I’ve just finished putting together the materials for my seventeenth public philosophy salon at the Wansha Performing Arts Centre (莎藝術展演中心) here in Tainan. This long-standing series came out of a chance meeting with the director of the arts centre, Shih-jung Chen (陳室融). I was browsing the posters outside the arts centre, director Chen came out and invited me in for tea, we started talking about philosophy… and suddenly, I found myself committed to leading a monthly two-hour philosophy salon, largely in Mandarin.
At the outset, when I started doing this about 18 months ago, my Mandarin was still pretty scrappy. And so it was an enormous challenge putting together the monthly materials, and wrestling with the challenges of leading a sometimes large group of enthusiastic philosophers, all chatting in the space of a large concert hall. But as time has gone on, a few things have happened: my Mandarin has improved considerably; the regular attendees at the salon (which is free to come along to) have got much more used to me; and I’ve developed a pretty robust template for the sessions, which makes them both easy and fun to plan.
The salon is discussion-based, rather than it being a lecture. So we have a number of groups, mostly speaking Mandarin, as well as—if there’s enough demand—an English-language group (which is usually managed with her usual wit, intelligence and sense of fun, by Hannah Stevens). And we do philosophy through discussion.
In my early days teaching philosophy, I worked in adult education. And the salon feels like a return to those roots. It’s free to attend for participants, and I try to mix some fun activities in with the discussion as well. Our topic this month is impossibly big: death and philosophy. We’ll be ranging between Heidegger and Epicurus, and between Xunzi on mourning and Zhuangzi on the naturalness of death. And we’ll be writing epitaphs and compiling our own set of philosophical advice for those of us (everyone reading this, I’m guessing) who are not yet dead.
It is hard to believe that this is the seventeenth salon! Over the past year and a half, the knowledge that every month I need to stand in front of a room full of strangers (and some friends too), and discuss some of life’s deepest and most perplexing questions has done wonders for my language skills. But perhaps above all, the salon has reminded me that philosophy is often done best—with the most vigour, creativity and sheer good-will—when it is done out in the wild.
