It’s a Wednesday night on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and roughly 75 people, sitting in groups of about four or five each, are engaged in zealous discussion in the library of a new private members’ club. “Do you believe in objective truth?” a young man asks.

We’re at the New York Philosophy Club, a free weekly event that attracts hundreds of New Yorkers to ponder life’s greatest questions. The discussions last about an hour and a half, structured in three rounds of 30 minutes. In bars, restaurants, and event spaces all over the city, guests talk about wealth, suffering, power, and purpose. (On an average night, the crowd size hovers at about 150, but one night in November drew 400.) On entering, you receive a sheet of paper guiding the conversation, as well as a name tag—first names only. Then, you’re ready to philosophize.

The New York Philosophy Club was founded by three young men, Jawaun Brown (30), Cole Whetstone (29), and Ren Yu (21), who want to “restore meaning and human connection through the shared pursuit of wisdom.” The emphasis here is on the word “shared.” “We could all be at home reading books by ourselves,” says Brown, “but what’s the fun in that? Where’s the community?”

Nobody can say exactly when the New York Philosophy Club was founded, and each cofounder has a slightly different story for how it all began for them. Whetstone (who studied classics at Harvard and ancient philosophy at Oxford) and Yu (who briefly studied philosophy in college before switching to finance) had both been hosting their own small philosophical gatherings at their apartments in the spring of 2024. When the two met one night, they instantly connected and decided to combine their groups. Brown, who describes his political science degree as being very theory-heavy, joined the pair the following January, and the club really began to take shape. They now have over two dozen volunteers and an ever-growing list of interested participants.

“I really wish I had a community like this earlier in my life,” Yu says, “that just accepted me as I was and allowed me to explore ideas.”

“It feels like an intellectual home,” Brown adds. On any given night, they will jump to topics like love and death with perfect strangers. “I’ve had many conversations where we’ve had extremely deep connections with each other,” Yu says.

Photo: Noëlle de Leeuw

During the meeting on the Lower East Side, two men in one group, Alex and Harrison, can’t settle on their definition of “storytelling.” Alex makes a plea that storytelling is an art form.

“Look, even, at political rhetoric,” he argues. “That kind of storytelling is an art.”

Harrison dissents. “It’s not an art,” he says, “it’s a craft—a skill you can hone.”

The philosophy club is not about getting every party on the same page, per se. It’s about having a conversation. “We don’t want you to come in agreeing with everyone,” Brown says, “but we do want to create a space where people are willing to listen to each other.”

In another group, Jackson, who introduces himself as a biologist, is talking about the animal kingdom. A bee will find a delicious flower, he explains, and upon returning to the hive, will perform a dance to convey as much. That bee is telling a story. The woman opposite him, Lydia, objects. Two bees may be communicating, but is the bee himself considering what he’s doing an act of storytelling? she asks. Or are we humans just labeling it that way?

Jackson considers this. “If an act of storytelling occurs,” he muses, “but no conscious entity is present to perceive it as such, does the story still exist?” Soon, talk has turned to the parameters of consciousness itself.

Photo: Noëlle de Leeuw

Throughout the night, there’s not a single phone in sight. “People want to talk about meaningful things,” Whetstone says, “and they want to meet new people. They want to be seen by people. They want to have these kinds of friendships where they don’t have to talk about the weather.”

Brown, whose day job is in tech, emphasizes the need for offline community-building. “You are a lot more lonely than you feel you should be for how much communication you’re doing,” he says. “We have communication without community now. So we sort of turned that model on its head, where we’re really creating a community.”

A little after 9 p.m., Yu announces that the last round of conversation has ended—yet nobody in the room gets up. Nobody even stops talking. At 9:30 p.m., people are still referring to Kant and Rousseau. It isn’t until 10 p.m. that the last group realizes the space is otherwise empty, that the chairs have been folded and put away. It’s not unusual for the Wednesday night philosophers to linger late. According to Yu, a small group will usually stay until the early hours. “Once,” he says, “I stayed until 6.”

While discussion flowed on the Lower East Side, a parallel event was going on in Astoria, part of the New York Philosophy Club’s expansion. The founders hope to continue to grow in New York, and to eventually cater to all neighborhoods, every week. “The eventual goal, the North Star—although this is pretty far off,” Yu says, “is to be all over America.”