Haverford’s Philosophy Club is a non-academic space for students to discuss General Tso’s chicken, neo-Hegelian notions of the anarchic, Marxist approaches to climate change, and more. A core tenet is that all philosophers (all students) are welcome. This does not mean that spewing a boatload of technical jargon is unwelcome—just that senior members will wave their hands in mock horror and ask you to translate it into plain English. And, it means that people from other majors, and anyone who draws philosophical truth from their lived experiences, have equal space to share their insights.
Two major historical developments have made our club what it is today. The first is Margaret Gest’s donation to the Gest Center for the Study of Religion. As you can see in the background of my photo with my co-lead, Roger Lin, the space includes a philosophy and religion lounge with an impressive collection of modern art and antique Quaker furniture. It is a space for philosophy majors to hole up before big paper writing deadlines, bring Wawa takeout for 3 AM debates about objective morality, and pour over an extensive public library of philosophy tomes. As a transfer student, most of my friendships came from late nights in the Gest Center, listening to other students rave about books I really should have gotten around to reading. My good friend’s hermeneutics were on point, as always, when he nicknamed the Gest Lounge the “Gnosis factory.”
The Gest Center became a more popular hangout spot when in 2018, the philosophy and religion departments began funding four “Gest Ambassadors” to run student programming. As the two Gest Ambassadors from the philosophy department, Roger and I host “philosophy hours” from 7-10 every Sunday and Thursday, while the religion department’s ambassadors host theirs on Mondays and Wednesdays. The result is an ever-growing crowd of students, many of whom only minored in, or took classes in, religion and philosophy, who have begun hanging out with majors in the Gest Lounge. Many of these people began popping by philosophy club meetings from 7-8 on Thursday nights.
The meetings have a relatively firm structure (from which we often find ourselves deviating). Toward the beginning of the semester, the Gest Ambassadors and other club leads grab brunch and outline a tentative schedule of meeting topics. Some hits from last semester are “Film, Media, Stories,” “Relationships and Love,” and “Philosophy of Labor: Careers, Jobs, and Elections.” We schedule many of our topics around relevant campus events to provide a space for more infrequent attendees to discuss pressing subjects. Our meeting on “Philosophy of Labor: Careers, Jobs, and Elections,” for instance, coincided with the career fair, while our Halloween meeting on “Fear” corresponded with election season.
Most meetings begin with us going around the circle, introducing ourselves by name, class year, pronouns, and a fun fact, and then sharing a personal experience that relates to the topic. This gives everyone a voice in the conversation’s direction. For instance, one participant in our “Philosophy of Food” meeting explained that she had a negative relationship with food. Her comments about her experience challenged our group’s assumptions of food as a symbol for articulating interpersonal and cultural cohesion.
Then, we move into answering the three questions on the flyer for the week’s meeting. It is always funny to see how our conversation shifts into a new topic, only to culminate in unexpected answers to our main questions. Two participants in our meeting on “Nihilism and Hope” (my personal favorite) spent twenty minutes trying to explain Brandom’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, while our meeting on the philosophy of food became a discussion of whether emotions derived more from neurochemical reactions or our cognitive reactions to those reactions, and, subsequently, of culture’s role in cultivating subjective aesthetics.
These kinds of discussions reveal philosophy’s role as a Glasperlenspiel, or “Glass Bead Game.” They actualize Hesse’s picture of how drawing conceptual links between disparate content is like a sort of worship service, an admiration of the cohesive, rationalist scenery uniting our experiences. Ultimately, our philosophical discussions do reconnect. Our discussion of brain chemistry showed culture’s role in shaping how our neurochemistry fires, which transforms the experience of food into a communal conversation of what certain referents mean to us. Brandom’s emphasis on normativity and community approached how we saw hope and nihilism: as acts of resistance and devotion to actions in themselves, rather than the ends which may be impossible. What our Philosophy Club shows us is that no experience (or human) is an island. Philosophy, academic or popular, is what weaves them together.
To that end, the most important part of Philosophy Club is the community. I have spoken of how Philosophy Club gatherings helped me find friends as a transfer student. The same has happened since I have taken a leadership role: from long walk-and-talks with regular members about objective standards of truth to conversations about Deleuze with regular office hours visitors, to my casual exchanges with the people who realize I’m “the guy who sends all the philosophy emails.” I bring up my own experience here to highlight how consistent of a theme strong communal connections are for club members. From venting about election results together, to emotionally supporting our members in writing grad school applications, the philosophy club is a stronger, tightly-knit community because of the trust it takes to collaborate on philosophical investigations. And, the spirit of the community only continues after meetings, whether it’s exploring prison abolition study groups together or hiking across campus to check out meteor showers.
Our club also bolsters students’ academic philosophy work with our yearly Undergraduate Philosophy Consortium. The event welcomes submissions from all students, majors, and non-majors, who have taken philosophy classes and allows the authors of the ten best papers to present their work to the school. Additionally, we have a special prize for papers written in a 100-level class to encourage less-experienced students to try their hand at academic philosophy and, most importantly, to have fun with it. This year’s winning 100-level paper author presented a PowerPoint of Aristotle wearing party hats, and explained how part of Aristotelian virtue ethics is being a “fun guy to have at a party.” More generally, each consortium builds community within the department by welcoming back alumni judges and hosting a reception for students to talk about papers ranging from environmental science to Hegelian social theory to the set theory of perception.
The second historical event behind our philosophy club was the Roland Altherr Symposium. In memory of Roland Altherr, a philosophy department alumnus from the class of ‘77, the fund lets each senior class invite a distinguished philosopher to give a school-wide talk. The Haverford College philosophy department has been honored to host many distinguished speakers: Gayatri Spivak, Hubert Dreyfus, John McDowell, Homi Bhaba, Robert Pippin, and, as of this year, Catherine Malabou. The philosophy club’s role before each talk is to recap each philosopher for interested students. During our meeting the night before Malabou’s talk, seniors summarized her Derridean/Hegelian interpretations of anarchism. This led to many club members attending the talk, including many freshmen, who were able to have long, face-to-face conversions with the internationally renowned philosopher.
In general, the talk united dozens of Haverford’s students and faculty across academic concentrations. Malabou gave a cohesive overview of her philosophy’s post-structuralist, metabiological, and political dimensions, and was generous enough to give profound answers to many student questions. We were still processing the talk two days later when one of my professors opened his Derrida seminar by inviting students to share what they had learned from talking to Malabou. Some of it was academic—for example, the particular areas Malabou felt her teachings diverged from Derrida’s—and some of it was practical—for example, that Derrida would frequently get into car crashes while driving Malabou. In other words, the Altherr talk was as much a pedagogical dissemination of philosophy and a practical exercise in community building as a purely academic exchange, and I am honored to have helped organize it through the Philosophy Club.
Our plans for this semester include setting up socials for junior and senior majors, as our club’s alumni have recommended. My personal goal is to set up a reading group outside of the philosophy club geared toward STEM students with a philosophical bent. Most importantly, we will continue fostering armchair and academic philosophy at Haverford, sharing what a beautiful, humbling experience it is to tackle The Big Questions with friends. This “Gnosis Factory” is staying open.
Ben Fitzgerald
Ben Fitzgerald is a student at Haverford College (class of ‘26) studying philosophy with a computer science minor. He is a co-president of Haverford’s philosophy club and a “Gest Ambassador” for the philosophy department.
