Mind & Desire

A number of the ideas that people use to make sense of the world and try to formulate what we ought to be doing, make recommendations, set up their own lives, engage with others, are essentially fictions or myths.And I’d like to talk about one of them in particular today that I’ve encountered, now going back at least 20 years in my work as an educator. I’m sure many of you have heard these terms thrown around for about that same amount of time. And the term, and the concept, is that of “digital native.”Usually this is tied in with a generational sort of differentiation where those of us who, for example, grew up in Generation X without the internet, without all these websites, without mobile technology would be digital immigrants, as would definitely be the baby boomers. And then the millennials were supposed to be digital natives. And then, the next generation coming up under them, the current generation in college, Generation Z or Zoomers, whatever you want to call them, are also supposed to be digital natives.On its face, it seems like a plausible idea. Those who, as children, are being introduced to and engaging with a new technology should be a bit more savvy in using it. It should feel more intuitive to them than to people who are older adults who are engaging with it without having had the benefit of childhood. Sort of like people will try to say, you know, the time for learning languages is when you’re a child. By the time that you’re an adult, your brain has become too fixed and ossified to easily learn languages, which turns out to be a good bit of nonsense, and perhaps, I won’t say wishful thinking, because it’s actually a kind of pessimistic thinking, but maybe wishful thinking for the experts who then get to play at being experts about that and use it as an excuse for why they don’t know languages that well So coming back to technology, and in particular, the technologies that are associated with the internet and with phones, you know, mobile technology and all of those sorts of matter, what was being said roughly 20 years ago, maybe a little bit even further back by the so-called pedagogical experts, was that we now needed to take into account, in addition to all the other sorts of divides, like the difference between male and female students or difference between races or any other sort of background thing like that. We also needed to take into stock when we were designing our classes and assessment measures and even thinking about what technology we were going to apply and use, whether in the classroom or in our course management systems outside of the classroom. We needed to take into account this new divide between a sort of have and have not.Those who have a normal facility and perhaps greater insights into the newer technology and those of us who have to struggle with it, who don’t have the habits already baked or built in like these younger people do.I remember one particular incident that really drove it home to me, the mindset that is involved in this. So it was a pedagogy and professional development conference. And I think the session that I was in wasn’t even really about digital divides and digital natives versus digital immigrants or any of that sort of stuff. But the presenters ended up introducing that distinction. And then there were a bunch of other people in the session who in the Q&A and response part were really hammering this point home.I looked around and I noticed the demographic disparities involved in this. So this is when I was quite young as a professor. I’d been teaching probably about... 10 years at that point. So I was in my early 40s, out of graduate school, having a good bit of experience under my belt as a Generation X instructor. And the people who were leading the workshop and carrying out most of the conversation and seemed very, very committed to this notion of digital native versus digital immigrant divide were all boomers. I’m not going to say that all boomers are the stereotypical boomer or anything like that, but these actually were.They had all the wisdom that they were going to share with us younger professors who should be taking our cues from them. about how we should be dealing with yet another generation younger than us, our millennial students. And so boomers were portraying themselves as the ones who, they were part of one big “we”: them, the bosses, we, the underlings. And we were the digital immigrants who needed to be sensitive to and structure everything around the other generation of digital natives.I noticed that there were a few older millennials in there and they were seemingly a little bit uncomfortable. And there were a lot of people my age as well. And they were some of them just kind of keeping their heads down. None of them really wanting to raise the issue, which is that this whole digital native thing is kind of BS.Yeah. Now, why do I say that? Well, because our actual experience in the classroom, many of us using technology in ways that these educational experts were often not knowing about and perhaps not even suspecting that we might be doing, we knew that we instructors actually understood the technology and could use it more readily in than the supposed digital natives, not least because we actually had to be fairly conscious about what we were doing.And so we could raise an issue here about deliberate and conscious use of a technology and more intuitive use, and say that sometimes you’re actually better off thinking about what you’re doing rather than just responding in a gut way.But it went really far beyond that. What I noticed in my classes were that despite having cell phones, despite having grown up in an environment that included the internet and being on computers, most of my students really did not know how to use them effectively, even when it came to things like doing searches for information using a search engine, by that time almost completely Google, or writing papers and formatting them easily and up to standards in a word processing program, or how to effectively send emails. And that’s a very, very basic technology.A lot of them knew on a very surface level how to do these sorts of things, but didn’t really understand once things got tricky, what they should do next. or how to find information that would be useful for them, or any of the limitations of the technology that they were using. If they were indeed natives, they were natives who didn’t understand their own supposed special environment, as well as the people who came in from the outside, we might say, temporally.And so this entire narrative or dichotomy, or whatever you want to have it, ideology perhaps, of digital natives and digital immigrants who are very different, almost like dogs and cats to each other, or you know how “men are from Mars and women are from Venus. This all collapses when you look at it carefully. And I still see people making a lot of reference to it today. But indeed, it tends to still be boomers who are saying those sorts of things, and not people in Generation X, who perhaps had a better vantage point since we had a lot. more technology that we grew up with, but it was technology that we had to master. It wasn’t quite so easy to use when you got a computer. First you actually, back in the day, had to learn how to use an operating system like DOS or some other thing to program what you wanted. And then eventually, you know, we get all of the mouse and point and click and windows and pick whatever else you want to talk about. And things in some respects get easier, but also get harder to really know precisely what you’re doing with. I’m not going to say that younger people per se don’t know what they’re doing. But many of them don’t seem to be, if they are digital natives, natives who know more than just a city block of their environment. And that’s a big problem when we want to make these generalizations.So it’s something I’ve been thinking about today. I thought it might be interesting for people, to talk about and think about, and perhaps compare their own experiences or their own assumptions about this contested term.I will actually close this out by throwing out a modest proposal, which is actually quite a radical one when you’re not just calling it “modest”, which is that we should retire this term. It turns out to be pretty useless for picking out any sort of reality that would help us in figuring out policy or education or anything that really matters to us.Should we replace it with another term? Only if we’re going to make the concept better, fuller, more flexible than it currently stands. It’s really more of a mistake waiting to happen than anything else. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

This post is public so feel free to share it.Recently, I was a guest on another podcast, as I do from time to time, going on other people’s platforms and talking with them about whatever it is that they want to bring me in for. And in this case, the person wanted to talk about Stoicism and specifically Epictetus, and they hit me with a term that I wasn’t really familiar with but I could say “I think I know what you’re talking about”, especially after they cited a passage and explained what they meant.It’s not something that’s actually new, but the term that’s circulating around is relatively new it’s being labeled as the “Stoic pause.”. The general idea behind it is one that you can find articulated across the Stoic corpus. Seneca talks about it. Epictetus talks about it. Marcus Aurelius talks about it. And so do others as well, and for good reason.And it’s basically just this. Before you allow your reasoning processes or your reactions or your feelings or whatever it happens to be, to lead you to have a response, take a little break. Introduce a little pause temporally into the process.And for the person who was asking me about this, he thought this had to do specifically with the notion of handling what the Stoics call “impressions” or “appearances”, or even “imaginations”, phantasiai, and whether we give assent to them or don’t give assent to them. And that’s all part of the picture, to be sure, but it’s not quite so simple and straightforward as that in all the Stoic writings.There’s lots of passages where those people that I already talked about will say: ‘when you run into this, then pause for a moment and say, examine what’s going on with yourself.” It might be examine the impressions that are impinging upon you, test them to see if they are what they think they are. It could also be pause for a moment so you can choose what you’re going to do. It might be framed in terms of reasoning processes that we could call unconscious, or subliminal, or implicit, or below the level of our conscious thinking. But we are engaging in thinking nonetheless, as we can later reconstruct it. And if we’re paying attention, we can actually see what’s And a lot of our emotions from a Stoic perspective, particularly the emotions that they call the perturbationes, the ones that are getting in the way, “perturbations” is a literal translation of the disruptive emotions. They usually involve a set of judgments that we’re making, and we make those judgments because we have some appearances or impressions coming in, and then we think about those and we respond in turn.So this isn’t the be-all and end-all of what Stoic practice would be, but it’s very helpful to do. Really, we could say you cannot function without doing this, and doing it repetitively and doing it consciously, and over time with practice getting good at it. If you don’t do it, all the other stuff that you do is probably not going to work out very well for you. This is going to be one big deficit area.So far, so good, right? That’s an important idea, taking a pause, not just to take a pause and count to 10 or something like that, but to actually refocus your attention on: “Hey, what’s going on here today?”, and paying attention to what it is that you think, what it is that you feel, the judgments that you’re making, what information you’re using that might be a little dubious. All those sorts of things. That’s all great. Nothing wrong with that at all. It’s also not distinctively Stoic. And to call it the “Stoic pause”, I’m not sure who came up with this term, is a little bit weird and culty, and maybe a little bit too grifter self-helpy as well. Because again, it’s not the unique property of Stoic philosophy.It would be sort of like talking about “Greg Sadler’s soccer kick,” right? Everybody else plays soccer in the world. Of course, many of them call it “football” and we could change it to “Greg Sadler’s football kick”. Well, so many other people are doing it. You would hear that and you’d be like, why are you bringing Greg Sadler into this as distinctive?So there’s nothing particularly Stoic about this. All of the other robust virtue ethics that we can find throughout the centuries, not just in Western philosophy, but also in Chinese philosophy and Indian philosophy, all over the place, are going to advise that at least at some point in time, you pay attention to and slow down your reactions, and analyze your own thought processes and emotions, and pay attention to habits and all of that sort of stuff.So just shifting back to the Western sphere and talking about ancient mediterranean and near eastern thought on this, well the Platonists advise doing that. You’ve just got to read Plutarch a bit and you’ll see that. The Aristotelians definitely suggest doing this. The Stoics do. The Epicureans do. Even the Skeptics who some of them don’t believe in much of anything, they certainly are suggesting doing that as well. This shows you that we’re already covering a lot of groundBut it’s not just philosophy people. We could say that this is an important part of many religious traditions as well. And so you can find in the Biblical Wisdom literature some references to doing this sort of thing. We can say that it also pops up in literature as well. And speaking of literature, it even shows up in science fiction. I brought up in that particular session, that recording on the person’s podcast, that one prime example of this is from A.E. Van Vogt, who was a Golden Age science fiction writer, probably most famous for his World of Null-A and Slan, but he wrote a lot of other works as well. And he called it the “thalmic pause”, because he was saying you put the part of your brain that likes to make snap decisions on a sort of pause ,and you think through what’s actually going on here. He’s describing exactly the same process.Now, of course, if you know your history about this guy, Van Vogt had some philosophical training, specifically, he was involved with the Institute for General Semantics and Korzybski and those people. But there’s many other people who advise taking some sort of pause before making a snap judgment or a decision.I mean, we might even say that we see something like this going on in the very first book of the Iliad, because Achilles is hearing what Agamemnon has to say, and he’s getting angry, and he’s thinking: “I should kill this b*****d right here where he stands. I’m going to pull up my sword and do this jerk in. He’s not a very good king at all.” And Athena helps him to stay his hand. This might be a prime example of this sort of thing.And, you know, we have a great character in Homer who will often do that sort of thing, and typically only gets himself in deep trouble when he makes quick decisions, and that’s Odysseus. So it’s not as if this is a distinctively philosophical idea, let alone just a Stoic idea, but it is a really good thing to do. I think philosophies might be particularly helpful for helping us understand why we should do it, how it can be beneficial to us, and then what we should be filling that pause with, how we should be examining the thought processes and decision-making processes, the evaluations that we’re engaged in.So I’m not going to call this the “Stoic pause” myself, because as we’ve just talked about, it’s got a much wider base than just Stoicism. But if somebody wants to call it the “Stoic pause”, that’s up to them. They can certainly do that. But I do think it’s something that all of us would benefit from incorporating into our practice, even if we get away from our ordinary lives. And we’re just talking about studying philosophy.I’ll give you just a prime example of this before we end here. So you’re reading something and you think you understand exactly what the author is saying. And they write something that to you seems really, really stupid, and you find yourself thinking: “Why am I reading this dummy? I’m wasting my time with an idiot like this.” Well, that’s a great place to take a pause.You might actually be right. Now, you might be right in your assessment that they’re an idiot, and have gotten something fundamentally wrong, and then wrote about it. You might also be wrong at the same time, that it’s a total waste of your time. So you should actually look at the connection between those two statements, right? Because one doesn’t necessarily imply the other. But odds are, if they’re a great thinker, and you are reading them for the first or eighth time, and other people think that reading them is valuable, and as you’re reading them, your take is: “No, this person is stupid and their ideas are stupid.” Odds are that you’re missing something, and you’re probably bringing something to the reading that’s getting in the way. So you might want to take a pause there and think about how you are responding and whether it really makes all that much sense. And if you do that, you will probably save yourself some headaches and not throw away books that would be useful for you to refocus on.So you see that even outside of our ordinary scope of life, if you’re just doing study, this pause, whatever you want to call it. We could call it the “Stoic pause", the “Platonic pause, the “A.E. Van Vogt” pause, whatever you want to call it. This practice of pausing, and then filling that pause with the sorts of mental activities that are going to be helpful for you, this can be incredibly powerful. And you’re probably going to need to do this thousands of times over the course of your life in order to be happy.Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

I’ve had a few queries and comments, mostly in YouTube but also in some other places lately, that got me thinking about a sort of general topic. And this is one of those, if the shoe fits, wear it. Many of you listening to this, probably this isn’t the case for you, but you might know somebody that this would be helpful for to hear, or maybe just share this idea with them.And I’m going to put it in a really flippant sort of contemporary culture way. You don’t want to make judgments about philosophy or philosophers based on what the kids these days call “vibes”. And actually, it’s not just the kids these days. There’s lots of other people who use the term ironically, and it’s been around for a very long time. I mean, longer than my generation, the generation before mine, the boomers were talking about good vibes.And so, you know, it’s made its way back into the popular parlance and taken up a seat in popular conversations about philosophy and many, many other fields as well for, I would say, close to a decade now.And what do I mean by this? So we could get a little bit more expansive and perhaps even rigorous about this notion. People have been doing this for a very, very long time, going way back in the literature that we have, you’ve got to do some work in order to find it, I imagine. But I’ve encountered this in literature, about literature, about philosophy, about other fields as well.And it consists in making a judgment not based on actually spending time reading the thinker and working through their thought in a kind of careful and receptive manner and then coming to a well-founded conclusion about them but instead taking shortcuts, going by your gut, or reading for the gist, and only catching maybe 10% of what’s being said, or even just going by what you’ve heard about them from other people, and using that as sort of your input as you then start reading your way through people.I’m going to give you a prime example of this that happened recently, and it was in Substack, and it was specifically about Alasdair MacIntyre, because I’m advertising that I’m teaching this upcoming class on MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which is a complex book. It’s covering a lot of the history of ideas coming all the way up to present culture, and you know there’s a good bit of sophistication to it. This person asked about something that showed me that they they didn’t really know that much about MacIntyre, and whatever ideas they had were kind of garbled andThey asked about universal moral frameworks. Does MacIntyre ever deliver on his promise to provide that? And that’s exactly the opposite of what MacIntyre does. He mentions universal moral frameworks as something that the Enlightenment was attempting to provide us with and then failing to do so over and over and over again with a number of different attempts, a number of different responses and steps. And he’s quite right about that.And so this person, you know, maybe they were reading and not reading attentively, so they fell into the mistake of thinking that the philosopher who is criticizing a position is actually endorsing that position. So I wrote them back and I was like: yeah, MacIntyre doesn’t do that. If you think that he is, why don’t you cite me (and I’m being flippant here), cite me some chapter and verse, meaning tell me where in the text you’re actually finding this. And their response was to say: Well you know, I just read a few chapters of it and that was the impression that I got from it. And I wrote back and said, well, see, there’s your mistake. You don’t ever want to make judgments about a philosophical work or about a philosopher or about a school based just on small sample size and your first impressions of that, because they’re probably going to be wrong.And I’m going to say right up front (well not exactly up front, because I’ve been talking now for several minutes about that!), but I’m going to lay it out for you: I’ve done that myself plenty of times. And I think pretty much every one of us who’s in the philosophy business for a while has probably fallen into that mistake, but we don’t want to say that as reason for justifying it. We actually want to say: Oh, I can relate to you.It’s an easy mistake to make early on, and you definitely want to avoid it. Those of us who did, we can say, yeah, it led me into some blind alleys and reasoning wrongly about what I should read and what I shouldn’t read, and what different people are thinking. And it’s better to be disabused of that illusion that you’ve actually got it figured out based on vibes or impressions or feels or whatever you want to call it.It’s better to have something solid, something that actually does relate to the text in a way that’s reasonably representative of it so that you can have good judgments going forward.And you know, I had somebody just today in YouTube who asked a question that actually made me laugh a bit. They wanted to know whether taking a course in formal logic would help them as they go to study continental philosophy, and so I had to tell them: No actually that’s not going to be of any help whatsoever. And I was kind of wondering where they got that idea from. I suppose they thought that formal logic is going to be helpful for everything. It’s not even helpful for most analytic philosophy quite frankly, If you’re reading around in actual analytic philosophy, particularly the classical works in it, let’s say from the first 30, 40 years of the inception of that new way of doing philosophy,And the person responded by saying: well you know, I’ve read some Hegel and I’ve read some Zizek. So I thought maybe as I’m going to read other continental philosophy, formal logic would actually be quite helpful. And then I got a formal logic textbook and I found it quite difficult.And I thought: well, I don’t think you’ve actually read Hegel and Zizek then. Or you have “read” them, but that means you sort of like ran your eyes over them and digested some of the words. But there’s no way that you attentively studied Hegel, say going through the entire Phenomenology, or the Science of Logic or even the Philosophy of Right, or even any of the lectures, and worked your way through that and then found sort of an intro level formal logic class difficult.It’s just not going to be the case. So I think the same would hold for Zizek. Zizek is a very stream of consciousness thinker in some of his works. His earlier works are actually quite rigorous and you need to understand a lot in order to make sense of what he’s saying adequately. So clearly this person felt that they understood Hegel and Zizek in some respect, but I don’t think that they did.And we don’t have to single out continental philosophy in this respect. I think there’s lots of people who go by vibes when it comes to Spinoza, right? They are attracted to some ideas that they maybe got in somewhat digested form, even in the media of memes and they’re like, yeah, this is a really cool guy. Everything’s substance. I’m just a mode of substance. And well, there’s a lot more to it than that.Or people do this with Aristotle. Aristotle is the best thinker ever. And then you’re like: well, I don’t think you’ve actually read that much of his works. People who, for example, will talk about the organon in very glowing terms and then want to apply those logical works, which usually they don’t actually read the whole of. They’ll read the Categories and On Interpretation and the two Analytics, and then that’s it for them. They don’t read the Topics, which is an amazing, important work and would actually be quite helpful for them to do. And it’s quite different than the other works as well that get classified in that. But people talk about this and it’s sort of like when I’ve talked in the past about texts with aura, ideas, thinkers take on a kind of aura, a positive set of feels that then get contrasted to other things the other philosophers. They’re not as good as Aristotle he’s The Prince of Philosophers, or the Philosopher, as Thomas Aquinas called him. And none of this is actually going to be helpful for a person who wants to genuinely study and make progress in this complicated field that we call philosophy.I bring it up in part because, again, if the shoe fits, wear it. If you’re falling into this sometimes, not necessarily all the time, if you’re listening to this, you’re probably inclined towards philosophy already and not making these sorts of beginner level mistakes all the time. But we can fall into this.If you know people who could benefit from hearing this message, maybe you want to pass that along to them. You can send them this if you want to. You’re probably able to reproduce this in your own voice and words in a conversation with them. And it might actually turn out to be quite helpful to take a stumbling block out of the way that holds people back from using the precious time that they have for studying philosophy in a more productive manner. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

Last week, I gave a podcast interview and we ranged over a number of interesting questions. I got asked one by the host that, you know, it seems sort of a easy question, almost a softball at first. And I suppose for some people, if they have oversimplistic views on ethics, it might really be one. But for me, it was a tough question. I had to think about it quite a bit. And so here’s the question as far as I remember it.I mean, we’ll find out when the podcast actually comes out what the exact wording was. But it was something along the lines of, “if you can only say one single thing, make one point for the average person or the audience of people out there in general about ethics, what would it be?”And like I said, that is not an easy one for someone like me who thinks that ethics is kind of deep and complicated. And it’s not that people can’t get it, but there’s a lot of as we say moving parts, and you don’t want to leave them out any more than you’d want to say: “hey, let’s simplify the toaster or the car, we’ll get rid of all the parts that aren’t absolutely necessary.” And then you find out you’ve actually gotten rid of some of the necessary parts when you try to use it.So I think for people who are committed to some sort of very hardcore substantive ethics that they think covers everything, like you know, you could be a Kantian and be like, just follow the categorical imperative. And then, of course, you have to explain the categorical imperative, which has at least three formulations. But we’ll put that aside. Or if you’re a utilitarian and you’re saying, follow the greatest happiness principle. Well, okay, that sounds good, but it requires a lot of explaining and then showing how it actually works in practice and answering objections. And you might think of the old Google motto, just don’t be evil. Well, that’s so contentless, it doesn’t tell you anything actually helpful. But I think a lot of people do approach ethics in that way, because they’ve already got some point of view staked out that they think really covers everything. And I just don’t have that sort of approach. I have a much more complicated and messy approach that is you know what we sometimes call “ethical pluralism”, thinking that there’s multiple principles that we need to bring to bear. I am of course a virtue ethicist, but virtue ethics isn’t as simple as just be virtuous or do what virtue would tell you, because there’s a lot more to it than that.So I did have an answer, and I’m fairly satisfied with this answer, and I’m going to give it to you here. But it’s one that as I think about it, more each time that I mull it over, which is what I’m doing here with you, it winds up getting a little bit more complicated. I’ll probably have to write a piece about this before too long. So I’m kind of working my thoughts out here.So when I was asked the question, after I took a tiny little pause and bought myself some time by saying wow, that’s a tough question there. I didn’t have a Twix bar like in the commercial to chew on or anything like that. I said something along these lines.What I would want to say is that whatever good you’re doing by a particular choice or action that you are intending actually doing, what you need to keep in mind is that even if the action fails or somehow goes astray, there are factors that you didn’t know about, or it just goes unnoticed. Maybe it was to help somebody and they don’t realize that they’re being helped. Or if something else undoes it, or even if it’s just like seemingly a little drop in not just the bucket, but an ocean that is the wider world, The good that you accomplish or even just intend (intending is a sort of accomplishing), is real. And even though it’s limited, that doesn’t take away its reality. And its reality is not just that it exists, but that it is indeed true. Even if it’s not perfectly good, because most things aren’t, that doesn’t take away what goodness it has.And why do I think this is the most important thing for me to say? Because I’ve seen so many people who are on one side of this or the other. They’re the doer of the good action and they see it somehow not come to full fruition and they feel as if what they did was nothing. it didn’t accomplish anything. It didn’t embody any good. It didn’t improve anything. And they can get discouraged and that might lead them to not do it in the future. But even if like their universe was to end right there, I would still give them that advice and say, the good that you did is still good. Keep that in mind.And on the other side, I think there’s a lot of people who are perfectionists, not just for themselves, but for lots of other people as well. They’re kind of critics, they’re naysayers, they’re the ones who say: well, you think you did something, but look at it. Oh, it’s not really a good thing at all, because it’s not a perfect good, or an eternally lasting good, or the best or anything like that. So we live in a world where this happens an awful lot.And I just think it’s really important for somebody at least to be consistently putting that message out. And maybe I’m not the only one to do that, thank goodness. But if I have to be the one to stress this over and over again, well I’m happy to do so, because it was a hard-won insight that for me that took a long time and experience and thinking about things for it to stick for me and I know that other people would benefit from hearing it as well andI do have a couple you know like corollaries and follow-ups to this as well which goes a little bit against the “hey, what’s the one thing that you want to say”? If you’re smuggling in corollaries, now you’re saying two things, three things, four things. But indulge me for a moment while I bring up another thing that I did say in the podcast, and then one other thing that I didn’t say in the podcast but I’ve been thinking aboutSo the first thing is that there’s a kind of perfectionism that a lot of people succumb to and try to impose on other people in ethics. And we have this phrase, “don’t let the best be the enemy of the good,” meaning don’t let the fact that you’re aiming at some imaginary, not real best, some superlative, become the impediment to you actually choosing and doing and perhaps even sustaining something that is genuinely good, albeit not the best.So I think everybody’s heard that phrase, or at least if you hadn’t before, now you’ve got a good idea what it means and you can relate to it. And I want to add a little bit more there. So, you know, we can talk about the superlative, which is the best. We can talk about the whatever we want to call it, maybe substantive, the good. And then in between, we have something else that we call the comparative, and that is the better term, right? It’s not the best, and it’s not just the good. It’s where one good is more good than another good, and we can compare them back and forth. And that’s why we call it the comparative.So we could say, you know thinking about ice cream, and this is going to seem completely arbitrary to you: Vanilla that’s good. Vanilla is nice to have. Butter pecan, well that’s better. What’s the best? I don’t know. For me, it probably is mint chocolate chip. For you, it’s going to be something different. But you notice we’ve got like a hierarchy that we set out there.So what’s the upshot for this? I think we need to watch out not just for the best being the enemy of the good, but also for the best becoming an impediment to discerning and choosing and recognizing the better, as indeed a greater good than other goods, but not necessarily the apex of goodness itself. Because a lot of what we’re doing in ethics is not simply choosing between the good and the bad.It’s nice when things are that straightforward and obvious. Instead, we have to look at different kinds of things that are good and decide, well in this situation, which of them is better than than the other one. And we’d be foolish if we pick the lesser good instead of what we recognize to be the greater good, the better. But if we’re being perfectionists, if we’re always needing the best, we could have just the same attitude towards the better as we have towards the good, and we might think: ah you know, maybe the better isn’t even really better. And we might even come to think that it’s not even truly good. So I think this is a corollary.The other one that I wanted to bring up is that if we can say that the good that we do, even if it doesn’t last forever and seems to be easily dissipated or disappearing in an entire ocean where it’s a mere drop or anything along those lines, we can say the same thing about the opposite of the good the bad or the evil however you want to put it and some people will try to justify the bad that they do by, you know reference to some greater good. Or they’ll say: well it’s really not so bad, or they’ll say: well I did a bad thing, but nobody caught me, or I intended to do something bad, but it didn’t come off, so everything’s okay.Well, if we’re going to say that whatever good we do is something positive and real, I think we also need to be honest with ourselves about the bad as well and say,if there weren’t bad consequences that resulted from it, if I had a bad intention, even though it wasn’t fulfilled, it’s still bad. And that’s a thought that I think needs to go along with this one single thing. So another corollary.And like I said, I’m in process of working out my full thoughts on this. It’s not as if I haven’t had plenty of time indeed to think about these things over the course of time in the past. But these are murky matters that I think could use some additional reflection and articulation. So you can look forward to seeing me writing something about this down the line. But for now, that’s where my reflections stand.I hope this is something helpful for you. And if it is, you know, feel free to leave a comment about that. And don’t just say that it is helpful, but maybe say how it’s helpful for you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

