Independent Perspective News - Urban tendencies: an intellectual trend in bars, coffee shops, pubs and family homes

Was Narcissus narcissistic? At philosophy coffee shops, people of all ages make this kind of questions. They appeared in Europe, jumped to New York and are now fashionable in Buenos Aires.

Right now in Buenos Aires, just like Sócrates and his friends used to do five centuries before Christ, men and women talk about love, friendship, beauty, money, ethics and other everyday and metaphysical issues. They are in all stages of life, have different activities and interests. They are united by the love of coffee and knowledge. But their meetings are not academic: their talks develop while they eat and drink in nicer, warmer and more intimate places than college.

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The talks are held in bars, cafes, and pubs, or in houses open to curious people who wish to go deep into the wide realm of knowledge with their peers and a specialist. Those who participate in the philo-cafes do so not out of a sense of obligation but of their desire and pleasure of incorporating something new. Or something different.

When the sign of time, here as in other big cities, seems to be the harshest individualism, and while uncertainty seems to dominate the majority's life, the philo-cafes mitigate loneliness simply because in there people can share.

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"I like wakening souls and I use cinema as an excuse to reflect about life and find more healthy lifestyles", explains psychologist Gabriela Weiss, another of the promoters of this trend. Weiss organizes philo-meetings at her home. "With my children and my pets running round the house and with homemade food, which is a way to return to old-fashioned values", she invites. She knows, like her colleagues, that loneliness is one of the dramas of the time and that the meetings she promotes can help alleviate the problem.

"People want to connect", says journalist Liliana Resnik, coordinator of "The Coffee Workshop". "There are certain ages or kinds of people who don't enjoy going dancing, for example, where it's impossible to know what the others are thinking".

"These are alternative places not only to get to know people but also to reencounter thought", states Lilian Suaya, creator of the Psychological Cafe.

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With more or less economical prices, in bars and open houses, in these city schools of everything philosophy is not anymore "one of those unreachable things".