The Coffee Shops Network was influenced by the “slow reading” movement, a preview of what we might later find in Zoom world: a covid catalyzed set of partially overlapping meetups, taking their time with such books as The Design Way (52 Thinking Ideas) or with Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Greater Philadelphia Thinking Society) or with Cosmography (TrimTab Book Club).
The latter two books are by R. Buckminster Fuller, a common thread running through many of my Medium stories. He was one of America’s stellar futurists before running afoul of the various criminal syndicates that insist on doing business as usual. His contributions to high school mathematics have been suppressed by the textbook publishers, lest his other ideas prove too catchy.
Coffee Shops, at least in Jean-Paul Sartre’s France, were existentially a place for sharing philosophy. Even if “man” (the human being) had no essence, coffee shops certainly did. Their informality also led to banks in London apparently, a story I know less about. Coffee the beverage is associated with mental acumen after all.
Philosophy itself, by the mid 1900s, was grappling with questions about its own responsibilities, if it still had any. The burden of designing sense-making logic languages had been taken over by computer scientists, whereas Logic in the more…