One of the common ways that I see quite a few people who want to study philosophy, whether in academic settings or in the wider world, screwing things up for themselves is a sort of mistaken process, prioritization, and perspective that they assign to the thinkers, the texts, maybe movements that they’re reading from the past. And I suppose that you could say it takes on a certain sort of perfectionism assigned not to oneself, but to other people, namely the people that one is reading. I would say judging, but judging improperly. And in this, I’m going to give a little bit of advice, but it’s not going to be: Hey, don’t do that at all. It’s going to be more along the lines of: This is a problem. I’m not going to say stop doing it right now or here is a universal bar upon it, a negative imperative. Instead, I’m going to say think about these points, if this is indeed a problem for you, if you fall into these tendencies or if you see other people doing it, it might help to put it into perspective as well. And think.Think about what’s actually going on here. Does it really make sense to take these sorts of positions, which is not something coming out of a brute necessity or some sort of moral imperative, although it might be felt that way. It’s actually on some level a choice that the person is making. So I’m going to give you an example of this and then maybe a few other similar examples as well. And then I’ll talk about what’s really problematic about this. So some of you may have been seeing me recently releasing content on Jeremy Bentham’s unpublished until after he died. So we call that posthumously published work, which was supposed to be part of his major early released work, the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. I t’s usually titled Offenses Against Oneself, which is a bit of a misleading title because it really focuses much more on male-male homosexuality and whether it should be prohibited or punished by the law or not, which was indeed the case at the time that Bentham was writing.He didn’t publish it in his lifetime, in part because he was afraid of the blowback that he would get, because what he’s actually making a case for is that it should not be prohibited or punished, and that doing so actually from a variety of perspectives, some of which are utilitarian, the principle of utility, and some of which are just based on, you could say, analysis of the arguments behind them. These are not good cases for prohibiting or punishing male-male sexual relationships.So if there’s contemporary people that are going to get ticked off about me producing that content, it would probably be those who don’t like those kinds of relationships and would like to see them once again barred and punished and whatever else we’re going to throw into the mix. And there are quite a few people out there like that. There have been for a long time, even though we’ve seen considerable changes in our own lifetime on these matters here in the United States and you know, more so in some other places as well.The comment that I got was instead from somebody who wanted to take issue with the subtitle that gets appended to this “Of Pederasty,” and the fact that Bentham does use that term within the work. They were saying: I’m glad that Bentham is a supportive voice, but I can’t stand the fact that he uses this term and it’s targeting gays with something that’s really terrible. In effect, they’re saying they can’t see past that, and that’s what they wanted to focus on.And my response was pretty straightforward and simple. I said, I think that you’re smart enough to realize that Bentham is writing in the late 18th century and to, you know, yourself, place things in proper perspective when you’re thinking about language that everybody’s using at the time. To be fair Bentham pursues a rhetorical strategy of deploring homosexual relationships and sex, but you don’t think that he’s really committed to that.He does by the way, and I’ll point out this, he does have some pretty odd ideas about masturbation, which he considers to be worse than any other sexual offense. But that’s a bit of a digression. And it shows you that he is a creature of his time because that is based on some of the medical opinions of his time.Now, we can find similar, let’s call them, deplorings or dismissals of other philosophers. For example, there’s a lot of boneheaded things that Aristotle says about different people, slaves, women, non-Greeks. And you could easily say, well, I’m not going to learn anything by reading this person.Or if you buy into some of the more hysterical views expressed out there aboutanimal ethics and Rene Descartes’ part in it, there’s a lot of people who credit him, I think, pretty unfairly with the idea that animals are simply machines and don’t feel pain so we can do anything that we want to them, which you’re not actually going to find in his writings. And it’s making him sort of a poster boy himself for something that you don’t like.We could also go back to ancient times again and think of the Stoics. One of the topics that comes up over and over again is why didn’t the Stoics condemn slavery? Seneca had slaves. Epictetus himself was a slave. He often calls people slave in his discourses. They didn’t have some sort of systematic critique of slavery as an institution, which, by the way, was found in pretty much every other culture that they ran across. So it was kind of a constant in ancient times. But they also didn’t say: Do whatever you like to your slaves. Seneca actually has an entire discussion of slavery. where he says, you know, you should be treating them in this way, in this way. Cicero says similar things. And we see that in Epictetus. He’s discussing the little bit of God that is in everybody, including that slave over there. So you really have to kind of cherry pick or ignore important parts of a thinker’s work to allow yourself to focus in this way on the things that are going to offend you and allow you to say: I am bothered by this, and then to express that opinion to other people when the discussion really isn’t about that. So it’s a way of making it all about, not just you, but the point that you want to focus on to the detriment of the topic that pretty much everybody else at the time is interested in. We see this in comments. We see this happening in classes. We see this in discussions. There’s a lot of conference questions that are not really questions, but more rants that people engage in doing that sort of thing. It’s a very common sort of foible, we might say.What’s the problem with it? Well, there’s a couple different problems. You could say you’re being very anachronistic. People will often bring up a trope like, it’s a different time and culture. You have to understand that. And quite frankly, sometimes that’s just BS that is functioning like a cop-out. I just don’t want to discuss this thing. And it’s often poorly informed.So if you try to defend Aristotle from the claim that he contributed to slavery by saying that some people were natural slaves, and you haven’t actually read the discussion in Politics book one, and you’re like: Well everybody had slaves back then. Don’t worry about that. Aristotle actually says that not everybody’s cool with this. And by the way, most slaves are not slaves by any sort of nature or justice, or they’re just slaves because they’ve been taken as war captives. So you do want to be properly informed.Sometimes it actually is the case. I think in the case of Bentham, using the word pederasty, he’s not using it quite with the same tenor that somebody in our own time might be doing. Particularly if you read the rest of the work. But there are some cases where you can say: Yeah, this person really is using this term and doing so to be offensive in a way that translates across the eras. It’s important, though, that we recognize that we might be relying on contemporary vantage points that 20 years from now or 100 years from now might get similarly called into question later on. We’ve got plenty of experience of that in our lifetime.Another thing that you might think about is whether you’re expecting perfection or just to lower the bar a little bit, kind of sanitized or bowdlerized versions of the great thinkers who you want and you know, what’s behind that? I would suggest that a lot of the time it’s people who aren’t really that capable of receiving other people’s thought unless it’s been in some way put through some filters, dumbed down a bit, made safe for them.And this, by the way, applies not just to progressives who want to, say appropriate Nietzsche, but it’s going to be a very sanitized, defanged Nietzsche, as I call it. It also applies to conservatives who are like: Yeah man, I love western civilization and the Classics. And then you put Plato’s works in their hands, and suddenly they realize that in the Symposium is a bunch of guys mostly talking about male-male homosexual relationships, and suddenly they want all of that stuff to be excised from the text.There’s a kind of touchiness that goes along with this projection of perfectionism onto other people It also helps to realize that some terms may have just been in common use at the time that the author is writing and nothing detrimental in the same sense as we use the words today is intended by it. You might think, for example, of the term cripple, right? We’re not supposed to use that anymore. As a matter of fact, in our lifetime, we were supposed to switch to handicapped or disabled. And now we’re not supposed to say those either in certain circles. We’re supposed to say differently abled. This is a prime example of how easily terminology can shift around.So if you’re going to like get on somebody’s case, imaginary case obviously, because they’re long dead, because they’re using words in ways that you don’t like from the vantage point of the present, you’re really creating a problem more for yourself than for that thinker.The biggest problem with this, though, and here’s what I want people who engage in this sort of thing to really think about, is it’s conversationally kind of a jerk move to shift the focus in that way. It’s like saying: I’m bothered by this, and so therefore we should be talking about this, not about the main topic that was brought up in the writing, the post, the teaching, the text, whatever it happens to be. That’s supposed to take priority over what the main focus previously was. And I think that people who do that should ask themselves: Why do you think your feelings about this and the offense that you’re taking is so much more important than whatever contributions the person is making? So if you’re looking at Aristotle’s discussion of slavery and you’re looking at it in a honest way that actually focuses on the text, you’re going to see that he is very interested in delineating power relations and how they should be structured, knowing that they’re not typically structured that way and taking seriously some people’s views that maybe all slavery is wrong. And if you’re gonna get offended by the fact that he defends some kinds of slavery and ignore all the rest of it, well that’s on you. And you need to think about why you want to steer things that way, because it is actually a choice.If you’re going to take a document that was a very important set of arguments for gay rights and against criminalization of male-male homosexual relationships, and you’re going to mainly focus on the use of one term, that’s kind of weird. And you should actually wonder about why you’re being so weird about this. That would be part of being a thoughtful person.It’s not to say you have to stop immediately, but you really do need to think that over, I’d say. And you know, think about where this desire to focus so much on a perceived injustice, or bias, or slight, or harm, where is this actually coming from?AI’m going to close by suggesting that for many people who do this, I think it’s because they have actually encountered and seen genuine harm and injustice and stuff like that within the society that they live in. And there’s not that much that they can do about it. They’re not getting in everybody’s faces. It’s much more convenient and a lot safer for them to do so with a target who can’t effectively strike back because they’re long dead. And maybe that provides some imaginary satisfaction, but it’s, I think, not only off target. But there’s a risk of developing a kind of habit, a disposition of selecting the wrong targets characteristically and allowing oneself to fight imaginary battles that don’t actually do any good. for anybody involved except perhaps that person who’s imagining themselves a white knight or hero defending goodness against badness.There’s enough badness in the world that if you really want to confront it. You don’t have to go far. And you could be taking that as your focus. And then the very people who you want to criticize for having ethical lapses might turn out to be your best or at least decent ally. This is a public episode. 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This post is public so feel free to share it.I’d say I’ve had a more than normal amount of exchanges in various social media that have been rather unproductive, for a reason that I think goes beyond social media. It’s in fact something that I’ve seen throughout my academic career. And I think it betokens a certain lack of or not using an important skill that I try to foster in my own students and clients when I’m working with them, when it comes to engaging in philosophical discussion.But it’s something that I would say is a much wider application, because it helps to prevent misunderstandings and talking past each other, which is a rather unproductive use of our linguistic and communicative and even intellectual capacities. We human beings, as for example the Stoics, among many others, tell us are not just rational creatures, but that also means creatures that exist in communities, social creatures, creatures that can have an understanding with each other. And so when understanding is blocked, that’s kind of a problem.So let me tell you what I’m talking about first, and I’m going to keep it rather generic. I know that it happened in Substack and Twitter, and it also happens occasionally in LinkedIn or Facebook, or even when I’m posting things in YouTube. Typically what’s going on is I am reposting what somebody else has said, and then I am using it as a sort of platform to say the things that I want to say.I’ll give you just one example of this. I saw somebody who is making some sweeping generalizations about philosophy inside academia and philosophy outside academia. And they were very concerned about the sorts of things that people who are lauding philosophy outside academia say about philosophy inside academia. They thought they were being a bit unfair.And I was staking out a different position, which is there is no such thing really as philosophy inside academia or philosophy outside academia, because there are indeed people doing philosophy inside and outside both. But the experiences, the situations, what counts as academia, what counts as being outside of it, it’s incredibly varied. So any sort of generalization that a person wants to make is probably going to not only be wrong in some sense, you know, admit of exceptions, it’s just not going to be all that applicable. And it’ll typically be very reflective of the frame of reference that the person who’s writing it has. Nobody has enough of a frame of reference to be able to generalize in that way in the present day. Really probably, even in the past, one might make those sorts of generalizations because we certainly can indulge in them, but they wouldn’t be very accurate. And I think a lot of people just didn’t know that.So I weighed in saying that, and then the person was assuming that because I reposted their thing, I’m directly responding to them, which is kind of a bad assumption, because if I was directly responding to them, it would have been a reply statement. to their original post rather than quoting them and then saying, see, here’s part of the problem. Maybe we need to rethink this.I’ve had other things like this coming up as well. People jump into conversations and think that they’re contributing to the conversation, but they’re really not responding to me as such. They’re responding to the original post which I was not endorsing or saying had gotten things basically right. And then they do respond in a comment to me.So I had another one piggybacking off of that who did precisely that, and they thought they were contributing to the conversation. They actually used those words. And my response to them was you’re not actually contributing to the conversation. You want to talk to the person who originally posted that, to which I was kind of responding by quoting their post, but actually saying a whole bunch of other things, which you haven’t bothered to engage at all. As a matter of fact, you’re still engaging in that kind of sweeping generalization that I was criticizing.So this is just one instance out of many. I don’t want to get too hung up on the details of this, but what is the broader problem that shows a kind of carelessness, thoughtlessness, lack of paying attention to things, which could in fact be looked at as a sort of deficit, of a skill or capacity that has to be developed. It’s something that comes up over and over again when, for example, I teach Platonic dialogues, and I have students who don’t seem to grasp the difference between Socrates repeating what somebody else has said, not because he endorses it, but because he’s actually questioning it and probably saying, thinks that it’s wrong and is about to do his famous Socratic refutation, the elenchus that we see attributed to him as, for better or for worse, one of his key characteristics ofThey’re not able to properly differentiate between saying something about somebody else’s ideas and positively affirming those ideas. And that’s a real problem because if you can’t do that, a dialogue effectively becomes a monologue or it just turns into everybody agreeing and you do have different characters, but they’re all saying the same thing. And that definitely isn’t what’s happening in a platonic dialogue. If you think that is what’s happening, you have gone wrong somehow in your reading of it.And we could say this about all sorts of other things. It doesn’t have to be a dialogue as such. When Aristotle is bringing up somebody else’s point of view, and then shortly after that, he’s going to criticize that point of view, he is not endorsing that point of view, although he might say, well, they’ve got a little bit of correctness to what they’re saying. He’s very good about that sort of thing. So it’s not just when we have different characters speaking. It can also be within the body of a text.I actually ran into something like this the very first semester that I was student teaching with my mentor who had me and the other TA each give two lectures. And it’s, I don’t remember exactly what book it was. It was something, some article about the Holocaust and God that I was supposed to present. And I was presenting not my point of view, but the author’s point of view. And the author was actually citing somebody else who he disagreed with, who was attributing the guilt for the Holocaust of the Jewish people to Christians, if I remember right.So I had a woman who came up to me after class, very angry. And she was very upset with me for saying that somehow God was responsible for the Holocaust. I said, I’m not saying anything. This author is saying that another author is saying that. And she could just not get that through her head because she was so upset. She actually went to the chair and complained to him and he took me aside and gave me some advice about how to handle students like that.But it shows you that there’s a lot of people who just don’t distinguish either because they don’t, simply can’t, in which case this is going to be a really big problem for them in life, or they don’t have much experience in distinguishing, or they haven’t built up those mental muscles, or they’re being careless or kind of lazy, or they’re being tendentious and they’re trying to take offense when no offense is actually intendedIn any case, it’s not a very useful way to approach things. And if we want to have good communication about complex and oftentimes tricky and, you know, polemical topics, we really have to be clear about who is saying what and for what reason and responding to who.And so the fact that it’s other people who claim to be quite interested in philosophy, including a post-grad in philosophy, who are doing it, shows me that this is definitely something we need to concentrate on more. And maybe we need some sort of skill building curriculum to work on that. That might be something that I actually do some writing about later on down the line.But I think this is a good place to end this. These are some reflections from those recent engagements. But you can see that this is a really perennial human problem that probably isn’t going to go away. But I think we can make some headway into if we’re deliberate and thoughtful ourselves about it and figure out how people wind up going wrong in these ways.Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

I’m recording this new episode of Mind and Desire after a bit of a hiatus here inmy office, where I haven’t been able to be and work for not quite a month, but pretty close to it. As I think all of you know, I had a pretty nasty slip and fall on our hardwood floor in our condo which resulted in me landing just right in order to shatter my hip. As it actually turned out I shattered the head of my femur and a good bit of the bone. So I had to have what’s called emergency hip replacement.As my surgeon explained to me: This is not your dad or your grandpa’s hip replacement, where they have arthritis and it’s getting bad, and they come in and they get it handled in one or two hours. My operation actually took four hours. And because of the trauma of the fall and then trying to get up afterwards, which was not a great idea, and all of the other things that went with it, there’s a lot more pain and damage, a lot more recovery that has to take place. So the “emergency” is really the key term there.But I have been on the mend since the operation, as I’ve written about, it is something that takes a lot of time, because there’s many different steps that you have to go through to fix things. But I’m here for the first time back in my office. And this is you could say a baby step for actually doing things. This is probably the easiest location to get to. I can be dropped off right at the front door. There’s a lift that I can take, and I can get around on my cane to the elevator and then up to the fifth floor where my office is, and over to my office, unlock the door, come in here, sit down at this desk in front of the microphone, and communicate with all of you so that’s pretty good nowI’m going to talk in this one, not so much about philosophy, but about some of the things that I’ve learned through this experience. And I’ve already mentioned one of them. Emergency hip replacement is on a whole different level than ordinary hip replacement as far as the toll that it takes on your body and the recovery that it requires.I’ve done a bit of writing in Substack about some of the lessons that I’ve learned, but I haven’t actually gone through all of them. So I’ll just mention a few of them that I have already written about in those three articles so far.One of them is that weird freak stuff happens, and there isn’t really any deeper causality to it. I suppose if you think of the universe as being providentially organized and ordained by some higher mind, maybe you could think that there was some overarching reason for me to have a accident of this sort and undergo this experience. You know, maybe I was getting too big for my britches, or it’s to teach me the value of suffering, or something like that.But if you don’t buy into that, then it’s pretty easy to say, or it should be easy to say rather, that sometimes random stuff happens. I landed on my hip in such a way that it shattered that hip joint. The physician at the emergency room, because we went there, at first was very skeptical. He was like: You’re 55. What, you think you broke your hip? And then he moved my leg and he was like: Oh, maybe we need to do an x-ray. And when he came back from the x-ray, he had a very different attitude and facial expression. And he said something along the lines of: Oh yeah, you really broke that hip.So that sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen to healthy 55-year-olds. A lot of people were searching for the big why of it. Maybe my bones are brittle, so I had to meet with a bone specialist. They asked questions like: Are you safe at home? But really, when it comes down to it, sometimes the stars just align in weird ways. So that’s one important lesson, that we don’t always have to ask for deeper Why’s. And it might be good for us at some point to close that off.Another one was that as somebody who has been suffering from chronic pain in one form or another for decades, and I’m not recommending this, by the way, but it does have a sort of helpful effect. If I was somebody who didn’t experience a lot of routine pain, probably the pain much more intense that I was feeling, because of the fall and break and then the surgery and the recovery, would have gotten to me a lot more. But I’m kind of used to it.So when I was asked, you know, what would I like my pain level to be by one of the nurses, I actually settled on a four. Because to me that seemed just fine and reasonable, because some days I may actually be at a four when I’m normally healthy, and getting around, and getting on with life. Nobody should be in pain ideally, but sometimes having been in pain can be helpful for you.And the third thing that I actually wrote about quite recently had to do with people wishing me a speedy or quick recovery. I said: OK, I understand the sentiment behind it, but it kind of misfires. Because what you really want with this sort of thing is definitely not quick recovery. And to want it to be quick is kind of off base. What you want is all of the little things that have to connect with each other, and cumulatively build you back to a state of health, to be going along and happening as they should.So day-to-day work, doing the PT exercises that you don’t really want to do, every one of them matters. Walking around on it, exercising, eating right, taking care of the pain by getting ahead of it with the painkillers. All of those sorts of things have to do with the healing and none of them are or should be quick.Now, what other lessons have I learned? Well, I’ll give you a hint about one that I’m going to be writing about soon. So they went in for the surgery through my thigh, the front of my thigh, the quadriceps. And that’s where I’ve had a good bit of the pain.And they made a pretty sizable incision. Fortunately, these days they can make them a good bit smaller than they used to in the past, where they’d cut you wide open. But it was still pretty big and they stitched it up with sutures and that’s exactly the way it should be. And it doesn’t look very attractive as these things I imagine never do.So I was looking at it and we’d look at it every single day after we took the big bandage off, because it had to be kept clean and kind of monitored, all of those sorts of things. And you could see it, it was all puckered up and elevated and, you know, there was red blotchy stuff around it. And you could see it slowly getting better.When I went to the surgeon this week... They took the sutures out. And interestingly, when they did that, of course, there’s a little bit of bleeding until they put a bandage on it. When we took the bandage off, I discovered that all of that bunched up ugly skin is now straightened out. And I do have this long line that’s going to be quite a big scar. It doesn’t look great, and it probably never will look great. As a matter of fact, as a side note, when I went in to the ER and they had me get into a gown, so I took off my shirt, they saw the four incision scars from when I had my gallbladder out, and they did that laparoscopically. And they asked, did somebody stab you at one point? And I was like, no, no, it’s just an operational scar.So I’m at the point where I don’t worry too much about attractiveness and all of those sorts of things that I used to be, maybe we could say, obsessed with, in my younger years. And I’m happy. actually, to have these various scars, not because they’re things to show off or anything, but anytime that I look at them, I can remind myself of what it is that I went through. And so I think having a certain kind of attitude towards what happens to our body and what makes it seem less attractive, more ugly in certain respects, can be quite helpful.And I’ll have to think about what other lessons I’ve learned. Those are the biggest ones so far. I could sit down and perhaps plot them out and determine for myself what all the other lessons are. You’ll probably see me doing that in subsequent writings. But that’s probably a good place to leave off here so this doesn’t get overly long.I did want to get back to recording these Mind & Desire podcast episodes. And so it actually fills me with some joy and I would say rightful pride that I’m able to be here once again in the office recording it, even if it’s just a short break, while that I’m here as opposed to spending all day in my office like a workaholic. So that is where I’m going to leave off and you can expect more reflections to come down the line. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

