It’s a Wednesday night and 20 students gather in Vollum not for a movie, or to discuss finances, but as the email sent out to all of them announced: “to situate the role of virtues in Epicurean hedonism once and for all.” Sent by the organization’s founder and the speaker for the night, Elise Woodard ’15, the phrase, following a description of what hedonism and virtue mean in the context of Epicureanism, and followed by a note stating “Epicurean delicacies will be served” relates the two main objectives of the club: providing a space for presentations of philosophically relevant arguments and creating an inclusive atmosphere for students of all disciplines who are interested in philosophical topics to evaluate and discuss the argument as presented. Woodard notes that “I don’t know of any other group [on campus] like us; we’re not doing political organizing, we’re not deciding on things to do outside of campus. I think the Philosophical Society is unique in being an academic club where you evaluate and discuss arguments. I think philosophy lends itself pretty well to this, it does things piecemeal, and each presentation is of stand-alone arguments that don’t require a lot of background knowledge.” Still, a lot of thought has gone into how the meetings should be structured.

NPR recently published a small piece that asked the question, “Where’s All the Good Halloween Music?” In it, someone sent in an email to the All Songs Considered offices and pondered why Christmas has so many (by which I mean far, far too many) songs associated whereas Halloween has, well, “Monster Mash.” The writer, Stephen Thompson, responded by listing a couple of “spooky” bands, like Timber Timbre and Dead Man’s Bones (yes, that Ryan Gosling band).

Regardless of how good these bands are, they are Halloween-scary in the same way that my mother’s choice in October lawn decorations are Halloween-scary. As I have been writing about this, NPR (god bless ’em) have posted another Halloween-centric music piece, this time a “Question of the Week” asking “What Are The Most Terrifying Songs Of All Time?” And the top result? Sufjan Stevens, with “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” Okay, well there are a couple ways to define ‘terrifying,’ I suppose.