<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_purple.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_purple.svg" width="40px" />
This series will examine four distinct ways whereby the Other becomes a decisive philosophical event: as presence, as plurality, as ethical asymmetry, and as structural difference.
Each session focuses on one thinker and one conceptual pathway, presented by a brave member of our community—currently experiencing performance anxiety about presenting to a group of critical Others. But they have no need to worry, because Jedi Master Professor Steven Taubeneck will be on hand to answer the hard hard questions and prevent us from cheating, lying, fabricating, speculating, and bluffing.
This generic placeholder description will be updated once our courageous presenters send in their outlines. For now, mark your calendars, join the discussion, and prepare for a series that explores how twentieth-century thought reconceived relation, responsibility, and alterity at the deepest and most disquieting levels.
</aside>
<aside> <img src="/icons/download_purple.svg" alt="/icons/download_purple.svg" width="40px" />
</aside>
<aside> <img src="/icons/calendar-day_purple.svg" alt="/icons/calendar-day_purple.svg" width="40px" />
<aside> <img src="notion://custom_emoji/4609e667-cff0-4e6e-b836-06b9464045c1/1950db50-53bb-80da-b8ce-007aa1474fb8" alt="notion://custom_emoji/4609e667-cff0-4e6e-b836-06b9464045c1/1950db50-53bb-80da-b8ce-007aa1474fb8" width="40px" />
</aside>
<aside> <img src="/icons/movie-clapboard-play_purple.svg" alt="/icons/movie-clapboard-play_purple.svg" width="40px" />
Jewish Thinkers of Otherness ⟩ Martin Buber
Our first event in the Jewish Thinkers of Otherness series centers on Martin Buber and advances a deliberately demanding thesis: not the familiar sociological claim that selves are socially constructed, but the more radical ontological claim that the self does not exist prior to relation and comes into being only in moments of genuine address. Reading I–Thou as a work of relational ontology rather than moral exhortation or religious sentiment, the discussion will examine Buber’s distinction between I–Thou and I–It as a distinction between modes of relating, not kinds of entities, and will emphasize the fragility, transience, and non-instrumental character of I–Thou encounters. We will explore how subjectivity, for Buber, is evental rather than substantial—arising briefly in dialogue and vanishing when relation hardens into use, concept, or administration—and how this bears on questions of intimacy, vulnerability, authenticity, love, and the possibility of ethical life without grounding it in institutions, norms, or political programs. The session aims to situate Buber precisely: neither a mystic of fusion nor a theorist of recognition, but a thinker of encounter whose work forces us to reconsider what it even means for a self to exist at all.
</aside>
<aside> <img src="/icons/window_purple.svg" alt="/icons/window_purple.svg" width="40px" /> MEETUP DESCRIPTION
<aside> <img src="/icons/chat_purple.svg" alt="/icons/chat_purple.svg" width="40px" /> CHATLOG
<aside> <img src="/icons/new-alert_purple.svg" alt="/icons/new-alert_purple.svg" width="40px" /> BONUS MATERIALS
</aside>