In the last week or so, I have been editing a number of Sadler's Lectures podcast episodes on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods book 2. And if you've been following my YouTube channel, then you're probably going to say, oh, I've seen those already. Well, yes, you've seen the videos, but what I do is take the sound files from the videos and And then I clean them up, take out all the filler words, long pauses, repetitions where I say the same word twice for some reason, just as I do for this Mind and Desire podcast. And it produces something a bit new.And for me, it's kind of cool because when I'm shooting a video, I'm up there in front of the chalkboard. I've got my notes on the board. I've got the text in front of me. And I'm just presenting to the viewers that are going to be watching the video, whether they be my academic students or lifelong learners or fellow professors, whoever's going to be watching that stuff. When I'm editing those videos into podcast episodes, I'm going back over the material again, or rather my presentation of the material to another person, and I'm here, hearing myself talk about the things that are important, interesting, worth taking into account, requiring some explanation from that text or that generally portion of the text that I am presenting on.So for the roughly last week or so, that has been what I've been doing in podcast editing with this work, Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, which I like quite a bit. And I did an entire sequence in the past on book 1 of the work. which has to do with the Epicurean position on not just the gods and religion, but cosmology, the nature of the universe, all those sorts of things. And book 2 takes us into the Stoic position, which Cicero takes a good bit more seriously than he does the Epicureans. As a matter of fact, pretty much everybody in antiquity who is not an Epicurean, you could say that they took Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoic ideas more seriously, viewed them as more plausible than Epicurean ideas. So Cicero himself is not committed to the Stoic views on these matters, but he can present them quite well. And he does so by placing them in the mouth of this guy, Balbus, who is a Stoic. And then he's going to criticize these ideas later on in the next book. So we're not getting a lot of critical examination, but we are getting a lot of exposition.Now, why should we read this work? Well, if you're interested in Stoic cosmology, you obviously want to go to this work because it's one of the main source texts for that, in part because we've lost so much Stoic literature from that period. But there's another reason why somebody might check that out other than just enjoying Cicero or, you know, liking to read ancient texts.And it's because it's, we could say, a underrated text in an area of philosophy that I do some work in and occasionally teach in, in which you may have some interest in as well, which we typically call the philosophy of religion. And this is an area of philosophy, a sub-discipline, if you like, where you can find textbooks and you can find all sorts of resources out there. You can find anthologies and reading lists.And it's been around as, we could say, an official sub-discipline for, you know, over 200 years. I know Hegel certainly has his lectures on the philosophy of religion, and there might be some other people that I'm blanking on who also take a similar approach, where there's these traditional topics that are discussed by a number of earlier thinkers, and we look at what they have to say, and then we kind of go through it.And in the present, what you're most likely going to find is a concentration on, you know, can we define religion? Are there other ways of characterizing what religion is, as opposed to other main areas of life or other disciplines? A lot of investigations into the nature of religious language, a preoccupation with arguments for and against the existence of God of all different sorts, issues of truth claims in religion and how we should adjudicate them, and whether it's possible to have more than one correct religion? Can we have religious pluralism? Those sorts of things tend to be what we focus on.And I really like this text. I have been teaching it now for more than 20 years in philosophy of religion classes precisely because it is a text that is going to bring in alternate but not totally foreign perspectives that give people, who are a little bit too used to thinking about philosophy of religion primarily in terms of theism, usually understood as Christian theism, versus atheism as the main axis for understanding things.So why would this text be interesting in that respect? Well, one reason is because it is dealing with religion as understood by different philosophical schools in antiquity. And these are pre-Christian schools. So Cicero is writing before this Jesus fellow shows up on the scene and people start following him and writing things about him, let alone, you know, developing into a movement that would have some traction and intellectual purchase and contributions within the larger Roman Empire.So it's kind of cool to see that a lot of the issues that we see in the modern: period and in the late modern period, various theists, whether Christian of different denominations or deist, as well as then agnostics, skeptics of different sorts, and then atheists of different brands as well, all debating back and forth, we get to see these ideas, at least some of them, being discussed in a different context.So for example, you'll often hear people talk about the problem of evil, or can you prove that the gods exist, or the ideas that we have of the divine, or whether there's anything like divine providential care for the universe. Well, these are all being discussed in those three books of Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, but they're being looked at by an Epicurean, a Stoic and a Skeptic. There was actually the possibility of having an Aristotelian, but he's not there so he doesn't get to participate But what we get is very interesting because the Stoics are going to provide arguments for the existence of God and the gods, plural we could say. Capital-g God and lowercase-g gods. And a lot of these are going to look kind of similar to arguments that later theists are going to make we can identify arguments from design or what we call teleological arguments. We can identify arguments from effects, which we could call cosmological arguments. There aren't any ontological arguments at that time, but that's going to happen later on.When we see an argument for the existence of, let's just say, the divine, to keep it rather generic, we can sometimes lose our focus and attend only to the argumentation and not where it's actually going. Because we're more focused on the polemics, on debate between people.And what we really should be thinking about is, well, what kind of God or gods is this supposed to be proving the existence of if the arguments should happen to work? And here's where it gets really interesting. Because for the Stoics, we don't have a God who is outside of the universe, who created it or anything like that. I mean, the closest that we get to that is the discussion of the ekpurosis, where the universe essentially gets consumed by fire or, strictly speaking, the kind of fire that ether is and God is still there. And then God starts everything up again. But that's as close as you're going to get. And even all the Stoics didn't necessarily accept that, as we find out in the book.Instead, the Stoics are pantheists, strictly speaking. They believe that the cosmos itself is divine and is not just divine nature in a trivial way, but is the best thing there is. It is rational. It is intelligent. It is all good. It actually cares about us human beings and providentially orders things. And yet at the same time in this book, we're going to see a little tension because the world, the mundus, is also that same God. But then we have the heavens above where the gods also exist.So the arguments, if you accept them, are leading you to a very different place than a say trinitarian god, or even the god of the deists who is still relatively speaking outside of space and time, when you see this. And so here's the upshot of this, especially for my students, is they find that their frame of reference gets shaken a bit. And that's the thing that I think is so cool about teaching these particular works.It's also great, and here's where I'm going to close, sometimes you get religious people who have gotten the wrong message about philosophy and think that philosophy is hostile to religion and you'd better not do philosophy because the philosophers are basically all godless and they're going to lead you away from the true belief.Well, you can find that even the Epicureans thought that there were gods. They were very different than what we think of as divine being or beings, but they believed in that. They weren't atheists, right? You could hedge and say, practically speaking, they were atheists, but now you're playing with words a little bit, rather than attending to what the text actually tells us.The Stoics very, very clearly believed in God and the gods, the divine beings. And they thought that was really important for us humans to have the right ideas about. To avoid, for example, superstition, which is talked about in the work. A distinction is made between genuine religion and superstition. And when you check these things out, you see that Christianity, at least, certainly absorbed a number of ideas and approaches from these ancient philosophies, that at least in the works of the Christian intellectuals who played such a massive role in the early, what we call patristic, period in forming the thought behind what we call Christianity as a religion.So those are some reflections I've had on this experience of going back over the videos to turn them into podcasts on this really great work of Cicero, which I highly encourage all of you to check out if you have any interest whatsoever in the intersections between philosophy and religion. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

I just got back inside from taking a walk for about half an hour around the area that my office building is located in in Milwaukee. I wanted to step out in part because I hadn't been outside all day, and my office doesn't have any windows, so it's nice to get outside and feel the air on you, hear the sounds of the city, but also of nature.And in my case, something else that's particularly refreshing, for both my eyes and I would say my soul, is seeing all the flowers that are still in bloom, while there's an opportunity to do so. If you follow me in social media, you've no doubt seen me posting from time to time as the season rolls from spring into summer and then into fall all the different flowers that I walk past and register. And I've got some musings about them that do have some philosophical import.But before that, I'm going to kind of sketch the scene for you. So our office building is located on a short road that runs parallel to the Menominee River Canal. And the Menominee River is one of three significant rivers that flow through Milwaukee. They all will end up terminating in the Milwaukee River. There's the Milwaukee itself, the Menominee, and the Kinnickinnic. And then they all flow out together into Lake Michigan. And I'm fortunate in that I live and work close enough that I can walk to any of these if I want to.But since I'm already there on the Menominee, I like to take a walk along what's called the Hank Aaron Trail, named after one of our great ball players, the Milwaukee Brewer Hank Aaron. The Hank Aaron trail goes for quite a ways. Some parts of it are simply spectacular. Others are just a path that you walk along. And the portion that we have here, before this massive company and building came in called Rite-Hite, was actually on the spectacular side. But it's still pretty good.And it's nice to walk along the river, and to see the waves, the wildlife, there's a lot of birds, sometimes ducks, or geese, or seagulls, lots of chickadees, swallows, other sorts of birds. Occasionally there's some crows that live around there that I always enjoy seeing. And there's a lot of pollinators, particularly honeybees, and various solitary bees and wasps, and a lot of bumblebees as well, which is a great sign for the health of the area. We get a lot of sulfur butterflies. Those are those beautiful little white and yellow butterflies that we used to actually call cabbage butterflies when we were young. We didn't know their proper name. And occasionally you'll see a monarch or some other butterfly as well.This time of year, the cicadas are in full time living, mating, doing whatever it is that they do activity. Much of it is their singing, which isn't really singing. It's, I think, produced by rubbing their legs together, but it's very loud. And it's a sound that I associate with high summer and the end of summer, as we move into the beginning of the school year. And it's a sound that I particularly like and respond to.I think many people don't enjoy hearing it, but for me, it's a bit of home. And in fact, since I lived far away from here in different regions for so long, to be back in a place that smells and sounds like what I am used to from my childhood, and teenage and early 20-something years, is really comforting on a deep level. So not every single day, but many days that I'm here in my office, I will get out and take a walk around. And we're fortunate in that there's a lot of green space in this city, some of it in the form of parks. That's a relic of Milwaukee's socialist past, that we have a lot more parks than most American cities do, because the socialists who ran the city were dedicated to the idea that ordinary people should be able to enjoy nature. And subsequent political changes haven't really succeeded in closing down or privatizing our parks.We also have, on the other side, a lot of empty space where things just grow. And because we have a lot of native wildflowers here and some non-native invasive species, there's a lot that you get to see as you walk through abandoned lots, or places that have just been allowed to go back to a kind of semi-natural, semi-urban state. And then there's things in between where people have deliberately replanted native plants. Sometimes along parking lots or along paths or things like that. And businesses seem to be, at least in certain areas, pretty cool with that.So there's a lot of natural beauty to enjoy and appreciate. And in these walks, I get to see many different types of flowers and insects and birds and to hear both the sounds of the city and traffic, but also to hear the calling of the birds, or the murmur of the water, or the blowing of the wind, sometimes through the tree leaves, or through dried grasses and flowering plants and bushes.I'm very thankful for that. And I do enjoy all four seasons of the year that we have here in southeastern Wisconsin. But I have to say that this is one of my favorite times of year, when there's still a lot of colorful flowers of different sorts to walk past and take in and to see the pollinators drawing nectar from trees. That's a aspect of natural beauty that I have been responding to since I was a child.And as a matter of fact, a bit of trivia about me that I think very few people know is that when we had to take aptitude tests and figure out what sort of jobs we might want to have, way back when I was in high school, one of the professions that I seriously considered was florist. I never went any further with it, but I've always been taking in the beauty of blooms, and cutting flowers and making arrangements both for other people and for myself, and appreciating when other people do that well also.So I mentioned that there would be some philosophical meat to this. And you could say that the appreciation of beauty is an aesthetic topic. And so we've already done a little bit of philosophizing on the way, even though we haven't mentioned Plato, or Augustine, or Kant, or any other person who writes about aesthetics.But what I want to focus on is something a bit different, namely, the contingency of the sights that we get to see, meaning that they didn't have to be that way. It's possible that there could have been no flowers whatsoever, that the weather patterns could change, that we could have blights. It could be that the kinds of flowers that we see would be replaced by other things, types of plants, maybe flowering, maybe not. It could be that the people who lived in this city didn't value natural beauty and just paved everything over instead, as indeed has happened in some places, or allowed it to turn into wasteland or desert without the rich profusion of that.So every time that we're able to enjoy that, we're really enjoying something that we might call hyper-contingent. It's not just that one efficient cause brought all this about. There are myriad interlocking intersecting causes, some of which are of this season, some of which date back perhaps centuries, and many of which are entirely contingent themselves, not depending on big-picture things like laws of nature or the way that species evolve and express their being, but rather incredibly contingent things, like seeds having sprouted in this particular place or somebody volunteering to plant a certain flowering plant or even berry producing plant.(There's some beautiful berries this time of year on various bushes that we can see before the birds come around and eat them all up.)All of this could be very different than it is. And indeed in just a few days, some of the things that are flowering will have dried up and won't be flowering anymore. And some new blooms until we reach the end of the season will not take their place so much because they don't occupy the same space, but instead draw the eye away from what is dead to what is living.And what is the proper response to this? I would say that thinking about things in this way, and you don't have to think about it constantly or very deeply, but thinking about things in this way opens up the possibility for some aesthetic and some emotional responses.I think that joy is certainly one of them. Pleasure. Perhaps desire, drawing you on further into seeing them. It could be tinged with a bit of sadness or melancholy as you think about all the flowers past, and the fact that these flowers will be gone soon. Also, satisfaction as you think about how they are furnishing food for all of these wonderful pollinating creatures that are part of this vast world that we live in. One might even feel a sense of awe or wonder or gratitude for the possibility of walking along and running one's eyes and perhaps even reaching out and touching and smelling some of these flowering plants that are available to us, fortunately, for the short time that that we have them.So I thought I would share this with you. It's not, I think, particularly profound reflections, but it might be something that at least some of you listeners resonate with and make you recall your own experiences of natural beauty or whatever it happens to be. Maybe flowers aren't your thing, but you like looking over a landscape or looking at a dry desert and watching long enough to see some of the signs of life in it. Whatever it happens to be, I think that engagement with nature, in a kind of unprogrammed way, is something needed for us human beings. Sometimes people don't realize that, but it's usually because they haven't had the opportunity to experience it much, or they've forgotten about it or locked it away. But I think this is something quite important. And I'll just end these reflections with that. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

Just a little bit earlier today, I had a very interesting, although short, conversation that got me thinking about something that could be turned into a decent analogy for philosophical study. And it wasn't directly about philosophy. It was actually about taking different routes, whether you stay on the interstate highways, which are pretty quicker, more direct in many cases, but also kind of boring, even mind numbing to drive on. And the alternative is to take what we often call the scenic route, where you're driving through towns and perhaps you don't have as many lanes, but it's more interesting to drive in and to look around at as you are making your path.And here's how the conversation went. Somebody was talking about driving up to Door County, which is a pretty ritzy and well-known vacation spot here in southern Wisconsin. It's actually past Green Bay. If you've ever seen the map of Wisconsin, you're going up that little finger that comes off. And it's very much, in my point of view, like Montauk and other parts of Long Island in in New York where the Hamptons are out there. It's really for rich people and the people who hold jobs out there working for rich people. That's the way Door County is.And so it's got kind of a reputation of being there for the rich people in Wisconsin and then people coming up from Chicago to go there. Just like Long Island, the Hamptons in Long Island has the reputation of being there for people who who come down from Connecticut or drive from other parts of New York and they've got the money to go out there.Anyway, they were talking about going up to Door County and what's the best way to go. So you can take the interstate for a good ways. Or you can get off the interstate, and take a more interesting and probably a lot more stimulating drive that gets you to see a lot more of the local foliage (it can be very nice during fall when the colors are all turning on the trees). But you also might go close to Lake Michigan, or drive through some scenic towns, and see some cool stuff.So where am I going with this? I think you can probably guess. This is a philosophy focused podcast, so it's going to have something to do with studying philosophy. And I think that there's a great case to be made for spending the time to take the more interesting but time-consuming route.I think a lot of people get themselves into, I won't say trouble, but they save time, but they also waste time by not going into the detours, the backwaters, the smaller routes that you're not quite sure exactly what you're getting into. And they think that they're being more efficient in learning philosophy by only focusing on what other people have told them is the most important stuff, or even taking shortcuts like, you know, having AIs summarize information for you, which we could probably do an entire discussion of covering why that's actually a terrible idea if your goal is to learn anything, not just in philosophy, but in history, in English, in the humanities in general. Probably not even great for doing stuff in the sciences either.Anyway, back to the main topic. So I got to thinking about when I was doing my first full-time gig where I was, as many of you know, teaching up in Michigan City in Indiana, almost on the border of Michigan, at Indiana State Prison. And if I took the interstate, I had about an hour commute, but the interstate was very, very boring. And even with books on CD, I kind of got tired of that after a while.And I would take that up in the morning to make sure I was there on time. But then coming home, I would often take state highways.So, for example, I might take 231, and go south a good ways, and get to see some cool stuff and go over some interesting bridges and go through some towns. Or I might take Highway 20 or Highway 12, which would roughly parallel the interstate that I was on. But there was a lot more to see, especially on 12. And it would take you longer, but it was more enjoyable and stimulating.So what would the equivalent of that be in philosophy? So imagine that you're going to read Plato's Republic. You could easily say: “OK, I just want the bare bones of this. I don't want to dilly dally over some of these discussions, which to me seem a little bit off topic. I just want the argument or I just want the key ideas.”Well, you can certainly do that. I mean, it's a free country. You can do anything you want with your reading. But are you really getting what you want out of it? You may not even suspect what you're missing if you're skipping over too many of the interesting features. If you're unwilling to go down side routes, into alleys where you're not sure what's there, or take a route and linger with Socrates as he seems to go off on a big digression, or even go into myth or something along those lines, you don't really know what you're missing out on.I suppose you could have something like the guidebook where a great commentator could say: “Well, make sure that you read this part. You may be tempted to skip over it, but it's really the equivalent of a Michelin star restaurant. You have to stop in.”Helpful for some people, I guess, if you think that you need somebody with some prestige to tell you: “Oh you have to stop here” or “You need to check this out”. But those of us who have enough judgment, or common sense, or whatever you want to say, experience perhaps, to know that much of the time we just need to explore, we need to see what's actually there for ourselves, and that might be the way to go.And I think if you need somebody like me, who's not quite as prestigious as the people who write the big commentaries and get published with big academic presses, but you know, presumably knows a little bit about philosophy and its study. If you need somebody like me to say to you: “Hey, when you're reading Thomas Hobbes, don't just jump to the stuff about the state of nature. Read the stuff in the book one of Leviathan, where he's talking about words being counters for things and the different kinds of passions, even though it seems a little bit off-topic, or digressions, or a waste of time. It's pretty cool stuff, and it actually turns out to be quite interesting and important.Or, I mean, Aristotle's prone to all sorts of digressions, as is Seneca. I mean it's almost endemic in ancient philosophy, I would say. But you could always check it out for yourself. I'm not saying you have to go down every single bywater and investigate, because who's got the time for that? But sometimes you probably do want to take, I won't say “the road less traveled”, invoking the Robert Frost poem, but one that certainly doesn't have quite as wide of a path, and doesn't seem to have quite as many people traveling that same way as you.That could turn out to be quite interesting. And there are so many things. that you would discover along the way that you might not find in a guidebook, or in Yelp, or whatever else the equivalent is for these sources that we use for deciding what's worth actually digging into, spending time with, going to see and checking out. There's often a lot of things along the way that you just have to run across.So I think that this is, of course, an analogy, a metaphor. Is this supposed to be something that you can use in every single circumstance? No, you have to have some good judgment about how to interpret and apply this. But I think this might be a very useful reminder for some people out there, about what they could be depriving themselves of, if they're only studying what turns out to be the equivalent of staying on the interstate highway, as they're working their way through philosophical texts and thinkers. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

I had an interesting exchange today on Twitter with somebody who direct messaged me, and they were talking about starting the Half Hour Hegel series, which, if you don't know, that is a video series that I published. And it took me about nine years of work to see it through, in part because it had roughly 370 or so videos, each one focused on anywhere from one to four paragraphs from Hegel's Phenomenology, which is viewed as one of the more difficult works of Western philosophy. And there's good reasons for that, which we don't have to go into right here.So this person was enthusiastic about starting the series, and that's understandable. I think that a lot of people have the impression that, sort of like with Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or Benedict Spinoza's Ethics, the Phenomenology of Spirit is a text that if you're really serious about studying philosophy, you have to dive into and work your way through at some point, and so better sooner than later, which is actually not the case in several different ways. But again, sort of a side topic.So he was looking forward to going through the series. And another thing that he said is that when he'd finished the series, then he'd write me again. So I wrote him back and I said, well, I'll see you in a year or two, because there are, again, 370 plus half hour videos. And they are complicated stuff because Hegel is a complicated thinker, and so the explanation of it is not going to be simple either. I use my chalkboard. I draw diagrams. I unpack Hegel's German at certain points, and talk about examples of what he's saying to illustrate it, since he doesn't really give you many examples. So deciding to embark on that that's kind of a big thing, i's a major commitment, you might say, of one's thought and time.In any case, I wrote him back and said, all right, I will see you in a year or two. And then he wrote me back and he said, no, no, you'll see me sooner than that. And what he wrote following that quip, which is rather optimistic, was the part that I'm going to be responding to here. So I'm paraphrasing what he said, because I don't have it verbatim in front of me.He was saying that he's using AI to scrape the videos, and what he means by that is go to the transcripts of the videos, which are probably decent but are going to get a lot of the German words wrong, and probably mix up some other things. And he would have an AI essentially summarize and bullet point things out for him, as he worked his way through Hegel's phenomenology. And he wanted to know whether I would update the transcripts so that the AI would function better.I wrote him back and I said, this is a terrible idea. This is something that I think we could apply more broadly. It could be taking AI to try to work your way through any important philosophical text, for example, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, or even better, his Metaphysics, or Plato's Republic, or one of his later dialogues like The Statesman, or Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods.We could go on and on and on.If you're relying on an AI to do some of the work for you, you are really cheating yourself and you're also setting yourself up for going wrong in a number of ways. It's sort of like as if you had decided, for whatever reason, could be that you think you're not smart, smart enough. It could be that you think you'll save yourself some time, whatever it happens to be. It's like deciding you're only going to read secondary literature about particular philosophers and that that will be good enough for you. You will never actually do the work, set aside the time, devote your mind to readings the text that the thinker actually wrote.And if you do that, it's pretty much guaranteed that you are going to miss out on some important stuff within the text. I don't think that you could even take, for example, Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and rely solely upon a secondary work to give you everything that's going on there. You actually do need to read the text yourself.Using AI strikes me as an even more thoughtless and foolish way to try to effectively cut corners. So there's a number of reasons why that's the case. And this person seems to be involved in AI in some respect. So I imagine that he's probably already aware of some of these issues. But the fact that he wants to apply this to Hegel's phenomenology shows me that perhaps he doesn't take those issues seriously.So what would the problems be? Well, first of all, there are what they call hallucinations, which is just a fancy word, probably an ill-chosen one, for just making stuff up that isn't true and may be completely imaginary, let's say.And imaginary there is being used as a metaphor because artificial intelligence, which itself is a metaphor, it's not actually intelligent, doesn't have an imagination. But if we understand imagination is like thinking up something that doesn't actually have reality by taking components of things and smooshing them together or modifying them. Okay, imagination works. So AIs will just make stuff up. Sometimes if you call them on it, they'll actually admit it and say, oh, I'm sorry, let me see if I can fix that. And then they'll go on to make something else up.For example, when I asked ChatGPT a while back about the books that I had written, it gave me one book that I actually have written, which is my main book that's out there. And then it attributed six other books to me, five of which were real books that some of my colleagues have written, and it lied and said that I wrote those books. One of the books was completely fictional. Fictional in the sense not that it's a book of fiction. It's a book that doesn't exist.So just imagine what would happen if you're feeding in Hegel's phenomenology and my commentary on it, all the crazy crap that it's going to come up with and say, yeah, this is what's going on here. It could make up anything you want. And unless you actually know Hegel, you won't know that you're getting duped by something that you chose to put your trust in.Another big problem is going to be superficiality of interpretation. So the way that these large language models work is they've scoured a vast amount of data that was available there on the internet, and hopefully they haven't started scouring other AI-generated data, which is a whole other problem that we can talk about somewhere else. But what they've done essentially is take what was available out there, and you could say that it's in many respects kind of lowest common denominator stuff. So there's a lot of crappy takes on hegel out there a lot of misinformed takes. I'll just give you one great example. Hegel in the Phenomenology does not use a thesis-antithesis-synthesis approach to things.As a matter of fact he actually criticizes a schematicism of that sort at various points in the Phenomenology. However, a lot of the people out there who have written things on Hegel over the years, including on a lot of websites and other videos and podcasts, have been replicating this wrongheaded approach to Hegel's thought and work. So you can guarantee that the AI is going to be working off of that stuff ,and is going to feed you erroneous material, and it's going to get things wrong. And again if you don't know Hegel you don't know what you don't know, namely that this thing is giving you bad information generated from many other people's bad information.The third thing is that AI leads to a kind of flattening of matters. It doesn't think. It doesn't have intelligence. It doesn't learn. It doesn't do any of these sorts of things, which would be problematic already with a lot of philosophers. But when you're looking at somebody like Hegel, within whose work the very problem of thinking itself is being thematized in a way that's supposed to draw you, the reader, in and get you thinking along with, but also against Hegel himself at different points. well, the AI is totally going to lose the thread and (let's say it was intelligent) wouldn't be able to grasp where it's getting things wrong.But it's not even intelligent. And it's rather foolish to think that it's going to give you an accurate take on something so complex, so convoluted as the movements of thought going on in Hegel's Phenomenology. Even I, a commentator on Hegel, couldn't actually film every single day that I got up there in front of the chalkboard to do it because sometimes I would lose the train of thought myself, somebody who had been studying Hegel for 20 years by the time that I started that project. So an AI is going to be totally out of its depth, and it's not going to tell you that it's out of its depth.So long story short, I told this person, this is a terrible idea. I don't think that you should do this. If you're going to study Hegel, actually study Hegel. Feel free to use the videos as a resource, but this is a counterproductive way to go, you may think that you're actually helping yourself, but you're getting in your own way.And then I capped it by saying, listen, if you're committed to this sort of using AI to essentially substitute for the work that's involved in understanding a complex classic work of philosophy, don't contact me again, because there wouldn't be any point in having a conversation. I don't know where it's going to go. Ididn't get a response after that. Perhaps they got discouraged, or perhaps they thought oh this guy's just a Luddite or some fuddy-duddy who doesn't understand AI like somebody smart and hip like I doAnd frankly, it doesn't really matter what his response is unless it's something like, yeah, I see that this would be a real mistake to go down this path. I don't foresee any useful conversation with somebody who has effectively deluded themselves, probably in conjunction with a lot of other people helping them with that delusion. sharing it, replicating it within their little teams, there wouldn't be much point in continuing a discussion.So that's where we'll leave the topic for the time being. Ultimately, the big point here is if you're going to use AI, there are some legitimate uses for it, but it's not going to help you study philosophy effectively. It might help you as a complete beginner to get some starting points, much like Wikipedia has in the past, or reading secondary literature. But you really have to be on your guard against getting misled and thinking that you actually know things that you don't, that when you go to the text you'll unfortunately (or actually fortunately for you) find out that they got wrong, and you've had wrong because you trusted a source that prudence would have told you not to place such reliance upon. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

