—and believing, with Spinoza, that all determination is negation—we try to structure our meetings in general and approachable terms. For example, meetings last year titled “Alienation,” “Death,” and “Identity Politics” sought to draw SU’s most devoted students of philosophy while attracting newcomers. While these meetings are open-ended, club leadership prepares short overviews of thinkers and arguments they hope to present to the group or pose for discussion. Our meeting on alienation, for instance, opened with a brief gloss on Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. In the past, the club has hosted watch parties, teach-ins, and debate breakdowns with the help of the philosophy department. Faculty guests have taught the Manifesto of the Communist Party, elucidated the key points of contention in the Foucault-Chomsky debate, and underscored the myriad fallacies operative in political debates.
Every year the club holds an annual undergraduate philosophy conference with participants from surrounding universities. Last Spring, students presented on moral psychology, phenomenology, political philosophy, philosophy of mathematics, and medieval philosophy. Despite the variegated line-up, students and the facility supported and engaged with every presenter. Shawn Kalmykov’s paper on “The Consequences of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems on Hibert’s Program,” for example, sparked an impassioned discussion on the soundness of proofs by contradiction and other questions of analytical import. Bringing together undergraduate philosophy students and supportive friends and faculty for the conference is a constitutive part of the club’s role in SU student life.
For consecutive years, the club has invited a guest speaker from off campus. Last spring, with the assistance of the philosophy, political science, and sociology departments, the philosophy club hosted Adolph Reed, Jr. In his talk, “The Only Thing That Hasn’t Changed About Black Politics Since 1965 is How We Think About It: Why?” Reed argued that the hegemonic use of “race relations” as a framework to interpret and explain inequality works to conceal an elite, antidemocratic class project. “Race relations,” Reed argued, rests on an untenable premise: that there are such things as “races” capable of relating to each other. This assumption props up corollary fabrications like the existence of monolithic racial interests, the ideological non-sequitur that a pay-day for one black person is a pay-day for all black people, and “interpretative pathologies” like Afropessimism. Not only, as Reed points out, are the assumptions of “race relations” racist—the ideological conviction that all black people have the same interests, dreams, and desires and that conviction’s corresponding political program of racial trickledown implies the existence of a racial hivemind, if not something much more egregious—they also work to legitimate inequality produced by political economy. Despite the seismic historical and conjunctural differences between the origination of “race-relations” in the 1890s and the rabid mobilization of the “POC PMC” into a class for itself during the Sanders campaigns, the “race relations” framework has always operated as an ideological mystification under which elite interests are maintained, consolidated, and abetted. (A sample of Reed’s talk by the same name can be found here.)
During Reed’s talk, I was merely one of many on the edge of my seat. The room was packed; for most of the nearly three-hour event, standing room was in short supply. Reed stayed, quite generously, well over an hour after his talk was scheduled to end, answering questions from students, faculty, and other attendees. For the many who made an hours-long trek to see the legendary elder statesmen of the American intellectual left, the talk did not disappoint.
The SU philosophy club has been around for decades; these highlights are for the most part only those of recent months. Despite the metastasizing influence of the neoliberal university model in SU’s administrative hierarchy, the club continues to generate student interest and hold important and intellectually stimulating events. In the coming years, we hope to continue to serve as a forum for shared, student-led philosophical discussion and learning on campus.
James Argento-McCurdy
James Argento-McCurdy is a philosophy and political science double major and serves as the philosophy club president at Seattle University. He is interested in Western Marxism, 20thcentury political thought, and American history.