Last week, I spent three days at a local conference, and it's one that I typically go to every year and occasionally present at (I think I've done three or four talks there over the last 10 or so years), and it's held at Marquette University and called the Aristotle and Aristotelian Tradition Conference.The theme changes from year to year, so you get different people and different kinds of papers and discussions at each of the conferences, depending on what the theme is and how it ties in with the kind of work that people are doing.So this year, it was about Aristotle and his predecessors, meaning Aristotle's own discussions, treatments, criticisms, interpretations of people, not just including Plato, his old teacher, but all of these other philosophers that had come before him. And you can find discussions about that sort of thing, for example, in Metaphysics book 1, where he tells us what all these different philosophers thought about the causes of and why they didn't have the four-cause schema that he did, but were on the way to developing it.Or you can look in other works. For example, there's some references in the Nicomachean Ethics to other people's viewpoints on things. And we don't have to belabor that point. Suffice it to say that Aristotle is very interested in what other people had to say, and he's also equally interested in in taking what's useful or right or even just half developed in their works and incorporating it into his own larger, fairly systematic perspective on matters, but stripping away the things that he thought were off base and saying, at least at certain points in his works, why he thought they were off base.Now, it's Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition, so it doesn't just include attention to Aristotle himself, but also to later thinkers, some of whom are also writing in Greek, some of whom are in various other places, you know Arabic writers on Aristotle, some works from the middle ages. I don't think there was anything on contemporary aristotelianism but i might have missed that because I had to miss a few of the sessions.In any case, why am I talking about this conference here? I had the luxury of not having to present any of my own work. I actually had a thought about what I might propose as a topic. It would have been a little bit out of the usual extent of this, which is much more focused on logic and metaphysics and matters like that, I would have focused on Aristotle and his engagements with predecessors in what we call the ethico-political works, which include the Ethics and the Politics, but also the Rhetoric and the Poetics, and a few other works of those sorts.So I didn't get a proposal together. And the good news about that was I didn't have to present anything. I could just sit back and see what other people had to say. And that was quite enjoyable. Sometimes I could go up to them afterwards or even in the session, ask questions. And I could also see what other people were interested in asking about or even debating about. And this is what you do at a good academic conference.It's one reason why we have this sort of, let's say genre or format or arrangement for doing that sort of thing. You might wonder, well, what would I get out of going to an academic conference? And with some of them, it might not be very good at all! Maybe you don't get any good discussion with anybody or you're kind of shut out because it turns out to be a gathering of people who all know each other. But in many cases, it's pretty cool to go because you meet up with other people who share a few things in common with him.So one of them is an interest in something that is probably pretty uncommon. If you meet up with somebody else who routinely reads Aristotle and wants to talk about metaphysical views on, say, causality or the principle of non-contradiction or the nature of the heavens or whatever, anything like that, that is a very, very small amount of people. You could say it's like a weird, tiny fandom, right?But it's not just fandom, because people who are interested in these things are putting in the time and effort to study them because they think there's something not just interesting, but potentially useful there, something worth knowing about and talking about. And here's another thing that you share in common with them. They're willing to write papers that very few people in the grand scheme of things are ever going to read, let alone read attentively, let alone read. give them useful feedback and responses about.So they're not just willing to write that. They're willing to travel, to hang out for three days with other people. They're willing to, to some degree, dress up when they're presenting and take what other people have to say about it seriously, and then perhaps go out for dinner later or meet together and discuss it over lunch. So these are quite often very important ways in which people get stimulation.And it kind of takes me back. Many of you probably know my first full-time teaching position was at Indiana State Prison. And I was teaching for Ball State University in a four-year degree program. But aside from the other professors in the prison program, and there was only one of them who actually taught any philosophy classes, you wouldn't get a lot of what we call peer interaction. I mean, the students were pretty good on the whole, interested, older, so a bit more mature. Very motivated, at least at a certain point, to learn and discuss and get as much as they could out of their education. but they didn't have access to the kinds of materials that we did because of the prison regime.And typically they were working on their bachelor's. So they weren't people who had done graduate work on Aristotle, or Hegel, or Maurice Blondel, or pick whoever else it happens to be. You do want — most people, I would say if you're an academic — you do want to engage with other people who are not just on your level in terms of their background and preparation and education and research, but who have a similar level of interest in what it is that you're focused on.And so for me, I mean, you do get some good interaction through reading other people and you can correspond by email or (we didn't have social media back then) but nowadays you could do it in social media. But there's something about actually being in the same space, the same place, the same conversation as other people that is quite valuable.And I think this is something that many people out there are quite starved for, have this deep desire. I think it's something much more important common and widespread among human beings who are interesting people, because they're interested in interesting things. And so those of you who are listening to this may recognize yourself in there.Even if you don't have a background academically in philosophy and you came to it kind of late, you might say to yourself, yeah, this is something that I wish I could get more of. And so academic conferences and do satisfy that desire to some degree. They're often more intense, but we could think about other venues in which this can happen.For example, something that I was fortunate to be invited to participate in just last year, Stoic Camp out in Wyoming, where a bunch of people, some of whom are academics, but many, most of whom are are not, and are from all sorts of walks of life, but are interested in Stoicism, get together way out in the wilderness at a camp and hang out and, you know, do camp things like eating meals together and taking hikes and bonfires, but also intensively study, and talk about, and practice this philosophy as a way of life together for some time.And you get to know people as you're doing this and I think that's quite valuable it's quite enjoyable it's something that has a lot of dimensions to recommend it so I thought I would talk a little bit here about what it's like to participate in an academic conference.I think now that I've said it, this is actually a very small subset of a much larger set of ways in which we engage each other about things that matter to us, and really have some substance and depth to them, so they can be explored and shared in common.And I think that's probably where I'll end. You can think about that yourself, whether you crave, need, desire those sorts of engagements or whether you do just fine without that and what the reason for yourself happens to be for being disposed one way in this matter or in the other direction.Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

Today I had an interesting conversation that in many respects was a repeat of a number of other conversations I've had in the past where there's a theme that comes up over and over again having to do with philosophy, but not just philosophy in the abstract. Particularly philosophy, we could say in its great thinkers, the ones who form a sort of canon in Western philosophy. And that canon actually needs to be rather deep and broad and diverse. Otherwise, it's not really a canon. It's just kind of a little bit of a club that people like to hang out in. It would include people that come to mind like Plato and Aristotle and David Hume and Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant. But it should also include a whole host of thinkers from ancient, medieval, early modern, late modern philosophy. Probably it should be so extensive that any one given person would look at the list and say, oh wow, here's somebody on here who I haven't actually read, but maybe they're worth checking out.Now coming back to the conversation, the thematic involved is that somebody says, wow, I didn't know that this kind of thought with its particular useful application was actually out there, or I didn't know that these thinkers who I've heard about actually had these really cool and interesting and potentially useful things to say.In the case of the person I was talking with today, they were coming from a background where they'd had one philosophy class in college, and it was a formal logic class, so they didn't really learn much about any particular thinker or delve into texts. And they'd recently become aware of at least with certain philosophers just how much they had to offer and they were thinking: well why didn't I get this in the course of my education, particularly in high school, and then in college, and then in professional studies later onWhy wasn't anybody introducing me to, for example, what Aristotle has to say about having decent conversations with people by using something that gets called dialectic. There are a lot of other ways in which this sort of thing can arise as well. It's very common if you did study philosophy, but you did so in a way what we call analytic philosophical tradition department, that you're probably not going to get much deep reading of texts and thinkers, because analytics typically don't read an awful lot. They like to stick to small portions of texts. The more that they actually, like for example, Robert Brandom, pay attention to thinkers and their works as a whole, the less analytic they tend to be over time. So the general tendency is to say, we just want the arguments. We just want the gist of it. Don't bother to read all of Bentham or Kant or whoever it's going to be. You might think that on the other side of the so-called analytic continental divide: that it would be a bit better. But what we see, unfortunately, happening there, as well as in departments and programs that share a similar kind of approach and canon, for example English departments that are really into, say, Derrida and all of his successors, what we see instead is they don't spend much time on the pre-19th century thinkers unless that's the flavor of the day. And they're going to read certain things and highlight those but you won't go to a department like that and get a really solid introduction to Plato or Aristotle, let alone somebody like Cicero or Plutarch or Augustine or any of these other thinkers.If you know much about the current landscape of philosophy, then you'll say, okay well, if you didn't get it from going to a place which really doesn't do philosophy much at all, or in an analytic department or a continental department, well, I know where you'll get this sort of stuff, and you'll get it good. It'll be in some sort of school that either specializes in history of philosophy or takes a kind of classical Great Books approach. And you'd think that would be the case.However, even there, what you find is it's pretty hit or miss because a lot of the places that bill themselves as providing a classical education don't really do much of that. They may teach some Aristotle, but usually in a way that goes against the very spirit of Aristotle's texts, which are all about, you know, inquiry and thinking through issues. They often will treat Aristotle as if he's just a precursor to Thomas Aquinas, or he's articulated these wonderful principles once and for all, and they ignore the, let's call it, dialectical aspects of Aristotle's own texts.And we could say the same about people reading Cicero or Plato or Augustine. Thomas Aquinas is particularly subject to that sort of treatment. So there's a lot of ways that one can go and then later on find out by actually reading the texts of philosophers just how much they missed out on. It can come from a lot of different backgrounds in this respect.And interestingly, what I've observed with this is that there's an entire spectrum running from irritation and frustration on one end all the way up to rage on the other end. And what is this spectrum? Well, this is the continuum of the broad emotion of anger. where we have sort of a low-grade thing on one side, frustration, and we have full-blown anger beyond anger, rage, fury on the other hand, and everything in between.And ironically, if you want to know about that, well, there's all sorts of great philosophical resources on that in the Western tradition. You probably heard me talk about quite a few of them. Aristotle is one of the thinkers who does, in fact, tell us an awful lot about that emotion. Seneca would be another one. He wrote an entire book on anger. And one of the common elements to the philosophical treatments of anger is that there's a realization it's a complex emotion and it arises out of the perception that some sort of wrong has been done to you or to others.Somebody or something that you care about or feel responsible for or identify with. And that wrong is unjust. It shouldn't have happened. And so you desire to respond in some way that would set this right by punishing, by retaliating. And that's what anger at its core really involves. There's more to it than that. We don't have to worry about the other elements because what we're really interested in here is that emotion so often arising in relation to realizing that what you studied is didn't actually give you what you see you could have gotten, what you should have gotten, right? There is an ought, a moral obligation there that you feel has been violated in some way.And especially if you paid for that education, you would be rightly thinking, I paid all this money. Why didn't I get what they should have provided me with? And quite often, the answer is they didn't know any better than you. Those people who were teaching you, who were setting up the curriculum, they probably were themselves fairly ignorant and in an unphilosophical way, relying uncritically on what other people had to say about where you would actually go to find the cool stuff that now you're discovering.And what we see all too often, I think this is quite surprising to people who imagine that philosophers are all these hyper-rational people, which indeed they're not. What we see happening is a replication of a vicious circle. So we'll take an example in continental philosophy. Why would you read Aristotle?You know that he's committed to a substance, metaphysics, and an ethics that focuses on virtue. We know that these sorts of concepts have been used in ways that go against human dignity, or are logocentric and phallocentric, or not rhizomatic enough, or pick whatever flavor of the day you've got for the cool kids ideas that are being bandied about.So we don't need to actually read Aristotle. It's enough that we criticize him and then move on to the more interesting stuff that we're going to talk about and what happens we have generations of people who don't actually know what's there in Aristotle's worksThis could equally happen in a great books program where people have far too narrow conceptions about what Aristotle is teaching and what his method is and ideas like that. And they just transmit that to their students in a dogmatic fashion.The remedy for this is pretty straightforward and simple. You got to actually read the texts and see what's in there. And until you do that, you really don't know, do you? And if an expert claims that they know exactly what's in those texts, but they haven't read them recently, you should probably be a little bit suspicious of that self-proclaimed or proclaimed by many others expert.In the end, the remedy is not to get angry and say there ought to be a law, we ought to change things. It's much lower level. You can change it for yourself. You can find other people who are, in fact, reading these thinkers and texts and talking about the important issues. And if you want to incorporate any of those insights into your own life and thinking, there is literally nothing stopping you except the demand on your own part that somebody else go along on the journey with you.Somebody who probably is invested in going on a different journey. So this is a topic I probably need to do some writing about because I've been thinking about it for quite a long time. Having encountered this sort of realization and then reaction on the part of so many of the people I have talked to over the years. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

Today I was doing a little bit of writing about a class that I'm going to be teaching for the second time, which is called Stoicism and the Cardinal Virtues. And one of the things that I was mentioning as I was writing about this class, trying to get people interested in signing up for it and taking it along with me, is the fact that when it comes to virtue, the four cardinal virtues, the subordinate virtues that each of those four cardinal virtues encompasses or includes, what we don't have is any one single Stoic text where you're going to get a comprehensive overview of that.Instead, what we have is a set of different discussions spread throughout a whole bunch of different thinkers, a whole bunch of texts, many of which are actually by Stoics, some of which are by people like Cicero who are not themselves Stoics but know a lot about it, communicate a good bit about it, and find certain aspects of the Stoic point of view rather attractive.What we have to do is take these many different discussions, which, by the way, are in two different languages, ancient Greek, Latin, right? And we have to do a lot of connecting the dots, correlating what one person says with what another person says, catching allusions that are being made, for example, in Epictetus, who talks about a number of these different subordinate virtues without mentioning the cardinal virtues by name. We have to piece together a fairly systematic doctrine.And what we're doing there is what I for about 20 years or so have come to call “philosophical detective work”. That's my own phrase. Nobody else is required to use it. You're not going to be able to look it up in an online dictionary or a website and have people say, oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. It's just a useful term that I have been providing people with for a number of years, probably a little bit ambiguous, maybe misleading or inexact in what they make of it so that they can understand the kind of work that I and certain other philosophers do.And I say certain other philosophers because there are other philosophers who I see doing this, particularly people working in the history of philosophy, but not restricted to that. But I also say certain other philosophers because we're probably in the minority when it comes to the contemporary philosophy world where other people are taking different approaches.If you look at my academic writings and even some of my popular writings, you'll see me doing this in my own way with a lot of different thinkers. So, for example, when it comes to Aristotle, I’m somebody who delves into particular topics and reads across a number of different texts where Aristotle is discussing that. On anger, for example, I will bring in the Rhetoric and the two Ethics, the Nicomachean and Eudamian, the Politics, and any other text that I think is particularly relevant for what it is that I'm discussing, which might be the Topics, might be the De Anima, might even be the Poetics for that matter.When I'm working on Thomas Hobbes, okay, there I'm mostly using Leviathan, but I'm ranging throughout the first two books of the work and I'm connecting together discussions rather than saying, oh, I'm only going to look at this particular chapter. I am going to bring in all sorts of things to try to illuminate the topic that I'm interested in.If I'm writing about Jeremy Bentham, well, I obviously will be engaging with his most important and most often excerpted work, which is the introduction to the principles of morality and legislation. But I'll also bring in things from other works by him as well, and I'll be ranging over the whole of that big, thick, and oftentimes boring, but also quite interesting book.So when it comes to the Stoics on the virtues, I am looking at not just what Seneca and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, these three late Stoics, have to say, but also what we find in Cicero's works or in Musonius Rufus's lectures or in the summaries of Stoic doctrine that we have in Diogenes Laertes and in Arius Didymus and other texts as well, because what I'm going to be doing is putting together a comprehensive picture as best as I can of what it is that these people, these really deep and systematic thinkers, wanted to tell us about these interesting, complicated phenomena.In this case, what we call the virtues, but I might also be looking at an emotion or something else, a philosophy of action, motivations that people have. And in order to do this kind of work, there is a important prerequisite that I think a lot of philosophers don't want to engage in and don't see the usefulness of — perhaps were never even introduced to as an important way of doing philosophy — and that is to read widely and attentively and note connections between things.If, for example, you want to know what St. Anselm's ideas about something that he talks about are, you have to read not just the most famous book where there's a chapter on that. You actually have to read around history.in his works, and probably not just read particular treatises, but also look at his letters to other people if there's anything relevant in there, or at the life of St. Anselm, or even texts like the Dicta Anselmi, which hasn't even been translated into English,and you might find useful stuff even in his Prayers and Meditations.It's when you do that, when you actually engage with a thinker and their body of work, not just in a very pragmatic way, saying I'm interested in Anselm's ontological argument, so I'm only going to read Proslogion 2,or maybe 2 to 4, and the response to Gaunillo. But you say I want to see what he makes of other arguments in his works. In particular, since the Prosologian is supposed to be kind of a condensation of the many arguments of the Monologion, maybe you got to read that. But you probably also have to read through his works looking for other instances of “that than which nothing greater can be thought”, which you will find as a catchphrase used in other works, if you actually go to them and you read them.If you don't do that, then unless you are fortunate enough to read somebody else who is doing that kind of work and they put it down in their own books or articles, you won't even suspect what you're missing. And that is where I think the vast majority of people who study education and teach and talk about and produce resources on philosophy actually are.By contrast, if you really want to know a thinker well, you need to read a lot of the stuff that they've written. So it's not enough to understand Rene Descartes. just to read his Discourse on Method and the Meditations. You probably also want to read the Objections and Replies to the Meditations, but you also want to read letters that the guy wrote and some of his other works, and then you get a much fuller sense of what his project is and what he's doing and what positions he actually develops and holds and defends on particular matters.I don't actually know how I wound up doing this other than being interested in reading as much as I could of particular authors and then seeing the interconnections between ideas and arguments and distinctions and other elements of philosophy spread across their works. But early on in my development as, I would say, a graduate student and then as a young professor, that's what I was tending to do in my academic articles and book chapters. And I think I even did some of that with my students in my classes and with colleagues, for example, at conferences saying, you know if you check out this, this person is also saying this about the topic.And that has become one of my main approaches to understanding philosophical thinkers and movements over time. I imagine that many of my peers find what I do differently, either confusing or frustrating. They don't understand why there's so many allusions to other works when it seems like we could make things a lot simpler. But I'm not interested in simplifying.I'm interested in doing justice to the complexity and depth and richness of the thought that we're lucky enough to have access to under the names of these interesting thinkers. And so that's what I call philosophical detective work. I'm not saying that anybody else necessarily has to do it. or that it's even the best way to study philosophy or teach it or talk about it. But I think it's a viable way of working at it, and it's one that is rather respectful of the great thinkers who so generously contributed their works to us. And so those are some reflections for today. I don't really know what you ought to make of them, but I thought I would share it with you and you can tell me what your own views or experiences are when it comes to this approach. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

I had an interesting but short conversation today in Facebook that I'm going to use as sort of a launching point for thinking about some bigger picture issues having to do with how you study philosophy, particularly if you're doing it on your own, if you're somebody who can't do it full time in a school with the guidance of professors (which, by the way, is probably a bit overrated. It's kind of a grab bag. But that's a conversation for another time.)So this person was commenting on a post that I made, where I was linking to the piece that I wrote last night about Alasdair MacIntyre and some of my memories of interactions with him that, to me, revealed a kind of character that I've talked about before in this podcast, specifically with MacIntyre. So I don't need to go over any of that again.The person probably expressed themselves poorly because what they were asking for is something that I'm asked for an awful lot in comments and emails and AMAs. Which is: tell me what works of a philosopher are most important or essential for me to begin with.But what this person added to it that kind of set me thinking in a certain line (perhaps wrongly) was: “I don't want to waste time or effort.” And I thought, you know, there's a couple things wrong with this.One is that if you're just beginning in philosophy or really in any field, you don't know enough to be able to say where you're wasting time or effort. As a matter of fact, this is something that MacIntyre has drawn upon an awful lot in his work as an analogy for moral theory, to learning how to play an instrument, or learning how to work with a crew on a fishing boat, or learning how to do some sort of handicraft like pottery, and anything along those lines,You don't know enough at the start, even though you may feel that you do, to be able to say what's a waste of your time or effort and what isn't. It's up to people who know a bit better than you, if you're lucky enough to have them there personally. who can say: Well, here's what you need to do. I understand that you don't really like playing scales and doing these drills on the flute or the piano or whatever it is, but you really do need to do this if you want to progress.If you want to be able to fish with us, first you've got to learn how to stand on a boat and not fall over when the waves hit, and then you've got to learn how to work with the netting, and how to tell certain signs about the water, and we could go on and on and on. You get the point. I don't need to belabor that any further.So there's that part going on, the you don't know enough to know what you don't know, which I may talk about somewhere else, because I think that's actually very important. People get themselves into all sorts of trouble and predicaments and emotional conundrums because they're working off of insufficient information. And they draw conclusions from it about what they ought to do.And this is where you actually do waste time and effort going down blind alleys, so to speak, or getting yourself stuck in a cul-de-sac somewhere. And then you got to come out and redo it. The other thing that I was perhaps wrongly reading into it, because I said to the person, you know, that's not the sort of attitude that you want to bring to philosophical works, is this notion that you can divide works up into those that are actually worth your time and effort and those which are a waste of it.Now, there are definitely some books out there that either in general for most people or for a particular person, given where they currently are, would be kind of a waste of their time and effort relative to something else. I don't suggest that people dive right away in the beginning of their philosophical studies into Hegel's Phenomenology or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or Spinoza's Ethics or any of these other texts that people take as kind of pinnacles and must-reads. Again, another topic for another time.And it would be kind of a waste of time, relatively speaking again, to say: Well, I'm going to plow my way through Kant's first critique, and I'll just do that rather than reading other things where you might make a little bit more progress. I can certainly understand that notion. But the idea that philosophical texts in general, particularly with somebody like MacIntyre, where his writing is pretty accessible, deliberately so, and he touches on many interesting and important topics, weaving them together well, there really isn't anything that would be a waste of your time to read or to study or to reread and go back to. And I think we can say that for a lot of philosophers, even if you're reading something that's very challenging and makes reference to a lot of other thinkers that you haven't probably studied before, like say Aristotle's Metaphysics, it's not a waste of your time for you to be reading that, particularly given all the other things that we do that, at least in comparison to reading philosophy, do turn out to be kind of wastes of time.You know, scrolling on our phones, watching television shows that we probably won't remember a year from now, composing emails about all sorts of topics to people who probably aren't going to read them. You know, we could compare those things and say, yeah, that's kind of a waste of time. You know, maybe not. Again, who's to say what actually constitutes a waste of time? It's always going to be in comparison to something else that you could be spending your time upon.So as we went back and forth in conversation, it emerged that this person was probably underrating their own capacities for reading and understanding and study, which is a very common set of ideas that people impose on themselves and labor under when it comes to philosophy and not just philosophy, but other fields as well.They say, oh, I'm just not very good at this. I'm not intellectual. I'm not very smart. And, you know, if you approach things with that attitude, you create could then say: Well, I don't want to waste my time studying something that's far beyond me that I'm just not ready for. And that would actually make some sense. But again, with McIntyre, I don't think there's an awful lot where a decently educated and well-motivated person who does want to understand what he's saying would pick up a book and just not be able to make any sense of it whatsoever, and wouldn't be able to make some progress, any more than I think that's the case with reading Plato's dialogues (granted some are much more difficult than others, and you might be a little confused at first with all the variety of perspectives going on). But it's worth plowing away atAnd so here is the broader general point. I'm not saying that nobody ever wastes their time or effort studying particular works of philosophy, but I will say, and here's a claim that I'm making, that for nearly all of us, our default should not be heading in with this attitude of, “I don't want to waste my time and effort.”It should be rather, well, I've got some time and effort to spare, and I could be wasting it on things that are very trivial, but I'm choosing to devote it to something that I think is going to have a better yield, a better payoff. a better return on investment. And I don't really know that that's the case, but I've seen that it has been the case for other people.And not just in the last five years, like some fly-by-night personal development program. “If it worked for me, it can work for you. Sign up for my coaching package” kind of nonsense. It's been working for people studying philosophy for thousands of years with some of these texts.Now, granted, MacIntyre's stuff is much more recent, since the guy just finished up with his life last week. But when hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of people have read somebody and said, Hey, there's something here worth studying. Maybe that can be a sign that, since you're talking not just about bestseller lists or beach reading or things that make it on to daytime talk shows, but actual intellectual work that you can take that as an index. There's really something there, that if you don't hold yourself back and act as if it's up to the text to show to you that it's worth your time and effort, but you actually invest the time and effort, you will likely (not guaranteed, but likely) see it pay off.And so I think that this worried attitude that some people bring to their studies, what am I going to get out of this? That's the wrong question early on. First, you actually have to do the “out of this”. Well, you've got to go in first, and then you can figure out what is going to happen when you come out.So those are a few reflections about an interesting exchange that perhaps I misinterpreted, but I certainly got some mileage out of thinking about it. Maybe it's helpful for you to hear these words yourself, and if it steers anybody away from a counterproductive attitude towards studying philosophical text, then it did a decent job at what it was supposed to do. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

I saw a very interesting discussion in Stoicism Reddit today, and it was titled, “What Do You Think Are the Flaws of Stoicism?” It drew a lot of discussion, much of which I think was fairly decent. And I got to thinking about this, and I realized that what we have here is a topic where we probably want to make some distinctions and explore things a good bit because we use this term flaws or we could say blind spots or things that can be criticized.There's all sorts of stuff like that that we can bring up. And I think a lot of people take them as basically all the same thing and having the same implication. If there's a flaw, well, then there's something wrong with Stoicism. And some things that might appear to be flaws at first could actually turn out either not to be flaws, to be based on mistaken assumptions, or they're the sorts of things where you can say, well yeah, this is a flaw in a sense, but it's not one we really care about that much. It doesn't shake the system, so to speak.And so there's a number of different ways of criticism that I want to put out there for you and have you see the differences between them.So I want to begin by talking about criticisms that can be made and the fact that a lot of the criticisms that people will make in the present are are actually criticisms that people have made of the Stoics either around their own time or a little bit later or later on in the modern period or perhaps even in the 19th, 20th, and 21st century. So a lot of people effectively reinvent wheels by coming up with what they think to be new, unique criticisms, but maybe they were actually made already by Plutarch, who has a whole book called On Stoic Self-Contradictions, or by Friedrich Nietzsche, who has a lot to say about the Stoics, much of which is not particularly well-focused as it turns out. Or you know, we could pick whoever else we want.And one thing that we should be aware of is that for a lot of the criticisms that people do have of the Stoics, there's already responses to those in the Stoic texts that we are fortunate enough to have. We don't even have to defer them and say, oh well, that was covered in Chrysippus' book that we don't have. No, in the Epictetus, the Seneca, the Musonius Rufus, Arius Didymus, Marcus Aurelius, these different thinkers, we can often find things where we're like, yeah I mean, people say this, and here's what Epictetus actually says about this very case, or Seneca says in response to this very case.So we don't expect everybody to have read everything, but quite a few criticisms are not good criticisms if they've already been satisfactorily addressed by the Stoics. Now, it might well turn out that somebody diagnoses a flaw and makes a criticism of something that's genuinely new that hasn't been said before. I think that can happen. And I don't think necessarily that the Stoics did get everything right. We'll come back to that in just a bit.Another common criticism that gets made is that the Stoic body of work is not available to us in its entirety. And as a of what was originally available. You know, we don't have any full writings from the early and middle Stoics. And we don't even have all of what Arian wrote down of Epictetus's teachings. The Discourses was supposedly eight books. We only have four of them. And then, you know, the stuff that's in the Enchiridion and possibly the fragments, because some of those are kind of sketchy. So yeah, that's a real issue.And when it comes to Stoic physics and Stoic logic, so their cosmology, their religious views, their logic, their epistemology, we've lost a lot. We do have a lot of Stoic ethics, probably enough, I would say, although it'd always be nice to have more, wouldn't it? And can you really fault the Stoics for not having somehow preserved their own works? I mean, we can say this about a lot of ancient schools of philosophy, some of which we have nothing by except secondhand in other people's works. So I don't think that's really a valid criticism or pointing out a flaw. But there is something that's kind of connected to that that we could say might be kind of a flaw. And this would be the Stoics not having responses to later and very different perspectives. You know, what if an Existentialist wanted to criticize a Stoic?Well, assuming that the Existentialist actually got the Stoics right, which is a big assumption, well perhaps there could be something to that. Maybe they do expose flaws or gaps or blind spots in Stoic doctrines.I don't think that the worries about the Stoics not knowing enough about 20th century and 21st century culture, like for example, the existence of the internet and mobile technology and cell phones and dating apps and stuff like that, that doesn't strike me as a very valid criticism because what we can find in the Stoic texts, they don't obviously speak about those things directly because Seneca doesn't know about cell phones. Epictetus doesn't know about dating. But the things that they say understood rightly are applicable to those matters. That's why we do workshops on that and write articles about that.Another common thing that has to do with the Stoics being stuck in the past is the criticism that their worldview and assumptions on a moral level are actually deficient because, for example, they accepted the institution of slavery, which we all know is bad. And you know, I'm willing to say that slavery is bad. I'm also willing to point out that every single civilization that we see in ancient times that proceeded past a certain level of development had something like slavery, and that it didn't completely go away. We still have some places in the world where slavery is being practiced and defended. So it doesn't strike me as a really valid criticism, particularly when we go to the texts and we see that Epictetus and Seneca have an awful lot to say about how you ought to be as a free person treating slaves. And you should reflect on the fact that you could be in their situation so easily if some things had just gone a slightly bit different or that the slave is a rational being like yourself. So you should treat them not as a slave, but as an employee or a family member. And we could go on and on and on with similar sorts of examplesAnother thing that people sometimes will view as a flaw, and here we're not looking at the past, we're looking at the present, is they look at current proponents or practitioners of Stoicism and they say: Wow you don't live up to what it is that you say you're all about. You are inconsistent. There's contradictions. You fail. And interestingly, guess who already addressed this?Seneca in, if I'm remembering right, On the Happy Life. He says, and he's not just talking about the Stoics. He's actually talking about Socrates and Aristotle and Plato. He talks about people in his own time who say, Oh these philosophers, they don't actually live up fully to their own doctrine. So therefore, none of it's any good.And he says, listen, all you need to be worried about at your current pretty bad state is whether they've gotten further along the path to virtue than you. You don't need to be criticizing them for not being legendary sages. You just need to quit being less of a screw up yourself. And these people have given you some tools that are helpful for that. And I think that's a perfectly valid response in the present. So I don't see those as really flaws myself. It just means that people fail and they often don't live up to their values or their plans and intentions. And we see that in every aspect of life, not just in applying philosophy. Does this mean that I have now successfully defended the Stoics from every one of their possible critics? No, not at all. And as a matter of fact, I don't agree with the Stoics entirely myself on every point. If I did, then I would be a Stoic and not an eclectic, which is what I tell everybody that I am, drawing on multiple and sometimes incompatible, at least on certain points, philosophical traditions that I hopefully understand fairly well, well enough to bring them together in a life that's not completely screwed up. So there's some things where I don't buy the Stoic line, and I'm willing to say that there could be flaws in Stoicism. As a matter of fact even people who were attracted to it in ancient times like Cicero, look at how he begins his Stoic paradoxes. He says you guys have got some good ethical philosophy but man are you bad at presenting it, because you don't pay adequate attention to rhetoric like the Aristotelians do. Let me show you how it's done, buddies! And that's what he does in his Stoic Paradoxes.So I think we can say that there's flaws, but there's fewer flaws than many people take there to be. Or we'll simply say this. There are fewer things that hold up to scrutiny when we actually look at them carefully and the assumptions behind them, and we go to the Stoic texts to see if there's any answers to them.There's fewer of those that turn out to be genuine flaws than one might at first imagine. And I think that's often going to be the case for any philosophical thinker or perspective or school that people have been reading and talking about for quite a long time. People caricature René Descartes. A lot of the answers or addresses of their criticisms are right there just in other parts of Descartes that they didn't read and similarly for many other thinkers. So that's all that I have to say about this. Hopefully this is a useful set of reflections for you.Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

Today in a tutorial session, I had a client ask me about the criterion of truth and about different perspectives or theories on what makes something true or false. And at the start, I said, well, we probably probably want to think in the plural. Because if we're understanding criterion in the singular, to be what it is that we can use as an index for something being true or the opposite being false, or perhaps even not knowing which it is, then since we do have multiple theoretical perspectives on truth articulated in the history of philosophy, many of which are not known to quite a few people, including those who write about theories of truth.Since this is the case, we need to talk in the plural, because there isn't just one conception of truth out there that everybody knows. buys into, accepts, uses references. And I think one natural place to begin is with the sort of thing that you'll find if you go online and look up truth in encyclopedias of philosophy, or on various websites, or you might find in an Intro to Philosophy textbook, or when you Google it and videos or podcasts come up where somebody claims that they're providing you with the three basic theories or five basic theories or something like that.So usually there are three that show up over and over again, and sometimes they're well explained and sometimes they're not one of them is called the correspondence theory of truth another is usually called the coherence theory of truth and then the other one is usually also called the pragmatic theory of truth but you can find some outliers in the use of the language.And the idea behind the correspondence theory of truth is that what we're looking for is correspondence, or to use Thomas Aquinas' term from earlier on, adequation between how things are in reality or in being, and our mental representations of those or our thoughts about them, or our linguistic you could say representations or expressions of those things. I think this is actually a useful idea. It does cover a lot of ground. We can say when I give you a proposition which happens to be true right now such as I am holding a full cup of coffee, which is indeed the case, and you're thinking about it or you're hearing it, well, that's a true statement. It'll stop being a true statement once I've drank the coffee, or if I spill it or whatever else changes that condition.And, you know, this works for quite a few things.: This is what we mean by true or false. If I tell you I have a million dollars in the bank that I will be happy to send you if you just find forward me a little bit of money, say $2,000, so that I can access this money and then get it to you, and I will do so out of gratitude. I think many of you recognize the internet scams that set things up that way. Those are probably all false statements, right? We can say, what makes them false? Well, I'm not describing things as they really are. So then we have the coherence theory of truth. And the idea there, this is often associated with people like Hegel or the Hegelians, is that what makes propositions true or thoughts true is not just corresponding to isolated bits of reality, but rather how they all cohere together in something like a system. There are no contradictions between them, or at least no important contradictions. And this can actually be quite useful as sort of a supplement, you could say, to the correspondence theory of truth.And then another one that often gets talked about is the pragmatic theory of truth. I would say that, you know, this has been around longer than the term pragmatism has, although pragmatic is an earlier term. You see, for example, Kant actually using it. So the idea is typically associated with people like William James or John Dewey, people that we call pragmatists.And it's often boiled down to truth is what works for a person. So, you know, you could see a lot of possibility for abuse in this. And it's not an adequate representation of, say, William James's position as he articulates it. But it's good enough for now, right?So we can talk about other theories that are out there that have been recently named, you know, a semantic theory of truth, deflationary. But those are basically just things that philosophers, mostly analytic philosophers, think in terms of.But there's actually a much richer and earlier history that I would like to mention. And this is what I told my client. And this is what I think is. You might be interested in as well there are conceptions of truth that are not adequately captured or expressed by these other named theories and they're associated with pretty important philosophers throughout philosophies historySo I'm not going to begin at the beginning. Instead, I'm going to start with somebody who this client and I have talked about quite a bit, and I think this may have been motivating the discussion and his question from the start.So Kierkegaard has this notion of truth as subjectivity. Now, he's not saying that all truth is subjective or anything like that, but there are some important truths that we can only grasp subjectively and through commitment, perhaps even through passion, maybe the highest passion of faith, right?So this is a different notion of of truth at play there. And it doesn't mean that we have to throw everything out and say, this is the only one that matters, because that's not what Kierkegaard is doing. This client is quite interested in existentialist thought. So if you know your existentialism and you are used to talking in terms of truth, then Heidegger's truth as alētheia, which is a Greek term meaning something like unconcealing or uncovering. But it is the standard term for truth, and used as a noun, as an adjective. So Heidegger has a conception that doesn't fit in well with these standard theories either. But I think it's actually communicating something quite useful to usNow going backwards in time, somebody who I do a lot of work on is Anselm of Canterbury, and he actually has quite a few thoughts about the nature of truth, veritas in Latin. And he's got a whole dialogue on it which is really important but very infrequently read by the people who want to talk about truth. Because in it not only does he discuss what's clearly a correspondence theory of truth with respect to our thoughts and our words and the realities that they're supposed to express, but he also talks about truth in the will and truth in everything.So this is a differing conception. He will also discuss truth in the being of things and God as truth. So here we have a much more robust conception of truth than what we're typically getting. And I'd like to throw us even further back. And I'm just kind of picking a bunch of people. This is not a survey of every single philosopher and what they've had to say about truth.But if you think about Aristotle, if you've ever read the Nicomachean Ethics, book six, where he's talking about what we often call the intellectual virtues, these are states or habits, hexeis, that allow us to attain truth in different kinds of matters. And Aristotle will talk about practical truth, truth that has to do with actions, somewhat like what Anselm was talking about, probably along the lines of what Kierkegaard is also implying, and our desires are right. The way in which he defines practical truth is not just having intellectual matters right but also having the right, rightly oriented let's say desires, a desire in the very broadest sense orexisSo I brought up these four as examples of important philosophical figures who really thought a lot about the nature of truth and have a lot to contribute that the let's call it standard fair literature often shows an ignorance of or a disengagement with that I think is quite important. And what's the upshot of this? There is no one single conception of truth that is truly the only one. We actually need these to form a sort of composite picture of what it means to be true. And we need to use different conceptions or criteria of of truth in different kinds of situations. And I don't think that there is one single overarching perspective that we can draw all of these into. But I also don't think that it makes everything up for grabs either. We don't have to be pessimists about that. So this is something that I was leading my client through. I thought it could be interesting for those of you who listen to this to learn about and reflect upon. And so there you go.Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

Over roughly the last week, I've been producing a set of new core concept videos on two main works of Plutarch, and I've been doing that as resources for my academic students enrolled at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in a class that's called Philosophy, Mindfulness, and Life, which is exploring philosophies as ways of life.So we look at texts that not only give you sort of frameworks, but also useful practices, or as Martha Nussbaum calls them (and I'm bringing this up because this really is the best term in this case) therapeutic arguments. And that's what Plutarch is providing in On Tranquility of Mind, and to a lesser extent in his work How A Person Can Become Consciousness of Their Progress in virtue.So today I shot several videos on his work On Tranquility of Mind, and one particular line of reasoning that I think might be really interesting to not just talk about and explore. But think about how it applies to our own life, and mindsets and the outcome of our thinking about matters has to do with. So here's the term that I actually used for the title of the video, desiring or trying to do everything. Nobody can do everything. There's that old saying, you can't have it all. And by have it all, they mean that you not only can't have possession of everything, but you can't apply yourself to do everything at a very high level in life. As a matter of fact, if you think about it, there's probably far more things that you cannot do at any given point in time, or even over the course of your entire life, than the things that you can do. So you always kind of have to make some choices, decide priorities. But that doesn't mean that we can't feel like or desire to do it all, especially if we've been getting wrongheaded ideas about this from other people, which would include the people we grow up with and we're surrounded with or our friend group.But I would say that social media has probably contributed to this problem because we have a much greater possibility of comparing ourselves to the at least superficial appearance of the lives of others. And we also get exposed to a much wider variety of possible things to think we ought to be involved with. So I think this is a really helpful discussion.He gives you examples like he says, not only do people demand to be at the same time rich, and learned, and physically strong, and convivial spirits, and pleasant company, and friends of kings, and rulers of cities. So that's seven different things right there that you're probably never going to combine in one person.But adding to that, unless they shall also have dogs and horses and quails and roosters that can win prizes, they are disconsolate.And he brings up an example of Dionysus, who was one of the greatest tyrants of his age in Syracuse and Sicily, but he couldn't sing verses better than a poet named Philixenus, and he couldn't get the better of Plato in dialectic, so he was very angry about this. He felt like somehow life is letting him down, and he actually sent Philoxenos into the stone quarries basically to die,and he sold Plato off into slavery. And that's the wrong way to go about things.So how do we get into this problem? Well, he starts out by saying that it's a matter of having expectations that are too high and aiming at things that are too great. Then when we fail, we blame our destiny and our fortune instead of our own foolishness. And what's the root of this?Well, he says that it is self-love, which is philautia in Greek. And this makes people desirous of being the first all the time. So that's philoprotos, desiring being number one, we would say, and to be victorious or to be successful in everything. And this is a term philonikos that the Greeks use quite a bit. They took philonikia, this desire for winnings, for superiority, for surpassing others, as a fairly basic human desire. And I think they're probably right about that. People really do enjoy feeling like they've won in some sort of way.And by not managing this well and being realistic about it, we get ourselves into all sorts of trouble. And Plutarch points out, well, he's got a lot of considerations, but the one that I think is actually the best here is even among the gods, the different gods have different powers, different functions, different domains. But if we think about human beings, no human being can actually combine all these things in one person.And he brings up, interestingly, the legendary Stoic sage who supposedly could do this. And he says, this is liable to discourage people, including people who are attracted to Stoicism, because they look at this ideal and they're like, oh man, I fall short of that. My life sucks. So this is a real recipe for making your life unhappy by having wrongheaded ideas. Not only is it impossible to Just to have it all. But there's another deeper reason why that's the case. And it's quite simple. Some of the things that you're trying to combine in one person's life are actually incompatible with each other. They rule each other out. So he uses a couple interesting examples. If you're going to do training in rhetoric or mathematics, or for that matter, philosophy, that requires a fairly quiet life and some free time. But if you want to be involved in political or the active life, the social life, and attain the friendship of important people, you can't do that without hard work and full occupation of your time.Likewise, if you want to spend a lot of time on your body, making it really strong and vigorous, you're probably going to make the soul work. And so you can't do everything all at once. They interfere with each other. He also talks about making money. If you want to devote your life to making lots of money, well, that's really cool. That increases your wealth. But if you want to make progress in philosophy, you probably need to make making money a pretty low priority.So if you're going to try to combine these ways of life with each other, you're not actually going to be successful because they're not compatible with each other. It's going to go on and give some additional advice along these lines and lots of examples. You can go to the text and read it. As a matter of fact, I highly encourage you to do that.He's going to finish up by talking about something really interesting. So there's this line that in English translation, it's a great line by itself, but I think if you can read it in the Greek, it's got a lot of other resonances to it. So he tells us that when we're trying to actually have it all, what we end up doing is slandering ourselves. We wind up being displeased and we despise ourselves as living an incomplete and trivial life.So slandering ourselves is a translation of the Greek term soukophantomen. And it's the word that we get sycophant from, basically a butt kisser, somebody who is kissing up to other people. But it also has a really important meaning. Second meaning in ancient Greek, a sycophant was also somebody who would report other people to the authorities to try to get in good with the authorities or maybe even make some money from them. So a narc, a snitch, as we call them in American English. Why is this interesting to note? Well, you're snitching on yourself when you are being that kind of sycophant. So you're telling somebody, yourself, I guess, the world, other people, that your life isn't a good life. Being displeased, that's a decent enough translation of akharistomen. And another way you could translate that, because it's coming from a Greek term that means both joy and gratitude, is being ungrateful about the life that you live.And then this despising, that's kataphronumen. And that is also translatable as have contempt, look down upon. Literally, it combines the terms for downward and for thinking about. And so we look at our own life and we despise it as being needy, missing something, endeus. And a telos so what's being translated as trivial there a better way of translating it would be not having a proper goal to it and thereby being trivial so that's what happens to us if we let these unrealistic ideas about being able to have it all or that we should try to have it all.And I think that we're probably at greater risk in our current society, perhaps, than they were in ancient times for cultivating these desires because we hear these messages coming from all sorts of directions and we see people being presented as if they actually do have it all when they don't. If we looked closely at their lives, we would see that they're not the perfect combinations of everything good, that their social media account or their publicists or whoever else is presenting them as.So I think this is a really great passage. I think it would be good for us to keep this in mind when we feel down about not being good at something or not succeeding in some area of our life. We can look at what we actually are good at or successful in to whatever measure we have that and say, that's probably as good as it's going to get for me. And that is good enough, not just for me as a person, but for me as a human being who can't possibly do it all. And if we do that, we're going to have a much more content and happy and tranquil life. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

Today I'm in the middle of processing some thoughts and feelings about somebody who died quite a long time ago, and I only found out about it yesterday.So you may have seen the piece that I published a little over a year ago, A Tale of Two Philosophy Teachers, which was about two of the people that I had in high school who taught philosophy classes. One was called a philosophy class. It was intro to philosophy. And that wasn't very good at all. And the other was actually a Sacraments class, but it was taught by a guy who decided to teach us philosophy and to teach in a philosophical way. And that was very, very good.You may have heard me talking about them in other places as well, because sometimes people ask me in interviews and video channels or podcasts or stuff like that. How did you get started in philosophy? Did you have it in high school? And I tell the story.So I posted yesterday or rather reposted the piece that I'd written. And I included a little bit of a call to action as I was putting it in social media saying, you know, I never was able to track down this person who was a substitute teacher just for one semester, came from Seattle. I don't know where he went after that. His name was Mr. Lorenzo, but I don't know his first name.And I never had any success in talking to people from my high school, who he was, where he went to, whether he was still around, because they didn't keep records about that sort of thing, not from what was happening in the 1980s. And so anyway, I put it out there.And one of the people who I know from high school who has now become a friend, but was actually like my bitterest rival back in high school (there's a whole story that could be told there), he wrote me in LinkedIn and he said Oh I know that guy. I didn't even realize that this now friend was in the class, but I guess he was and it probably happened during our junior year. And he said Yeah that was Perry Lorenzo. And I've thought about him a lot. And by the way, here is an article about him. He was pretty important out there in Seattle, and he died in 2009. And he was involved with all sorts of matters. He taught at a high school. He also taught in a college or a university. He was involved with the opera and all sorts of other interesting things about him. But he died only 51 years old in 2009.And it looks like from the story that he came out to spend that semester with us and told us about Seattle at the time. He had had this Augustinian conversion, as he called it, which was part of why he was teaching us about St. Augustine. And in order to teach us about Augustine, he had to also teach us about Aristotle and Plato and Manichaeism and some psychology stuff as well.So, it looks like he went back to Seattle after that one semester with us and went on to have a really great teaching career. Apparently he was quite gifted. He was very devoted to the life of the mind, to the Catholic and classical intellectual traditions. He was heavily involved in the arts and apparently an all-around great guy.So it's very interesting me to read this because I got to know him, at least to the degree that a teenager who's bright but troubled and in somebody's class with somebody who's probably only 10 years older than him and is engaging in discussion within the classroom can get to actually know somebody. I got to know him as somebody who was a genuinely well-motivated teacher, and not all the teachers were like that. As a matter of fact I would say less than half of them at my high school were people who I would say had that sort of mindset. I think a lot of them saw us as pains in their rear to process and get through and they wanted to not be bothered with things.But this guy was genuinely interested in ideas. And if it wasn't for him, there's a good likelihood that maybe I would not have followed along the career trajectory that I did because I'd had an Intro to Philosophy class. It was pretty bad. It was dry, boring, dull. The teacher wasn't very good. Or maybe I wasn't up for it, but I think actually he wasn't very good!And then the next year I had this guy, Perry Lorenzo, and he taught the class in an eminently philosophical way. He was like...Listen, we're getting rid of this textbook. I'm going to put stuff up on the board. We're going to discuss things. Don't worry about what's on the test. I'll just give you some essay tests and make you write some papers. The other students groaned and complained because they were all college prep kids who wanted to have, what do I need to do to get an A in this class? And they weren't very interested in learning, I would say.But I found it fascinating. And that was my real introduction to the field of philosophy being done by somebody who clearly embodied philosophy, but philosophy in a broad sense, not in a narrow academic sense. Philosophy as what we nowadays call philosophy as a way of life. He made a big mark on me, on my soul because of that. So then later on, when I went to college and actually had the opportunity to study philosophy, looking down the list of possible majors, I saw it and I was like, well, this is pretty cool stuff. So maybe I should study this.And, you know, I've thought about him a lot over the years. I'm Kind of saddened to discover, first of all, that he died so young. I'm now older. I'm 54 years old. He died at only 51 years old of cancer. So a life really cut short. I find that to be a source of sadness. And it looks like his community and his partner lost somebody whose life was vibrant and dynamic and rich and was contributing to many other people. So a great loss to him, a great loss to his community.And had I been more on the ball, maybe I could have been in touch with him years and years ago and actually told him, Hey, you made a big difference. You made an impact in my life, and I'd like to thank you for that. And that opportunity is gone. I mean, I can certainly think of him as having a soul that has survived death and think good thoughts about him and say prayers for him and all those sorts of things. But it's not the same as being able to at least send a letter that somebody is going to read or look them in the eyes or talk to them on the phone and say, You don't realize this, but you did something really good for me. And because of that, for other people as well who are affected by my work in philosophy for some sort of good. So I've got kind of mixed feelings. There's a sense of joy in finding out who this person was and what a good life in so many different ways he not only had, but chose and built for himself and not just for himself, but many other people whose lives were positively affected by him. And there's sadness for the lost opportunities and the fact that he's gone.I think I took it for granted that he was probably still out there somewhere and there could be time to track him down, although I had no idea how I might actually do that. It's also surprising that somebody who I've known for all these years had all that information right there at his fingertips. I'm guessing many of myother classmates did as well and could have perhaps clued me into it So I'm going to do some writing about this in the near future, and I wanted to use this as an opportunity to maybe talk about it and in the process, clarify my thoughts while they're still fresh in my mind and my heart. And to share a little bit with those of you who listen to this. Maybe there's a warning there. Reach out to people. Get the information about them while you have the opportunity. It could be a good idea. But it might also not be directly applicable to your own life. You might look at it as I'm giving you a little bit of a glimpse into a person who was important for me becoming a philosopher and maybe even the kind of philosopher I've become.And if you're positively impacted by that, and odds are if you're listening to this, you probably are one of those people, then you can think of him as somebody who played a role in that. So that's probably enough for me to say about this at this point. And I'll just post this and see what people make of it. I'm going to continue thinking about what I want to say in a written form later on this week or weekend. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

I think that at this point, a number of you have heard me talk at one point or another about Alasdair MacIntyre, the Scottish philosopher who wound up doing a lot of his work over here in the United States. And you may or may not know that about 20 years ago, I actually got to meet him because I participated in what was called the Erasmus Institute Faculty Fellowship in the summer of 2005, hosted by the Erasmus Institute at Notre Dame University. And that was kind of a big honor. I'll tell you a little bit about the story of how I got in there in just a moment. But a little bit of lead up before I get into that. So as I was walking to the office today, I was thinking about MacIntyre. And I'm not exactly sure why this came up, perhaps because I was thinking about Gabriel Marcel, another important philosopher from France in the 20th century, somebody who I particularly like. Maybe down the line, I'll tell you a bit more about him and why I like his work and teach it and keep going back to it. And I was thinking about this conversation that I had with MacIntyre in his office at Notre Dame.This was in the fall of months after the fellowship had finished up, and I was mentioning to him how his work engaged with a lot of the same themes that Gabriel Marcel's work did, but that I'd never seen him actually write about Marcel. And I was also thinking about how McIntyre reacted to that and what was going on in that meeting. So I'll come back to that in just a moment. I'll tell you first about this fellowship.I was at that time three years out of graduate school. I had defended my dissertation on Maurice Blondel. I was doing some research work on this big project that eventually culminated in my first book, Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France. And so that tells you what that book was about. And I was also teaching at Indiana State Prison. We had to cover the entire philosophy and religious studies curriculum because it was a four year bachelor's degree program. And I was one of two people in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies who taught there. The other guy who taught there, he was only there part time. I was there full time. So I was pretty busy, but still quite interested in the various fields that I was researching and writing in and pursuing, doing a lot of work also on Anselm of Canterbury, some work on Aristotle, some on Hobbes. So you can say I was spread out over a number of different places.I had encountered Alasdair MacIntyre's work back in graduate school, in part because one of his books - it was either After Virtue or Whose Justice, Which Rationality - was in our value fields reading list for our preliminary examination. And I'd heard good things about his stuff, so I started reading him back then. I read both of those books as well as some other stuff as well. And I very much liked the approach to the history of ideas that he was sketching out. He seemed a rather down-to-earth sort of author, but I didn't know anything about the guy himself.So I saw an advertisement to apply for this summer fellowship. And it was a really interesting one. The title of the fellowship was Practical Rationality: Rational Decision Theory, Aristotelian Thomism, and Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis. And I thought, whoa, that actually could be quite good. The opportunity to get to study for two intensive weeks at Notre Dame with Alasdair MacIntyre would have been attractive enough. But as it so happened, I had a background, as I read through the description, in all three of these areas.Now, if you know MacIntyre, you know that he likes to set up triads of different, let's call them approaches, movements, he uses the word traditions, within moral or even epistemological theory and compare and contrast them with each other, try to bring them into dialogue with each other. So I thought wow this would be really great! I could see this guy at work and I would have something to contribute to the conversation.So I wrote up the application and sent it off and then i got a letter back in the mail saying hey you're in You're one of 12 people. Here's the list of the other people. And it was very funny because as I was reading down this list, I realized that I was by far the most junior of scholars involved in this. And I was not at any sort of prestigious university like most of these people were. So I was really looking forward to it.I think it happened either in June or July. I drove out to Notre Dame bringing my computer with me and some books and some other things as well. And I went to this seminar where we began the morning having breakfast together. MacIntyre wasn't at breakfast, but all the rest of us were. And then we would meet in a seminar room for an intensive three-hour session with him where he would do some lecturing. We'd do a lot of discussion and present some ideas, and then we would break for lunch, come back for the afternoon, have another intensive session. Then we would have dinner, and then we were on our own,So I would spend a lot of my alone time over in the Hesburgh Library working on this project of mine, and I also got to present some of that project while I was there, because each one of us in the second week had to sort of present what we were doing. So I looked at the Christian philosophy debate and current Christian philosophy in terms of traditions in a Macintyrian way, and he actually surprised me giving me a manuscript afterwards of his own translation of one of the texts that I was translating and said that I could compare his translation with mine if I wanted to.It was a wonderful experience. There was a lot of really interesting discussion going on. And then it came to an end. One of the things that all of the other people were doing at that time, and I didn't do at that time, because I lived only an hour and a half from Notre Dame, so I could basically go there anytime I wanted to, was to have a one-on-one session with MacIntyre over in his office talking through some of these ideas that they wanted to propose. And so I said, well, I'll just meet with you down the line. And later on we emailed and that was how this came about.So in, I want to say, October, because it was already starting to get kind of cool, I drove out to Notre Dame and I parked and walked over to his office and he met me there and he said, let's go up and have a chat and then we'll go to lunch. And if you want, you can come to one of my classes and see how that goes.So we did exactly that. And the chat was very interesting because, as it turned out, I found out how I actually got into this rather prestigious fellowship program. A significant part of it was the fact that he was interested in my prison teaching and wanted to talk about what that's like, what the prisoners were like, what they were interested in, how scholarship could inform prison teaching. And he also wanted to know about this guy who he hadn't read, Maurice Blondel, who I'd done my dissertation on, and whether there was anything in his works that might be worthwhile for MacIntyre himself to engage with.Now, remember, too, that MacIntyre, at the time that we were meeting up like this, would have been probably in his late 70s and certainly could have retired if he wanted to, was not in the best of health, but he was still very, very committed to doing the kind of work that he had been doing for decades, a really intensive philosophical dialogue and engagement with other ways of thinking to see what you can take from them for whatever became in his work an Aristotelian-Thomist framework.So when I brought up Gabriel Marcel, MacIntyre knew who he was, but admitted to me that he really hadn't read him. And I think what that meant is he probably had, but decades back and then had forgotten about it. And I said, well, you know, there's a lot of similar ideas in in your work and his work, and I think it would be, in fact, quite productive for you to check him out. And so he said, yeah, okay, that makes sense. I will definitely check him out. And to me, that was kind of an interesting surprise, but a confirmation of the type of person that I had gotten to know him to be, which is somebody who really walks the walk, not just in virtue ethics, rather than just talking the talk, but also with his commitment to inquiry. If there was something out there that somebody whose opinion he valued and apparently he valued mine in this respect, thought he should check out, he would go and do the groundwork, even though he didn't have to, even though he had a million other things to do. And that made a huge impression on me.I will say that over the years, MacIntyre and I have not been in a lot of contact with each other we sort of lost touch although i could tell you stories about the 10 years that followed after that where he did give me some interesting ideas and guidance and acted in a very friendly way to me writing letters of recommendation telling me that the work I was doing down at Fayetteville State University although rather onerous was important for the students who were there.He made a big impression on me as a young scholar and young philosopher. And I'm very grateful for having crossed paths and having had dialogue with him. on that because it's, in some respects, not the diametric opposite of what you see in so many academic professionals, but it certainly is something quite different from it, a genuine personal connection that I think for some of us can be quite important.So I thought I would share that story with you about a scholar who certainly could have sat on his laurels, but deliberately refused to do so in ways that I got to see myself in my engagements with him. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

This is episode number 30 of the Mind & Desire podcast, and since you know it's kind of a nice round number, perhaps a bit of a milestone, I put a chat for my Substack subscribers to participate in saying: Hey! What topics do you think would be good for a episode that commemorates the getting to a certain point in the podcast?And I only had a few takers, but one of them is particularly good. It was from Andrew Parker, who said: “Kindness. Kindness in our interpersonal interactions, educating through kindness, proliferation of kindness through social media.”So I'm not going to do exactly that, but the topic here will in fact be kindness, and it's connected to some things that I am often thinking about, both in terms of Stoic philosophy and ancient philosophy more generally, and the class that I'm teaching on friendship in ancient philosophy, but also in my ethics classes more broadly. Because this is indeed a topic that ordinary people would say, well, this is important for ethics. We should be kind, at least in certain circumstances, and there's something wrong if we're not. And then there's some ethicists who will say, well, no, kindness isn't really that important. It's something else instead.And I also think about reasons why myself personally and other people might hold themselves back from exhibiting kindness in some circumstances where they have the opportunity to do so. What are the obstacles for that?So the first thing that I want to say, coming back to ancient philosophy, is that people sometimes say: Oh you know - wisdom, justice, temperance, courage - these cardinal virtues not just for the Stoics but also for the Platonists, for the Epicureans. . . I don't understand why you left kindness or some other synonyms for that off the list. This seems kind of an oversight. Is ancient ethics not about being good to other people or only being good in certain ways?And the answer is: Well no. You actually have to look at what they say in their texts, and you see that they are very interested in kindness. And I'll give you a couple book recommendations. One of them is by this guy, Seneca, a Stoic philosopher, who's willing to draw on a lot of people. He's got an entire book called On Benefits. And benefits are things that you do for another person, something good that you do to or for them. He wrote an entire work on this in which he stressed how important of a portion of life this is, that our lives would be kind of lacking without other people giving it to us and without us giving it to them.I'll also mention Marcus Tullius Cicero, who I think all of you know I'm a huge fan of. He has a book called On Duties where he is providing his own interpretation of Stoic ethics. And in the very first book, very early on, he talks about our nature and how the virtues come out of that.So this is something that's really important for ancient philosophers, and that runs through the Middle Ages, that runs through early modern philosophy, and you just got to know where to look.So I mentioned there are synonyms being used, and this might help you wrap your head around it a little bit more. So beneficence, when you see people talking about that, or generosity, that's another key thing that's connected to it. Sometimes generosity, by the way, there's an older translation, liberality. If you're reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, older translations will talk about being “liberal”. What that means is actually giving things to other people when they need it, when it's a good thing to do, what we call generosity.And, you know, we could talk about affection for other people. We could talk about all sorts of other things. Goodwill. These are all, you could say, not exactly the same thing, but like a bundle of closely related dispositions that are connected with actions that we exhibit to other people.So, Andrew brought up two interesting things, the idea of educating through kindness, and then proliferation of kindness. I do want to say a little bit about both of those. So, we do educate through kindness, and as typically happens when we're educating, we're not just educating about one thing, we're also educating often on a higher level. Saying: this is important. This is something that you should pay attention to. This is something that you should incorporate into your mindset, your life, your character.So when we are kind to other people and we're doing it to them, we are showing them that we care about them, that we're willing to treat them as a person. We're viewing them as worthy of kindness. And maybe they don't even know that, right? If they've been treated badly by other people, sometimes doing kindness, people could be suspicious. Why are you being so nice to me? And we also educate ourselves, and maybe we could say more about that some other time. But I think even more importantly, we educate the people who are looking on that: Hey, this is the way to behave. This is how human beings treat each other. And likewise when we're showing, coldness, cruelty, unkindness to other people, we're sending a message to other people as well. It's okay to treat people like this. So I think that's an important aspect.And then the proliferation of kindness. I don't really see it as connected with social media, although you certainly could try to do that. A lot of people view social media as a realm of unkindness, but I think kindness can proliferate. When you are good to people, that creates a kind of situation of possible openness for them, where maybe they can be more receptive. They can take a chance and be good to other people. Sometimes they pay it forward, as we say. So I think that's an important topic, too.There's a lot of things that also can get in the way of us being kind. They can make us reluctant or afraid, or there could be other emotions that we feel as well. It's hard to be kind, for example, when we're angry. But there's four that I think a lot of people run into. And some of these can be framed in terms of philosophy.I mentioned earlier that some ethicists later on in the 20th century, for example, they've actually said: Well, you can't expect people to be kind. Ethics is really about the rules or principles that we can impose on everybody universally. And you can't make people feel a certain thing, because if they don't feel it then you're saying they're a bad person. Or they'll say: Listen, doing the right thing or justice, following through on moral obligations that's all you can actually expect of people. Kindness is something, as they'll say, supererogatory. Now that's a nice fancy term for, you could say, going above and beyond what is required or expected. But then, a lot of other people have rightly said: Well no, we want a world in which people are kind.Even Immanuel Kant in his groundwork for the metaphysics of morals says, well, you don't have to be benevolent to other people, but would you actually want to live in a world where nobody's good to anybody else? No, you can't even consistently will that. And we could go on and on from there.So I think that one of the big obstacles is this: Justice is all you can demand of me. And I think a proper response to that is: Well yeah, you should be just. And there may be some cases where justice is all you can do, but that doesn't rule out being kind, generous, beneficent, caring towards other people, does it? No, they're not contradictory to each other.And If you want to say that kindness is supererogatory, it goes above and beyond: Well, fine. What's wrong with that? Do you just want to do the bare minimum for people? Or would you like to be the kind of person who does, in fact, go beyond that?And then a second issue that arises, I think a big concern with people, and I actually saw this come up in my ancient philosophers on friendship class. Well, if we're supposed to be good to other people, won't I be exhausted? You know, I'm a limited being. I have this like obligation to be good to everybody. How am I possibly going to live that out?And I don't think that you do have to be good to everybody. It's impossible, and expecting the impossible of people is not actually good guidance, or ethics, or counsel, or anything like that. So if you are feeling this demand that somehow you have to give and give and give and give, you might want to actually ask yourself, where does that come from? And is that what genuine kindness actually looks like? Or is that kind of an aberration of it? And do you want to live with that?A third thing that I think holds people back very often from being kind to others is the fear or the feeling, and it might be based on a good bit of experience, that your kindness that you exhibit will essentially be wasted, that it won't do any real lasting good that it'll just kind of disappear. So think about if you have somebody who's very, very needy in your life, and you do and you do and you do for them, but they never seem to be satisfied with it. You could very easily say, it kind of doesn't matter what I do in a case like that. They'll never be satisfied. And that would be a reasonable place to say: Okay, I'm probably not going to just keep throwing my kindness down a well in this case, but that's not the norm.And even if you're kind to a stranger that you'll never see again, or you're kind to somebody as they're dying, right? They're not going to return your kindness in any way. It isn't wasted because as Seneca points out to us in his work On Benefits, the good thing that you're doing, it still is, even if it doesn't land in the right way, even if the person doesn't receive it with the proper spirit, even if they instead actually turn around and bite you or something like that.And then the fourth thing that I think is really important, particularly in our age where we have all of these people counseling, you have to have a mindset, you have to have a feeling, you have to do this and that. You don't actually have to feel loving or kind or generous or beneficent towards a person to do something good for them to show them a kindness. You don't have to be in a great mood to smile at somebody who you meet.Now, of course, you don't want to be a complete masked-up faker or something like that. But there's a difference between feeling something and then choosing to do something. A lot of loving another person in a relationship is doing things that are loving to them, even if you're not feeling particularly loving at the time. And I think a lot of people worry about being sort of hypocrites. But if you weigh on the one hand your worries and feelings about this and on the other hand the good, however limited, that you're doing by being kind to another person, well, I think that your worries probably should take a back seat in that case.So I think these are definitely not the only issues or worries or concerns that people have about kindness that might get in the way. But I think those are four big ones. And so if you're running into those, maybe this helps people. motivate you, get over the obstacle or the hump that they've placed in the way. It is really important to be kind.There are many different ways we can be kind. A lot of it is placed in our own hands and our own judgment and discretion about how we want to be kind, when we want to be kind, in what ways we want to be kind. And even if the other person doesn't reciprocate or notice or even turns around and throws it back in our face, you've still done a good thing by being kind to them. I'll leave off there, celebrate with me this 30th episode. We got a lot more to come, hopefully down the line. And thanks to Andrew Parker for his own little beneficence in giving me a great topic to sink my teeth into and hopefully convey a little bit of wisdom, not coming from me, but from mostly ancient philosophers who have a lot to teach us on the topic. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

I spent a good bit of my time today and yesterday, and probably will spend a good bit of tomorrow as well, putting together my notes and a handout for a presentation that I'll be giving in an online conference coming up, which has to do with anger from psychological and philosophical and other perspectives.And I've been allotted 15 minutes to talk about the topic that I have, you could say, signed up for, and that is early Christian thinkers on anger. This is something that I have talked about quite a bit and presented about in a variety of formats in the past, but never with this sort of brevity. The closest that I've come to it was a guest sermon that I was invited to give at a Unitarian Universalist church many years ago. And I think I got around 20 minutes for that.And it's a somewhat different question. You could say that I'll be presenting to here, which includes fellow philosophers, psychotherapists and people who aren't necessarily sold on the usefulness of looking at religious thinkers. So I've got to set it up in a rather different way. I have to skip over an awful lot because when we say early Christian thinkers, I mean people from the second century all the way well into the fifth century. And as it turns out, there's a lot of them to begin with.And there's a lot that they have to say about the emotion of anger. Some of them even have entire chapters of treatises or homilies or letters that are all about anger. And you might say, well, why is that the case? So this leads me into the topic that I really want to talk about. All of that was basically pretext.Some of you may know that in the past, one of my big areas of research, and I actually published an entire book about it, was the topic of Christian philosophy, the book that I published 14 years ago at this point was about a particular debate that took place in the 1930s, largely between French-speaking philosophers, but it touched on the long, long history of the interactions between Christianity and philosophy broadly construed in a number of different thinkers.So we talked about some of the ancient texts, philosophers who thought that there was something to this new religion, some of them were actually converts to it, but who had a philosophical background as well. At the time that I was working on that book, Pierre Hadot and his explicit phrase “philosophy as a way of life” weren't really that much on my horizon. I'd heard about him. There were other people who were talking about him, but I hadn't read him at the time. Subsequently, I have read quite a few of his works, including Philosophy as a Way of Life.And interestingly, he has an entire chapter of that book devoted to, here's the chapter title, “Spiritual Exercises and Christian Philosophy.” And he is not a Christian himself, I think, but he's certainly attracted to all modes of thought in which you have what he calls “spiritual exercises”. We often call these “philosophical practices”. Michel Foucault called these “technologies of the self”. Other people have called them by different names, but they're all basically the same thing.And one of the things that I'm going to talk about in my presentation that I think is really, really fascinating (so this is what I want to share with you today) is Hadot points out that philosophies were around as ways of intentional living for hundreds of years before Christianity emerges on the scene, and develops into a community and cultural force within the ancient world.And so a lot of these early Christian writers are pretty conversant with Platonic, Stoic, Aristotelian, Skeptic, Epicurean, Cynic philosophy, as well as others, and they know about philosophical practices because they actually advocate them and discuss them. One of the things that Hadot thinks is particularly distinctive to this new movement of thought, Christianity, is that there are a number of passages from their religious texts, from the scriptures.And by the way, as a side note, what we think of as the Bible was not formed as such as at the time that a lot of these people are writing, ta biblia is plural and means the books. And it wasn't completely agreed upon until the late 4th century, which books were in, which books were out. And books generally didn't mean something bound together in one single volume, but actually a bunch of books that you carried around with you, often in the form of scrolls. So a very, very different conception of what you would read and reference.And they would do a lot of reading, but they'd also do a lot of memorizing and meditating upon passages. So here's what Hadot says. There are certain passages that that they took as being really, really important, whether from the earlier Hebrew scriptures that Christians will then call the Old Testament, or from the newer scriptures, the Gospels, the letters of Paul, the Book of Acts, and actually even things that are no longer within the canon, like some of the letters of the very early bishops.They would connect together spiritual exercises or philosophical practices with particular scriptural passages, and the goal was to bring them into a sort of fruitful connection to each other. How does this bear out in terms of anger?I will just give you one really, really prime example that almost all of the heavy hitters in this early movement of Christian thought are going to reference, and that is a particular set of passages from what we nowadays call the Sermon on the Mount, which is found in the Gospel of Matthew. This is really important stuff for early Christians because this is conveying teachings from the guy himself, Jesus, the Christ or anointed one who they come to see as God incarnate.And what does Jesus teach? Well, a bunch of different things in the Sermon on the Mount. It's a very rich text, but there is a very important set of passages discussing anger, where Jesus is going to say to them, “the law says to you, you shall not kill, but I say to you,” and then he's going to give three sort of injunctions.The person who is angry with his brother - and some of the manuscripts say without cause, and others don't - is going to get into one level of trouble, you could say. It's being condemned as something bad.And then there's this second one, anyone who says “Rache” to their brother, and that's a bad thing to say, is going to have a higher level of condemnation and punishment. And then finally, anyone who says “you fool” is going to be threatened with hellfire.And this was an important passage. You could say it was a puzzling, enigmatic passage that drew people in and made them say, well, what is actually going on here? So they were drawn into thinking about and explaining things. What is meant by this? What the significance of it is. And you know, there's an increasing level of seriousness. And the idea there is that somehow by engaging in this emotion and the actions that come out of it, you are doing something that is bad for yourself but also bad for the other person. You're not literally murdering them, but you're doing something similar.And there are some follow-up verses as well when it talks about not bringing a gift to the altar and expecting it to be accepted. if your brother or sister has something against you, you've got to go get reconciled with them and you should try to settle things with other people.So, this ties in with all sorts of conceptions that are coming from philosophy, but being used to explain this set of verses that early Christians thought were quite revelatory and important. There are many others as well that you can find throughout, you know, he book of Proverbs or Sirach (sometimes also called Ecclesiastes). And even in the Psalms, we have letters from Paul, you know, James as well, where there are verses about anger.And what they did, these early Christian thinkers, is they used those not in the way that people do these days as proof texts where they say: “Well see, here's the answer. It's in the Bible.” Now we don't have to think anymore. No, it worked the other way. These were, you could say, fertilizers of human rational thought. And that's one way to use religious writings to employ them to encourage people's thinking, deepening their thoughts, engaging in ongoing discussion, connecting things together. And that is eminently philosophical.It might not be recognized as philosophy. And some people might say, oh well, you violated some sort of norm of philosophizing by bringing in a passage from a religious text. Now, that itself is something that would be a huge assumption that you probably want to look at. If you find that attractive, you want to wonder where you got that idea from and whether all philosophers buy into it. And the answer is No. But what we're going to find is that there's a number of really interesting insights that even if you don't buy into Christianity at all, even if you have negative feelings against it, you could read and and get something out of it. You could, so to speak, secularize and find it to be productive.So that's a little bit about what I'm going to be talking about. I think there's many other instances, and this ties in, as I mentioned, with this notion of Christian philosophy that got set out by a number of the members of this Christian philosophy debate in the 1930s. The idea is that revelation can be productive when human reason takes it in and and works on it using its own powers, so to speak, and deriving something from it. I think there's many instances of this. And by the way, it's not confined just to Christianity. You could do this as earlier Jewish thinkers were doing, like Philo of Alexandria with the Torah or other writings. You could do this with Buddhism, you could do this with Hinduism, but we don't need to belabor the point. So that's a bit about what I'm going to be doing in just a matter of days and the kind of work that I'm doing to prepare for it and the thoughts that are going into my mindset and the one I'll share with others in this conference during my 15 minutes that they'll give me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

I had an interesting, you might say, joking exchange, but only partly tongue-in-cheek with somebody on Twitter today, and it's very emblematic of a sort of mindset that I see quite a few people slip into.And the exchange was about the current state of academia and how everybody in it has abandoned truth and justice as values. And now they're all schemers or grifters or pick whatever else you want. And this is a kind of common complaint that you see about institutions or societies and their capacities to corrupt and co-opt us when it comes to our values and the formation of our character and moral action. I've seen analogous statements made over decades by a lot of people who say things like, well, if you're living under capitalism, you're always living off of somebody's misery, so none of the actions that you do can ever truly be good. And I've always been suspicious of these totalizing, what should we call them, accusations laments general criticisms that we see being made because in point of fact something that is a very common even ubiquitous aspect of our experience if we're paying attention is that at least some of the things that we do seem to matter.And I'm not saying that they matter in the long run in the sense of having lasting effects that can't be in some way undone or undermined or exploited or even turned against us in some way. I'll acknowledge that that's all true. Anything that we do can go bad in some way or at least just be neutralized but the mistaken line of reasoning that a lot of people fall into which then I think you can say leads to mistaken feelings or affects or moods is this notion that if you can show that there's a vulnerability, a contingency to things that seem good not being so in the long run, that maybe the consequences of our actions that we intend, they don't pay out, or pick any other way of conceptualizing this that you want.Basically, the idea is that we're within a bad institution or a bad system where people don't have the right mindset, where there are perverse incentives, where the good that you do could be harnessed for bad in some way that you really can't do anything good. And again, I think this goes against the experience that many of us do have in our lives, something that we should trust, but not 100%, that we do see that the things that we choose, that we advocate for, that we make possible, do bear some fruit at some time of goodness.So I want to come back to academia. And I will say that it's not as if there was ever a wonderful golden age the way that some people want to portray it, where everybody in the academy was all about truth and justice and the furthering of their discipline and expanding of human knowledge. The schools have been beset by all sorts of other motivations on the part of people who partake in them for as long as I've ever been involved in them. And if we look at literature, we can see that that's the case as well. You see people who are essentially driven by careerism, looking to step up the next rung of the ladder, writing books that don't need to be written, blocking other people so that they can be the important person, whether it's as an administrator or as a scholar or as a teacher, whatever it is that you've got.Even people involved in creating new institutions within the institutions or engaging in advocacy work, right? There's a lot of turf warrior mindsets going on and people could want to be the sage on the stage and have everybody thinking they're smart and cool. You could also, I suppose, be in it for the money in most academic institutions in the United States.That may have been a good bet at one time. It sure as hell hasn't been from the time that I was in graduate school in the 1990s onward, when the job markets were already getting pretty bad and salaries were going down and academic work became more and more precarious to where we are today. So people can have all sorts of motivations. And, you know, the idea of the college or university should be run like a business that's been around since I was a student that is corrosive, just as much as when hospitals that are supposed to have the ends of taking care of their patients and alleviating pain and helping people to practice good preventative care get worse. absorbed into hospital groups, which then are bought out by companies that are primarily interested in shareholder value and not in the ends that it's supposed to serve, we could come up with all sorts of other analogous cases.But none of that means that while you have your own range of freedom within these institutions, that you can't actually do the right thing. Now, you may have somebody looking over your shoulder. You may have policies put in place that seem dehumanizing, that are exploitative of students or patients or customers or whatever it's going to be. But that doesn't take away your own capacity to choose.And I see a lot of people who give in to a kind of despair unnecessarily where they say, well, there's nothing that I can do. So I hate it, but I need to make a living.I need to hold on to my position. And if I were to leave, maybe somebody even worse would take over somebody who isn't bothered by this sort of thing.None of that is entirely illegitimate, but it doesn't have to be the mindset that decides what you're going to do. You can adopt a number of other possible ways of doing things. You could be like Socrates, for example. who recounts the story of when his city had been taken over by the oligarchs, and he was told that he needed to go get somebody who, you know, after he brought them in, would probably be executed unjustly by these 30 tyrants. Socrates just didn't say anything, and he went home. He didn't find the guy. He was like, well, I guess if they're going to kill me, they're going to kill me, but I will do what I'm going to do. That's an option. right?You just keep doing the things that you think you ought to do and you might get fired. You might get attacked in various ways, but you can also like just not make a explicit stand and do the things that nobody's actually told you you can't do and keep on doing those good things. And you can still appeal to whatever better instincts people have. You can sometimes embarrass the people who are in charge.If you're getting a lot of heat from administrators about how you're supposed to be doing things to your students that you don't really want to do and your students don't like, you could shame them. in certain ways and you can drag your heels and not do them well so I don't buy this notion that unless you can produce lasting change at the top none of the things that we do down at our low level where the proverbial rubber hits the road really matter or accomplish any good and I will say this to bring it to a close.We don't actually know most of the time what lasting good we're doing by the work that we do with other people or with material items or with animals or anything like that. And it's a mistake, I would say, to assume that we have something like a God's eye view where we know when we do something precisely what its long-term effect is going to be. We just try to do our best.And I think that, you know, some people will not do their best and they'll say that they're doing their best, but most of us are trying our best, even if we're not giving 100% all the time, even if we're just giving 80%, I think that's great. That's better than 0%. And we should just keep on with what it is that we're doing, even if we feel like it's unsuccessful or futile or counterproductive, because in most cases we don't actually know. Now that would be very different if you were, I don't know, designing some piece of technology and you know that it's going to be used for terrible evil that's that's a different kind of case than what we're talking about in academia, or if you're working in a hospital group, or you're working for an insurance company, or you're working in a government position, or any other thing like that.So these are just a few reflections, and I guess I'll sum them up by saying that that motto of fighting the good fight — It doesn't matter so much whether we're getting the support from above or the opposite of support. We can still choose to do what we know to be right or what we even just think and suspect to be right in a probabilistic way, even if other people from outside are saying, oh, there's no point to that. Or our colleagues and co-workers who are burnt out and jaded try to tell us that it's not going to matter.That's up to us. That is a choice that we get to make. So that's what I do in my practice. And I hope that maybe hearing this, if you're wavering, can help you to say, yeah, I'm going to do that as well. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

I am planning on teaching a class on Plato's dialogues, at least certain of them, before too long. And so I've kind of got Plato on the brain, you might say. And I've been thinking for quite a long time about how to productively read platonic dialogues, whether you're doing so for a class or just your own edification and personal development and study. And I've got a few ideas that I'd like to share with you.And I don't claim to be some sort of high-level Plato expert who's got all of the answers about this. There are definitely people I'm going to criticize, at least in their approaches, who can certainly claim a much higher status as far as Plato scholarship than I can, but maybe you'll find this interesting or helpful or even just provocative of thought.So I think a lot of people lose sight of the fact that Plato did, in fact, write dialogues, and he did so by choice. We know that he also taught in his academy, and perhaps there's notes out there that we'll someday find or something along those lines. And there are some letters that scholars to some degree disagree about the authenticity of, but I'm not worried about that particularly myself.We do have all of these dialogues. And there are some of those, by the way, where scholarship has gotten to the point where they say, I don't think this one is actually by Plato or it's dubious. And there's a lot of other stuff that we could go into. For example, which dialogues are early or middle or late? And that's that's a whole other topic that I'm not going to worry too much about at this point.What I do want to say once again, however, is that they are dialogues for the most part. You could say, well, the Apology is more of a speech with a little bit of cross-examination dialogue built into it. Quite a few of the dialogues contain long passages where Socrates is advancing the discussion and and saying, doesn't it appear to you this way? And Glaucon will say, yes, indeed, Socrates, continue. But there's more than that to being dialogical.One of the things that you're going to notice is that Socrates, or in many cases, other interlocutors in these dialogues, are not just putting forth their own point of view and saying, there you go, that's my account. They're challenging each other. Sometimes they're actually framing something like a dialogue within their own discourse that appears to be a monologue. A great example of this is in the Crito, where Socrates brings in a character or rather set of characters who are not there, could be there, hypothetically, the laws of the city of Athens. And he stages a little bit of an argument back and forth between him and these laws that are going to accuse him of doing wrong to them. Or we might think as well about the Symposium where Socrates first engages in his typical back and forth with Agathon whose house he is a guest at and shows that Agathon's very nicely crafted speech doesn't reveal that Agathon actually understands love or virtue or the other topics that he's talking about, but then brings in another character and we're not even sure if she truly existed or not. Diotima, the wise woman from whom Socrates, according to himself, learned everything that he knows about love.So dialogue is really, really central to this. And you might say, well, who cares? I mean, we have plays, we have other sorts of things that are dialogue, but this is philosophical dialogue. There's not an awful lot of action going on, but there's an awful lot of thinking, exchange of ideas, sparring back and forth, sometimes jokes, all sorts of those types of discourse. There's a number of approaches that people have traditionally taken. And when I say traditionally, I mean, you know, not just back in ancient times, but also in the 20th century as well. Long enough that they've become established ways of looking at these things.So one way of getting something out of Plato, but also making sure that you don't get much more than that, is to focus primarily on arguments. And this is typical of analytic philosophy. And that can be quite helpful at times to say, are these arguments that are being advanced any good? Where are their weak points? Where could we say that there's an assumption being made that could be questionable? Are they actually valid?That's a nice approach. But if all you're doing is focusing on arguments, you're probably missing not only half, but I would say probably three quarters of what is actually happening in the dialogue. So it can be useful to focus in and say, what is the argument actually being advanced here by Socrates or by one of his other interlocutors? But we want more than that.And another way of thinking about it is focusing in on what we could call doctrines, right? Or theses or things like that. What claims are being advanced and how should we understand those? And we may understand them in terms of the arguments that are being provided, but we may also understand them in terms of what we could call accounts.And by the way, the term that's used in Greek, logos, which if you know anything about ancient Greek, you know, this is a pretty slippery, ambiguous term. It can mean argument. It can also mean account. It can mean a whole bunch of different things, a speech, a lie at some points in certain works. And so there's a lot of scope here for thinking about how what we do with words is actually helping us to understand ideas and reality.So somebody might talk about Plato's doctrine of the forms, and they have some idea of what that is, and they may even read across multiple dialogues to get a sense of what the doctrine genuinely is that Plato is trying to convey. Bad news is, when it comes to a lot of his important doctrines, the dialogues don't always neatly map onto each other, and we have to do a good bit of thinking work in order to get out of them what it is that we want.Now, some people have taken a very different tack and focused on what we call the dramatic elements of the dialogues, and that can be quite important. Oftentimes, along with that goes a sort of esotericism that myself, I find very unattractive because it involves people saying, I've got the hidden knowledge that all you dummies don't. And I'm pretty suspicious of people who make those sorts of claims.But sometimes saying, well, what is actually going on here? That can be quite helpful. So that leads me into something that's a bit more positive. And I've got a few, we could say, not negative so much, pointers, but just a few things to keep in mind that might be helpful for you.So characters matter, and character matters. A little bit of a pun there on my part. When we have a character like Thrasymachus or Callicles in the Republic or in the Gorgias, people who are advancing a certain kind of might makes right philosophy. It's reflected in the way that they talk. It's reflected in the stances they take and how they interact with say, Socrates or other people.There are other characters in the dialogues who are also saying things and they're saying them not just in terms of the content, but the way that they're talking. And it's reflective of the kind of person who they are. And so I think that's important to be attentive to that.Another thing is who's the main character in most of the dialogues, though not all of them, especially later ones, Socrates of course. And a lot of people approach the dialogues with an idea of Socrates already in mind, especially Socrates, the guy who knows that he knows nothing. And, you know, he does say that he's not sure that he has wisdom. He questions people, but he doesn't actually affirm that he knows absolutely nothing at all. And if he did, that would go against so many things that he actually does say in the dialogue.So there's no substitute for reading the actual text and getting an idea of who the Socrates guy was by seeing how he interacts with people as well. He asks questions. He calls the person themselves as a witness rather than allowing them to push off the responsibility of justifying their points of view by quoting a poet or some other person or proverb or something like that.And he's very interested not so much in hearing speeches, but in actual dialogue with people. And he'll model how Plato thinks we should engage in dialogue. And if we're paying close attention, if we're not even reading between the lines, but just being attentive, we will find out there's all sorts of things that Socrates actually knows. And he will signify that to you sometimes by saying, well, don't we know that X, Y, Z? And then the interlocutor will say, yes, in fact, we do know that. Or we've at least attained this much in our discourse. We haven't actually managed to define what we're looking for. I think a lot of people, because their eyes are too much on the proverbial prize, they lose sight of all the other things that we learn along the way.The other thing that I want to close with. If you do read platonic dialogues and you're paying close attention to them, you are going to notice that not only will some of the other characters make bad arguments and claims that can't really stand up and provide accounts that don't always completely make sense, but Socrates himself will sometimes do that as well.And you could ask, why would Plato put words in the mouth of his friend, mentor, the person who is the emblem of philosophy itself? Why would he do that in his well-crafted dialogues? And there's a number of answers that we could give to this. I'm only going to suggest one here right now, but perhaps we'll explore this more in a future episode or in some some writings about this.I think Plato wants you to realize when you see that that there's a problem there and for you to use your brain your mind to identify what's wrong with the reasoning And if you do that, you might not just say, oh, well, it's all bad. Throw it all away. You might say, I wonder how this could be qualified. I wonder how this account or argument could be improved. I wonder how this could be made more consistent. And doing that is actually thinking on your part, I'm convinced that that is part of what Plato calls dialectic, which is so absolutely irreplaceably important in the development, not only of you as an intellectual being, but also as a moral being.So those are some reflections on Plato's dialogues. Perhaps they might be useful for you. Hopefully they are. If not, then maybe you'll like something else that I talk about with respect to Plato down the line. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

As many of you listeners know, I teach classes both in traditional academic settings, in institutions that, you know, have a kind of formalized approach to education, and I do those face-to-face and online. And I also teach, in the Study with Sadler Academy, online classes and seminars to a much wider variety of people, in part because I open it up. You don't have to be enrolled in a particular school in order to take classes. And I also make them a good bit more affordable. Now, that's a totally different topic.Where am I going with this? So I had something interesting come up in both a seminar that I was teaching this last weekend, specifically on Stoic philosophy, and it's something that is coming up pretty frequently in the two classes that I'm teaching this semester, one of which is focused directly on the emotion of anger and looking at it from avariety of different perspectives, many of which are drawn from ancient philosophy, and another class which is explicitly about what we call philosophy as a way of life.And so what I'm going to talk about are what we call practices or spiritual exercises. There's a variety of different names for these. And I've talked about this a little bit before in the past. So what I want to bring up today is something that I ended up, I've been thinking about it for quite a while with respect to my academic classes. I brought up in a response to a question that I was asked in the Stoicism seminar.So it had to do with, well, how do we actually apply this philosophical stuff if we don't already have practices outlined for us? Because, you know, when it comes to a lot of matters, the Stoics really stand out, at least with the literature that we have of them, in providing us with a lot of explicit practices.So when Epictetus will say: When you're in this kind of situation, have ready at hand these thoughts. That's a practice. Or when he says: “You're encountering this sort of problem, do this.” Or: “Think about this every once in a while.” And Seneca has a lot of these as well. So does Marcus Aurelius. And we could go on and on.So what do we do when we're thinking about matters about which the philosophers have a lot to contribute, a lot of theory, a lot of exploration, but they don't actually advise us to do this or that as a practice. A prime example of this would be Aristotle and his predecessor Plato's discussions about the emotion of anger, which are kind of scattered across their texts.With Plato, we get a good bit of discussion of this part of ourselves called thumos, which is the part that gets angry in Republic book four and in other parts of the Republic. Then we get a lot of other partial discussions of anger in other dialogues like the Gorgias or Protagoras or Euthyphro, and there's some really useful stuff in there With Aristotle we get a more systematic, and we could even say scientific examination, of anger. But it's still scattered across multiple texts, so you have to do some correlating it if you want to say, well, here's the theory. And it's nice to have the theory, but we could easily say, sure, it's great to have a viewpoint on it. But what do I actually do with this?And there's a very simple answer to that, namely that you take the ideas and then you have to exercise a little bit of thought on your own part about how could these actually be applied? And in some cases, it's pretty straightforward. It's very low hanging fruit, so to speak. So I'll give you a couple examples. Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, he has this great line that you actually see used by other people who aren't Aristotelians, where he says it's easy to get angry. Anybody can do that. But getting angry with the right person for the right reason at the right time in the right way for the right amount of time, that is not easy and not everybody can do that. And there will be a couple other rights, or as one should in Greek dei is the terminology there, that we could bring up as well.Now, that's great. You can say, aha, so we have a way of understanding whether anger felt by a particular person or exhibited by them is good or bad, virtuous or vicious. And that leads to making ethical judgments, but you could also use this for anger management. And how would you do that? Well, you would say to yourself or to somebody else, when you actually start getting irritated, am I or are you getting angry with the right person? You just think about that.And merely turning your attention to that question and seriously asking yourself that question, not just giving yourself a pass. Obviously, I'm angry at the right person. I don't get angry at the wrong people. But, you know, actually questioning yourself. Maybe I am angry at the wrong person in this case. That can help you to manage your anger. And you could go further with it. You could ask yourself, well, what is going on with me? That I'm transferring my anger from somebody who perhaps I should be angry with or the person who at least is making me angry to somebody else instead and maybe deflecting it or using them as a scapegoat or however you want to conceive of it. See, you've got a practice there and you could do this with all those other rights as well.Am I expressing my anger in the right way? I know i'm angry, but should I be saying these sorts of things to these people? Or is this going to be damaging to the relationship that I claim to value with them? Or is anger leading me to do or say things that are morally dishonorable or shameful? Those are questions you can ask. And that's a philosophical practice. I'll give you another example coming from Plato in the Euthyphro, he very very helpfully tells us that the matters about which human beings and gods, in their own relationships and communities, disagree about with each other, and as a result either hate or get angry with each other over, are not questions that can be easily resolved. Like matters of mathematics where you can get it wrong, and then say let's do the operation or sum again, and see who's got the right answer. Instead they have to do with what we call moral values. In ancient Greek thought, something you see in Plato, and Aristotle, and the Stoics, and so many others, they distinguished between modalities like the good and the bad, or the just and the unjust, or the honorable and the shameful (also translatable as beautiful and ugly, or fair and foul), the useful and the harmful, and a number of other things as well.These are the things that we often do disagree about, you know, what they are, how they apply. And when people get these wrong in our eyes, we often get angry with them and they get angry with us. So if we know that we're heading into a situation where we are going to have that sort of disagreement, disagreement about those kinds of matters, we can say to ourselves, aha, I've got to watch getting angry, because this is exactly the sort of thing that does tend to make people angry with each other.So you notice what we've done there. This is some creative application of ideas that are taken from a philosopher. It doesn't take an awful lot to be able to extrapolate from the theory to the actual practice. And I think that in a lot of cases, this is exactly not just what we can do, but what we should do whenever we don't have a number of already outlined practices. So perhaps that's of some use to you.I know that I do it a lot. People will often ask me, oh, what are your favorite stoic practices that you do every day? And I'll often say, I don't actually have a lot of them because I get myself into situations. And then I've been doing it so long that I think about, well, what is the stuff that I need to apply to here, and that works for me. Whereas other people might need things to be a lot more structuredIf you actually do know the theory, turning it into practice is something that shouldn't be all that difficult. And if it is, well perhaps you want to look at why that's the case but if it isn't you can say aha i'm on the right track here and this is exactly what we should do with theories and practices. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

If you follow me on social media, you no doubt saw me posting a kind of funny meme about a workaholic. It actually shows a guy in heavy plate armor, and I suppose this is from some video game setting, as some people have pointed out. The caption of it is the part that we're really interested in, and it shows him with his head in his arms saying “workaholics when they run out of workahol”.And, you know, the point there is, of course, humorous. There is no such thing as workahol, but we could think of that as something like a disposition, some part of ourselves that maybe we started out with not by genetics or anything like that, but definitely from our environment. I certainly saw my father and my mother working quite hard, although they both knew how to enjoy themselves and take time off as well. And I saw this from childhood onward. I also grew up in a time when being productive and devoting yourself to things was often praised and rewarded. And I also realized that if you do want to get big projects done, you have to, as the expression goes, strike while the iron is hot. Oftentimes that means striking while you have the energy to do something.So am I a workaholic? Well, by some estimates, I certainly could be considered to be so. But I also like to think that as time has gone on and I've slowed down a bit, as has my wife, who's around the same age as me, we're both in our 50s, as energy levels decline inevitably, as illnesses happen, I've learned how to back off a bit.More importantly than that, the part that I think so many people find very challenging, it's not just about reducing your workload or deferring timelines and deadlines. It's about your mindset. You have to learn how to eventually become okay with things that you intended to do, that you may have even planned or committed to do, quite publicly, not getting done on the timeline that you want them done, and perhaps in some cases, not at all.One prime example of that, and this was admittedly based in a bit of, I'm not even going to call it wishful thinking, because I don't know what I was thinking when I said that this would happen. The Half-Hour Hegel project that a lot of people know me for, it's a series of what ended up being 376 half-hour videos going through all of Hegel's Phenomenology, and it's been a useful thing for many people.Somehow, I believed when I first started the project that it would only take me, you know, two, maybe three or four years to do. And I suppose if I'd kept at it assiduously and never took any time off and cranked out eight videos a month, maybe that could have happened. But as it turned out, you know, lots of things happen, illnesses, other projects, things that I needed to do with my wife or kids, the death of dogs and cats, and all of those sorts of matters. And so even when I was getting my quota of six videos done per month, which wasn't every single month, it ended up taking me nine years to see the entire project through. In that case, I can say I did in fact finish it up. But there have been many cases where something just got stalled and I didn't finish the project that I had intended, or where I said I was going to do something and just never got around to it. A lot of the books that I have sitting, waiting to be reviewed in my Dr. Sadler's Honest Reviews series are like that. They date back to 2018, 2019, and And I've read them and I just haven't gotten around to creating the videos.Now, how should we view that sort of thing? Do you beat yourself up about it and get down upon yourself and say, what a loser I am. I should have gotten this accomplished. Certainly that can be a motivator early on when you're not getting things done. But after you've had quite a few of these opposite of successes, which you can call failures if you want to — I would actually say running up on the shoals of life — after you've had enough of them, you come to realize that it's not sustainable to get on your own case and get down on yourself for each of these things that you didn't actually pull off. That you need to be a bit more forgiving while at the same time not forgiving, cutting yourself so much slack that you don't end up accomplishing things and you live, so to speak, just in a dream world where you daydream about what you might have accomplished.So why is this on my mind? Well, for the last, now I would say three weeks or so, I have been dealing with a number of different symptoms. And so has my wife, some of which could be attributed to a flu, you know, sinus issues, headaches, fatigue, muscle pain, sometimes chills.Eventually, we got to the point where we said, well, I think we're going to have to go in and see a doctor. So we drove in together to urgent care only to get checked out and then hear the verdict. Well, there's not much we can do for you. There's a lot of viruses going around. This doesn't appear to be bacterial, so no antibiotics would be helpful. We don't know what you've actually got, but clearly you can get some work done. So you can't be that badly off. Get some more rest. Make sure you stay very hydrated. Take some painkillers over the counter and eventually you'll be right as rain So now i'm starting to feel better, but for you know about three weeks what I was finding is that I would get fatigued fairly quickly. So by around three or four o'clock in the afternoon I couldn't get much of anything done. I would come home, take a nap, get up, have some dinner, think that I was going to do some work that night, be too tiredm and either go to bed early or take a bath and go to bed and start again the next day. In the morning, I would not be feeling great, but I could be productive.And then my productivity level would decline as the day went on.And I found myself getting further and further behind, which if you've experienced that, it can be quite frustrating, especially when you know that people are expecting things from you, perhaps even depending on you to get things done. That's the case if you're teaching. That's the case if you've got important projects going on. That's the case when you've made commitments to clients and colleagues that certain things were going to happen. So it requires a kind of mental shift. And I'm fortunate in that I have a partner in Andi, my wife, who is similarly driven, but also has similar challenges and who can say to me, hey you've done enough for the day. Your productivity shouldn't come before your health or whatever else it's going to be. Take it easy. Because I know that she won't tell me to take it easy too often. And I do the same for her. So this is a form of mutual support, you could say.But what ends up happening is that some things have to be put on hold. And prioritization becomes very important. One of the temptations that I tend to face is sticking with things that are easier and more attractive to me as projects and deferring the things that I really should do, but I'd prefer not to. When I run out of energy, then those things go onto the back burner. They wind up on the to-do list for the next day. And that's not a good thing because eventually your to-do list gets longer and longer and it has a higher proportion of the things that you weren't really that happy to do, at least at the time, which then can affect your mood as well.Sometimes the answer to that is just to wipe the slate clean altogether. Other times, maybe you have to do the, as one of my colleagues and friends calls it, eat your broccoli first and then you get your steak and dessert. I actually like broccoli, so that metaphor doesn't work for me as well, but apparently he's not so interested in vegetables, but really does like steak and dessert. So you rearrange your schedule so that you're getting to the tasks that you didn't originally want to do.Now, I'm not offering some sort of here's the program to make sense out of your life and rearrange everything to your benefit here in this podcast. I'm more setting out an experience, and a problem, and hints of a solution that I'm reflecting upon here as I tell you about the this. But I think this is actually something that can be quite helpful for a lot of people, and here's where I'll end this.A lot of people look at what I'm doing from the outside, and they say wow you're so productive. You get so much done. How do you do it? And my answer is two parts. Ine of them is I don't have a system as such, but I do have a number of habits that I've built up over the years that are helpful for me. I'm pretty good at prioritizing and also at making myself do things that I don't particularly want to do at the moment.But the other part of it is from the outside, it looks like I'm very productive, like I manage my time extraordinarily well and get a lot done. But that is an outside view and it isn't the complete reality of what is happening on the inside. My house, if we want to use this as a sort of metaphor is just as messy and cluttered as is yours. You're just not seeing it because my yard looks very clean and orderly, and there's a lot of things in it waiting for other people to come and take, but if you were to step inside you might be a little bit surprised. Now, not a hoarder situation, not super gross or messy, but certainly not what you would necessarily expect. And I think saying that might be helpful for some people to hear.I think I'll probably talk about this elsewhere because there's a lot to be said. But the most we can do is trying our best. And at some points in our life, our best isn't going to be the same best as it was in an earlier time. Now that may change as well. Sometimes things are cumulative. So our best could be even better than it was before.But part of the process of aging, and right now I'm solidly in middle age, is to begin to recognize where you have to accept limitations. So I will end with that, and I look forward to seeing what people have to say about that. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

After I've gotten up in the morning, one of the things that I typically do is check for memories in my Facebook account, because I've been posting things in there since 2009 when I got on Facebook. Quite often the memories are interesting or telling or they bring up something that I'd entirely forgotten about. And that was kind of the case for a memory from yesterday, which has to do with what we could call my origin story as a public philosopher on YouTube.So if you've been following me for a very long time or you've heard me in interviews, you know that I originally got started uploading videos not in my own channel, but in an institutional channel at the place that I was teaching called Fayetteville State University down in North Carolina. And they were from my last semester teaching there in 2011.I was teaching four sections of critical thinking, which was a typical load for that place. We didn't have a philosophy program, and critical thinking was a required class for all students in the university, so we taught a lot of sections.And I thought that I would start video recording using a flip cam, and what you call a spider tripod, a little tripod that you can arrange things. I would put it down on a desk and just start it at the beginning of class, turn it off at the end of class. Occasionally it would get bumped by a student and you would see students walking past it. But for the most part, it would take in the entire desk, chalkboard, and me giving a lecture. And it would pick up the sound from students asking questions or making comments quite well.I've told the story a number of times how my then fiancée, now wife Andi was absolutely instrumental in getting me to try it out and she said what do you have to lose you can record the lectures could be a useful resource for your students. And if you don't like them, you can always get rid of them later on.So I was originally - as I found out, I'd totally forgotten about this - I was originally planning on taking the video recordings and uploading the files into the course management system, which was called Blackboard. It's still around today. And I found that Blackboard at that time, at least, it might be able to now just could not handle long video files. You couldn't upload them into it effectively. So there wouldn't be any useful playback for my students.So we started having to think, OK, where can they actually go? I thought about uploading them into a personal YouTube channel. But back then, YouTube first was only allowing you to upload videos that were 10 minutes long and then 15 minutes and then 20 minutes. So if you look at old videos from about 15 years, even 13 years back, quite often what you would see is that they're broken up into chunks.The exception was if you had an institutional account. So Fayetteville State University had an institutional account, and that's where those critical thinking videos actually live. It's kind of a fluke because I don't think that I would have thought to upload them as a resource for the general public who is interested in critical thinking, let alone my class and the way that I work. This was very fortuitous because what ends up happening, again, you may know this from me talking about it elsewhere, when I first started putting videos out, these critical thinking videos, and then later when I moved to Marist College and I was teaching Introduction to Philosophy and Ethics every semester and then occasionally some other classes like Religion in American Culture or Worldviews and Values.With all of these classes and all of the videos that were recorded in them using lecture capture. Very low production. The sound quality isn't good. The lighting is not optimal. There's all sorts of weird interruptions, pauses. It's not scripted or anything like that. People really liked it.There were a lot of responses that I got in comments that were, for me, quite telling and rather affirming of what it was that I was doing. It gave me the idea that maybe this is actually a good thing to do because I thought, nah, nobody's going to watch my stuff. I'm, you know, kind of an unknown, a nobody teaching at these places, not very well-known high-tier institutions.And there were videos out from, for example, Shelley Kagan teaching his course about death at Yale University, if I remember right. And those were getting lots and lots of views. And I was like, ah, people aren't going to watch my stuff. But people did. And they said a lot of interesting things.The number one thing that motivated me was people who were thanking me and saying, I'm in a critical thinking class, or later on I'm in an intro class or an ethics class or something, and this video that you recorded is really helpful for me because my instructor doesn't explain things, or isn't a very good teacher and you know refuses to help us out with understanding the concepts, the material, the arguments. And so you saved my grade or you've allowed me to understand things.And I thought, yeah, that's actually quite helpful. That's wonderful that somebody who is not getting what they're paying for and should be getting from their instructor is at least getting it somewhere from somebody else.Another kind of comment that I got that was, again, very, I'll use the word affirming, were from people who said, I really like watching these videos because it is like being in a classroom again, and I had to drop out of college. Or I wasn't able to go to college because I have to work for a living, or my life situation doesn't allow it. Or I went to college, did graduate. I'm now working somewhere and I miss it. So, you know, that was kind of a cool thing.And video of that sort, just like videos of people, I suppose, whitewater rafting. You've done it before. You watch somebody else doing it and you're like, oh man, that's really cool. I remember when I did that or sledding or knitting or whatever it might be, right? So that was another good sort of comment.And over time, I got a lot of other types of comments as well. People asking questions, wanting to go a little bit further into depth, requesting videos of different sorts that led me down other paths. But when I think about where it all got started, the initial impulse did in fact come from my wife who was pushing me to just try it out. Because I can be a bit conservative and curmudgeonly when it comes to trying out new things, maybe less so now than I was when I was 40 years old. Isn't that funny to think about that? That 14 years has made such a profound difference when it comes to openness and willingness to experiment. So she was the one who got me to actually start recording. But then we had this bottleneck, this problem. How do you actually put it out there?And I didn't intend to try to acquire an audience online. I was thinking just in terms of my students and the fact that the course management system that we had, which probably should have been better and would have accommodated me if it had been, and then I might have left those videos in there, and never reached anyone outside of the places where I was teaching unless somebody convinced me to actually put them on YouTube.If that had been the case, then I think my career would be very different. YouTube allowed me to reach a worldwide audience. My videos have been viewed millions of times by people of all different ages, with all sorts of different motivations, sharing them with each other.And, you know, not everybody likes them, I suppose, but it seems like at least most of the people who do watch them find them of some value and recommend them to other people. And if it hadn't been for that one circumstance, perhaps none of that would have happened.So it's a great example of what we call contingency in life, or as the ancients like to call it, the role of fortune or chance. And I'm going to close here by bringing up something that perhaps I'll talk about a little bit more in another podcast, because it is a topic that deserves a lot more attention.Recently, I've been rereading Cicero's work on the ends for a variety of different projects, and I teach portions of it. And there's a lot of discussions in there about the degree to which we have control over the kind of life that we live.Is it going to be a good life? Well, how do we conceive of the good life? What is the goal or the end of human existence? And there's a lot of different candidates out there. You may be familiar with the genre of literature that says, let's survey everybody's viewpoints on this. For example, in Cicero's work, but also in Augustine's City of God, and Boethius we find similar discussions happening where people want to survey it.Theophrastus who was a both friend and follower of Aristotle, and who is you know pretty consistently Aristotelian in the books that we have of him, he's sort of following in his footsteps. He appears to have thought that fortune plays a more significant role in our happiness than do a lot of other ancient philosophers. And I'm not going to say that he's actually completely correct about that. But I will say that I've developed a much stronger appreciation for the many different ways in which factors have to come together in order for things that matter to our lives to really work out.And I could give you the example as well of how Andi and I wound up being together, connecting through Facebook, or rather reconnecting after not being in contact for time decades, because you know that we met in high school, but we didn't date in high school. She actually dated my archrival and then we lost track of each other. And then we crossed paths again in the mid 1990s and lost track of each other. And then in 2009, at the very end of the year,I sent a Facebook request because now she was being suggested because we had that old boyfriend of hers as a mutual friend in common on Facebook. And she accepted. And within a couple months through writing to each other, we fell in love and decided that we wanted to get married. All of that is a matter of chance or fortune.You could also look at it if you want to as providential. If you think that there is some mind who's organizing things behind the scenes, which certainly could be the case. But so many things in our lives turn out to be rather fortuitous, contingent. And we probably should develop a healthy appreciation for the fact that it is so possible in so many ways for things to go quite differently than the story that we actually know and remember.So here's where I'll stop with these reflections. Perhaps I'll follow these out a little bit more in some subsequent podcast episodes. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

This is the first week of the new academic semester for me, and I'm just teaching at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. The two classes that I have, both of which are very focused on practical philosophy, taking philosophical ideas and applying them within the scope of one's life, both of them are online courses. classes, which is kind of nice.I do like being in the classroom and engaging with students that way. But I think that online education, if it's done well, can be just as effective as face to face. And I've been doing it now for a while. This will be my 13th year teaching online. So you get pretty good at it after a while.In the first week of class in the contemporary educational setting in American academia, what you end up getting - and this is part of what I'm going to be talking about today, and trying to take a fairly non-complaining, non-criticizing, positive attitude towards, but also one that you might say holds the line where it has to - is what we can call student accommodations.Now, if you're not familiar with that, the general idea is that different students are better or worse equipped for studying at the college level. And a good bit of this may, in fact, stem from various disadvantages that they'vehad or learning disabilities or psychological problems that they're struggling with.And I think it's actually a good thing that we try as best as we can these days to understand students' situations and not to just say, “well, sink or swim, kid”, but try to make things more fair in certain ways, even out the field, give certain people the compensations and advantages that they need in order to do well, that we support them, that we make them feel welcome in the class.But it can also go a bit too far, and that's what I'm going to talk about today. So what ends up happening, and it's kind of done in a heavy handed cookie-cutter way, is whatever school I'm teaching at, there will be some sort of office of student support. It'll be called a million different things at different places. But their function is to take students who may be struggling and figure out what they need help with what sort of accommodations might be useful for them so that they can do well in classes, and then to send out what are called accommodation letters.And accommodation letters will say, this person has a verified issue or problem or challenge, and here are the various accommodations that are needed in order for them to have a chance at succeeding in their classes. And it's interesting, as a side note, when you read through all these different accommodations that are being expected. Sometimes there are things like the student needs instructions for assignments to be given to them in written form, or they need to be allowed to leave the classroom if they're suffering from anxiety or perhaps some physical health issue.Or they need, in some cases, for example, I had a blind student, they need all of the video things to be given proper transcripts so that they can use those to help them out. There's lots and lots of different things, but a lot of them, you read it and you're like, well, who isn't doing this in their classes? I mean, do you actually have assignments that you're giving to your students and you're not writing down somewhere in the course website what the requirements for the assignments are? I mean, that's just common sense good practices, and it makes life a lot easier for you as an instructor. Same thing with using grading rubrics or... matters along those lines.And if a student wants to leave the classroom, are you really going to say, where's your hall pass or something like that? This isn't elementary or high school. This is college. So it makes you wonder what is actually going on with a lot of the fellow instructors that they need to be told this.The students are also generally told that, and so they email me, they need to try to arrange a meeting with me to discuss their accommodations and how they are going to be implemented into the class and how they can succeed. And when I get that email, I almost always write them back and I say, we can have a meeting if you want to, but it's basically going to be me ticking down the list of the accommodations for the class and saying, I've already set up my class in such a way to accommodate this.So, for example, a student may need extensions on their assignments, which means that they get extra time to complete them. And I'll say, I don't give extensions. You know why? Because I already have a super generous late work policy. I take work from students all the way to the end of the semester, and I won't even take points off if you have some reasonable excuse for why you're turning in work late. I just want you to get the work done.And so in general, almost every accommodation that somebody needs, I've already met it in the way that my classes are designed and conducted. There are some, however, that really can't work, at least not for a philosophy class, and I suspect also for a lot of other classes in the humanities.So I had two students recently who are saying that they have a difficult time with reading texts. And I think, you know, if you know anything about philosophy, immediately your antenna are going to go up and say, well, wait a second. That's what you do in studying philosophy.You can't really learn about Plato without reading Plato's dialogues. And it's not something that you can replace by watching videos or listening to podcasts or reading Sparknotes summaries or any of those sorts of things. At some point, you actually are going to have to read the text and the text aren't going to get any easier than they already are.I mean, we can try to find translations that are more contemporary English. We can break the text into chunks. But if you're going to read Plato's Apology, you really do need to read and probably reread the whole thing. There's no way around this So I had two students who emailed me about their accommodations, and both of them were saying listen I've got a learning disability. I have a difficult time reading these sorts of texts one of them was actually asking for the text not to be large blocks of text but rather to be put in bullet points.And when I get requests like this, I do push back against it and say, listen, the class has been set up in such a way as to support your learning in a lot of different manners. You know, there are lecture videos and podcasts and lesson pages and links to outside resources and handouts on the materials. But you cannot not read the class text. You must read the text. All of these resources are there to help you do that.And so, you know, I don't throw students into the deep end and just say, well, hope you swim. I give them all sorts of resources, but I'm also telling them there is a line here that we can't go past. You cannot substitute these resources for actually engaging with the text, and you'd be shortchanging yourself to do that as a human being. And I suspect that when it comes down to it, all of these students are really capable of reading the text. It's less a matter of an on-off switch of capacity or incapacity, and it's more like a dimmer switch. It may be more difficult for them, but Plato is difficult for everybody. We all struggle with reading him, or Nietzsche, or Mary Wollstonecraft, or Simone de Beauvoir. That's the nature of intellectual writing done by people who really have a lot on the ball and are worth studying.And so I pushed back and with both of these students and said, listen, you're being supported, but there is no way that I am going to take these texts and put them into bullet point form for you. And even if I did, you wouldn't be reading the text. Now, there is a student support services.(And I may be getting the name wrong because all of these various offices are called by different things in different schools.) And if they want to take the text from the class, this is actually what I wrote the student who is asking for this. If they want to take those texts and put them into bullet point form, well, more power to them. They can certainly do that work. I don't have the time to do that. And I think it would be bad pedagogy to, in fact, just substitute that for really reading an original text. Plus, there's already resources out there, I think, doing that sort of thing. Back in n my day, when I was a student, we obviously didn't have a very well-developed internet, but what we did have were these books that you could buy at bookstores anywhere called Cliff Notes. And when I was in middle school and high school, and even in college, a lot of my fellow students would do that. Instead of actually reading a play by Shakespeare, they'd get the Cliff Notes. And the Cliff Notes would have all of these nice broken down sections, essentially bullet pointing things for them.Now we have Spark notes and all sorts of other places that you can go online if that's the sort of thing that you're looking for. But of course, if you do that, you're not really getting much of an education. It would be as if you decided just to read Wikipedia articles about Aristotle rather than actually reading Aristotle. Or instead of taking the chance that it might be difficult for you to read Seneca and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and Musonius Rufus and other Stoic authors, you decided to read Stoicism for Dummies or some sort of substitute like that.You certainly can do that. And it's better than not doing anything. And some learning will take place, but it's below the threshold of what it is that we're trying to promote and produce in a real philosophy class.So, you know, I don't want to sound like a curmudgeon here who's saying, oh, these kids these days are so lazy or any nonsense like that, because I don't believe that. I think that there are a lot of students in every generation who are kind of lazy and want to cut corners. And there's a lot of them who are dedicated and motivated and really interested. And there's quite a few in between. And I don't think that it changes from generation to generation.I do my best to provide as much possible support for the students in a variety of different modalities, let's say, video, podcast, writing, meeting with them, all these sorts of things. I do as much as I can of that because I want them to succeed.But I also want them to succeed at what it is that we're trying to do in the class, which is to read and think about and discuss and apply and actual primary texts of philosophical literature so those are my reflections on this process i thought i would give you a little bit of insight into what contemporary academia looks like again. I'm not saying that this is something radically new and these kids these days or anything like that But I do think that there can be kind of a culture which is fostered by these various essentially educational bureaucrats who want to understandably make things easier for the students so that they can learn things.But in the process, they're going too far and demanding that things be, and I'll just use the word, dumbed down, watered down, made far easier than they should be. And it's not about whether it's easy or hard. It's really about whether you're getting the real thing that you're paying for, which is a genuine education, reading primary texts and being able to get something out of that experience. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

We are quite early into the new year of 2025, and for an academic, even a part-timer like me, that means getting syllabi and course sites and a number of other related things ready for the classes that are coming up.And generally, the semester doesn't begin right at New Year's, or even in the first week of January. We get a little bit of lead time, a little bit of a respite. But then we hit the ground running. So I've been spending about the last week slowly putting the classes together that I'm going to teach. And actually, as far as academic classes go, this is a fairly light semester for me. I'm not teaching for Marquette University as I do sometimes. I'm only teaching for Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. I'm teaching two online courses, one of which is a class that I've taught before called Philosophy, Mindfulness, and Life. (And they put the mindfulness in there because it was a trendy topic). We do look at a little bit of contemporary mindfulness stuff, but we're mostly focused on looking at ancient philosophy and whatever you want to call them “spiritual exercises” (that's Pierre Hadot's term), or “philosophical practices”, or even, to use Foucault's term, “technologies of the self”.And the students learn a bit about a number of different important philosophical traditions. They read some texts, and then they, over the course of weeks, apply philosophy practices daily within their life and they keep track of that. And then they write some reports on it and they share their experiences with others. So it's very much a practical, transformative philosophy class.And that is, as I mentioned, a class I've taught before for my I think this will be the fourth time around. It is an asynchronous class, which means that it doesn't meet for any class sessions. The students are working together as a class, but entirely on their own. They engage each other through discussion forums, and that's where they compare notes and talk about what they're doing and experiencing.The other class is a new class for MIAD, but not a completely new class to me. I've taught it before three times for Marquette University, and it is my Anger and Justice class, which you might know something about. I've produced a number of resources, particularly lecture videos, and then converted those into podcast episodes on various works dealing with anger over the last several years.So that class will be meeting for regular class sessions only once a week. And I try not to overtax my students by making them meet for the full two and a half hours that it's allotted for. Instead, I have them meet for an hour and a half. We discuss the course texts. We talk about exercises, applications, ideas, that sort of stuff and their own experiences with what we're looking at and talking about. And then I let them go and I hold online office hours for that Anger and Justice class and for the other Philosophy, Mindfulness and Life class.So I have been getting ready to teach those two courses and you might be interested to know what does that mean for me as a professor? Can I just take whatever I did in the past and recycle it? And the answer to that is, well, I could do that, but that would not be good teaching.When you're actually setting up a class, particularly an online class, a lot of thought and preparation needs to go into it if it's going to be a good class. And you can't really, as we sometimes say, fake the funk or just cut and paste from one semester to the next. You really have to go back over your stuff. And you can't do that either in a mechanical way, just ticking off a bunch of boxes. You have to put thought into it. And so that's part of what I wanted to talk about with you today because it might be interesting for you to know what sort of thinking is. goes into preparing for new classes.So the first thing that I'm going to tell you about is what we often these days call “backwards design”. That is an educational designer sort of jargony way of talking about something else that we've been doing for a very, very long time but calling by different names. And I'm going to give you another jargony way of talking about it that comes essentially from Aristotle onward and I like to just call it what it is, “teleological”. So the Greek word telos means “end” or “goal or “purpose”. And when you're thinking about ends, and the means that you need to select from in order to achieve those ends, and perhaps not screwing up all of your other means and ends, you are engaging in teleological thinking about things. You notice that this goes throughout the entire history of philosophy. It's a major issue in ethics and it's also quite important in designing anything.You think about, well, what is it that I want to achieve or attain or produce? And what is it going to take for that to happen? And you might do this in a bunch of iterative steps. So you might begin with, you know, let's take an example that's not class related.I want to be happy. Now you've got to figure out what happiness actually means to you. And then once you've done that, let's say you've decided on Aristotle's idea of happiness. So virtuous activity along with sufficient means and some important relationships that are probably going to be along the lines of friendship. Then you got to say, OK, I know where I want to go. How do I get there? What do I need to do? So if you want to have virtuous activity, well, you've got to develop virtue, right? So what does it take to actually develop virtue? What does it take to have some financial monetary property means that will allow you to live the kind of life that you want to, not being super rich, but at least having some security and being able to use your wealth in virtuous ways.And then you've got to think, too, are there ways in which I could get to A which are going to keep me from getting to B? So if the pursuit of wealth is going to get in the way of Well, that may be a problem. You may have to rethink how it is you're going about getting wealth. So I think you get the idea, right? Teleological thinking. Now, how does this apply to classes? You might say, well, the whole purpose of a class is just for the students to learn some stuff. You really have to be able to explain to yourself and perhaps even to other people, what is it that you want the students to learn? And I think this is a great thing to do. I actually include this not only in my syllabus where it's supposed to be (which the students probably won't read or won't read closely, quite frankly, even if we go over it in class), but I include it in the course site and in each of the weekly modules.Here's what I want us to do because the goal is for you to come away with this, this sort of change in yourself or this sort of knowledge that you can do or a skill that you can now apply within your life. And then I have to think about, OK, so what is going to foster that? And you really have to think hard about this. You can't just say, well, I want them to learn some Platonic philosophy, so I'm just going to have them read some text by Plato, and that'll be good enough. Maybe we'll talk about it in the class session.No, no, no! You really have to think more than that you have to think about where can things go wrong. What kind of text do you need? What sort of translations? What do you need to explain to these students so that they can take these texts that were written a long time ago (and in the case of my classes I give them public domain translations which are a little old fashioned and Oxfordy)? How can I explain this stuff to get it across to them? And what other kinds of resources are they going to need in order to be able to make this work?A lot of people need examples. I find that very helpful myself. I produce a lot of handouts and worksheets, and I do that as well because I find that sort of stuff useful, and so in my view, students are probably gonna find that useful as well. I also, for these online classes, produce a lot of short lecture videos, which I call core concept videos, and I load those into the course site, and the students watch them, and find them quite helpful. I also turn them into podcast episodes so they can listen to them and download them and take them wherever they would like to.I sometimes write lesson pages for them as well, where I'm putting things into kind of a summary textual form for the students, which, again, they often tell me, hey, this is really helpful stuff.And big surprise, having resources in a variety of different formats on the rather difficult material that we're studying, to give them an introduction, to lead them in, to explain difficult ideas or concepts or terminology turns out to be very helpful.And it also winds up making them feel good in a certain way, making them feel supported, making them feel that I (which is a true thing) care about their education. And that generates a really nice, positive feedback loop where it's more likely that they'll put in the work to be good students because somebody is showing that they care about their education and about the obstacles and difficulties and misunderstandings that they're likely to encounter.So I have to think about for each class, each semester, what do my students actually need? And I'll give you an example of something interesting that I do for one of my classes that I don't do in most of my other classes. So for this Philosophy, Mindfulness, and Life class, one of the things that I saw a friend and colleague, Donald Robertson, doing (it's got to be over a decade ago. Yeah, actually, it is over a decade ago), for Stoic Week, he created, I want to say, seven sound files.And it was him and his Scottish dialect leading people through practices, philosophical practices taken from Stoicism, like a morning meditation and an evening meditation and the view from above and other. a bunch of other things as well. And I thought, wow, that is a great idea. And actually I used his guided meditations for earlier versions of my class, at least on the Stoicism part.And then I started thinking to myself, man, what if somebody did that for Epicurean or Cynic or Platonic philosophy? These different schools' traditions, because they're also very practically oriented, and we talk about them in the class. What if somebody took the Epicurean Tetrapharmakos and explained it and led people through a guided meditation, nice and slow, so that they could listen to this and it could slowly have an impact or effect upon their consciousness.So that's part of what I'm going to be doing for this new iteration of the class. It's something I wanted to do in the past and never got around to it. I think it would be helpful for my students, beneficial for them. I mean we'll see, it's kind of an experiment. Maybe none of them will find it useful, or maybe none of them really want to listen to it because it is a optional sort of resource. Maybe I'll make them available down the line to Substack subscribers or other people who are supporting me in other ways, but that's what I'm doing for the time being.So circling back, there's a lot of thinking things out that goes into designing the syllabus, thinking about what we're going to study, building out the course website, and then developing all of these resources for my students.And the good thing is, and this is what I'll close with, it doesn't all have to be done at once. The students are not going to be looking at the week 12 resources until around week 11. Actually, some of them may look at it in week 13! So I don't have to have everything done before the semester begins. But the more I have done, the less stressful it is for me and for my go-getter students who want to see the resources there, the more helpful it is for me to get these things done in advance. There's a lot of lead time, prep time before we even begin the class, at least for the kinds of classes that I teach.And so I've peeled back the curtain a little bit for you and you get some insight into what it looks like when a professor who actually cares about his students learning is taking on interesting classes like this. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

In a previous episode where I was talking about my work completing a video series on what we possess of Aristotle's Poetics, I had brought up the fact that there were rather rigid interpretations and applications of Aristotle's text to dramas, particularly in the 17th century, where Aristotle was interpreted as providing us with definitive rules for how a tragedy has to be written in order to be a good tragedy, in order to be a proper representative of that genre.And I promised that I would come back to the topic, so that is what I'm going to do here, but I want to broaden it a little bit. So it's interesting, if you go and you look at what people have to say about it, the most common way that people talk about it in the present seems to be telling us about Aristotle's theory of tragedy.And it's kind of a funny term to use, given that Aristotle does in fact use the Greek verb that we end up getting theory from, theorein, which means essentially to contemplate. And it's particularly used for the spectators at a tragedy, or we would call them today, the audience, the people literally looking at or watching the drama being depicted, the mimesis that Aristotle is particularly interested in.And a lot of people will write about this in ways that reflect a kind of rigidification of Aristotle's text. You might even, if we want to use another term, say ossification. And this comes from the word os, from bone. It's making Aristotle very bony. It's giving you something like a skeleton that doesn't have the mobility of Aristotle's thought as we actually see it right there in the text.So when you see somebody telling you about the theory of a particular philosopher, I'm not saying that every time that happens, alarm bells should go off or a red flag should go up in your head, but you might want to be a bit suspicious, particularly if the philosopher, him or herself, didn't say, “this is my theory”, right?If they didn't present it in that way, because what you're always getting there is a sort of reconstruction, and it could be a reconstruction that is also, we could say, a not only rigidification, but a reduction, making it less than it actually is.And when you think about these great authors and classic texts, why do we read them? Not because we're looking for a cookie cutter or recipe or schema that we can cram everything into. We're looking for thought that remains alive, that can provoke our own reflection and meditation and widening our own range of thinking and and even perception when it comes to these matters.So when you read through Aristotle's poetics, you can't apply it very easily to every single genre of drama that we have in the present, whether it's literary, whether it's presented on a stage, whether it is in a streaming television show or movie, but it should help you at least see some things in a different and deeper light.mThat's the power of Aristotle's text.And sometimes it's going to help you see it, not so much by saying, aha, I know exactly what's going on, but by helping you to better be puzzled, better be astounded, better be challenged, and better ask questions or muse upon things. That's the function of classic texts like Aristotle's Poetics.And so I want to say another thing as well to widen the scope here and take us to some of Aristotle's other works. So you'll often see people saying things like Aristotle's doctrine of this or that. So for example, Aristotle's doctrine of the unity of the virtues, this would be in book six of the Nicomachean Ethics. Or sometimes you'll even see argument being used as well, like Aristotle's function argument.And I'm not going to say that all of that should be automatically rejected. I mean, if it helps you to wrap your head around what is going on in Aristotle's admittedly ambiguous at times argument, difficult at times, tricky, and sometimes confusing text, that's great. Just don't mistake, as we often say, the map for the territory, where the territory is Aristotle's actual text and the thought lying behind it, and the map, or tiny little portion of the map, maybe just a route, is what it is that the commentator or even just website has to say about what Aristotle's really doing.Because you're not getting the fullness of what Aristotle's doing when somebody talks about the function argument or Aristotle's theory of tragedy or anything along those lines. His thought is more complex, more richly interconnected, more ambiguous in its language, and more, you could say, questing. Aristotle is often showing us his process of thinking about things, and that's part of why it is so messy when we try to reconstruct it.And maybe we need to get out of the habit of thinking that everything should be made nice and easy and quick to apply, set in bullet point form. Maybe that's a habit of mind that we actually need to break, to identify within ourselves, and then to slowly disentangle from our approach to things.So coming back to Aristotle, coming back especially to the Poetics, I will say that Aristotle does provide us with an effective definition of tragedy as a particular artistic memetic medium, a kind of poesis, a kind of poetry and production. But there's much more to the picture. And I'm just going to give you one example to drive this home.So everybody who knows anything about tragedy knows that it involves, according to Aristotle, purification of two emotions in particular, fear and pain. Well, that's true. Aristotle does actually say that in his definition, and he does talk about that. But are those really the only emotions that we would possibly want to focus on? He also mentions anger in the Poetics and I think that we could quite easily, using our brains and applying them somewhat to this, say perhaps sometimes if there is catharsis (purification is often how we translate that), if there is catharsis of emotion why couldn't it also be that of anger. He also talks about another interesting emotional state within there that often doesn't get remarked upon that we could translate as human feeling, philanthropia, a term that gets used a lot in later authors, but which Aristotle is using there.We might think about other emotions as well, like that of sadness, which he doesn't actually mention in this work, but does talk about in other places, certainly under the aspect of grief, which he mentions in the Nicomachean Ethics. So when we look at it that way, when we don't simply say, well, as we all know, Aristotle only thinks, because Aristotle only talks about two emotions there, that catharsis in good tragedy involves purification of the audience's feeling of fear and pity, or we might say sympathy or compassion, as a translation of Greek, by the way in which we read it and the assumptions that we bring to it.Sometimes, unfortunately, and this has often been the case for me as a younger person, the book that we're reading is not as great a book as other people are encountering. And maybe we have to mature a bit. Maybe we have to learn to not simply rely upon secondhand interpretations and go into the text ourselves and linger with, really spend time with it if we want to get entirely what is available to us as readers, as thinkers, as collaborators in the thought, if we want that to become available to us.So those are a few musings that hopefully discharge the obligation I incurred by promising to talk more about Aristotle's poetics. I'll probably return to it later on down the line because there's plenty of other interesting aspects of this text to talk about, but that's enough for right now. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

One of the kind of projects, or rather sets of projects that I've been working on probably a good portion of this last year, and I'll be continuing to do it this coming year, is you might say finishing up things that I started. And by that, I mean video series, which then will turn into podcast series down the line, core concept videos primarily.And I'm thinking about this in particular right now because I am finishing up a series that I'll be releasing pretty soon about Aristotle's poetics, which is a really great, I would say, underrated text, well worth reading if you're interested in Aristotle's philosophy, not just for literary criticism or his remarks on tragedy, but also for thinking about ethics and a bunch of other topics.Now, coming back to what I was saying originally, so why am I shooting videos, actually a set of seven, on Aristotle's Poetics? Well, because earlier on, I want to say last year, I shot a whole series on Aristotle's Poetics, but only covered the portions of the text that my students enrolled in an Introduction to Humanities class actually wrote. at the time.One of the required texts for that class, which I teach every so often, is Sophocles' play Antigone, which is really a great, great play. And Aristotle is one of the classic theorists who talks about the nature of tragedy. We talk about him in class. I have them read the Poetics, or at least selections of it that are relevant to Sophocles' tragedy. And so I thought it might be a nice resource for my students to have me going over and delving into all of the discussions that bear directly on tragedy. But what we find, if you look at Aristotle's Poetics, that is, I think, what most people go to it to read about. But he's also going to talk about the nature of mimesis and that is imitation, which is going to lead into all the different art forms that we engage in, including the dramatic arts, but other types of poetry as well. He's going to talk a good bit about epic poetry, particularly that of Homer. He'll tell you a little bit about comedy. Unfortunately, as many of you know, we have lost the second book of it in which he is reputed to have talked about comedy at great length.But he also tells us about a number of other interesting things,some of which connect up with matters that are discussed elsewhere, like the nature of diction or lexis or style in the rhetoric. Also, the importance of emotions, another topic discussed in both the rhetoric and the two Ethics, and I would say even in the Politics, the nature of character and choices and motivations, very much a matter of the Ethics but also found in the Rhetoric, and then metaphor.So I wanted to go back and finish up the series so I could say, here you go. If you want to study this text, you can check out all of these videos. Later on, I'll convert them into podcast episodes. And now you've got these resources. And then I could actually take them and turn them into an online course that people could use for their own edification and self-directed education as well. And as it turns out, there are a lot of texts where I've done precisely this over the years. I would start creating content to cover what I thought was the most productive pressing needs.So let's talk about this stuff and then we'll come back to it later on sometime in the future. Things I would almost like triage, figuring out what the most immediate needs of my students were and dealing with those by producing content on that. And then down the line, I think to myself, well, wouldn't it be nice to have the completed set?So I've done this with a number of other works. You know, I've shot videos on the entirety of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. At one point, there were videos on various Platonic dialogues where I shot some of them first and then shot the rest of them first. Later, there's a number of Stoic texts where I've produced content on some of the text, but not the entirety of it and need to go back and produce more. And, you know, this goes on and on and on.So I've got plans down the line to shoot some content on John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, which I've got quite a few videos on, but not covering all of the text. Or St. Augustine's Confessions. Again, similar thing. I produced a number of videos on it, but not all of them that I should have or would like to have. Friedrich Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals is another example. And so I'll probably be doing that.You know, I said for the next year, but I'll probably be doing that if we're honest about it for at least a couple of years to come, because I think it's important to complete these matters. Now, why is that the case? Well, is it just that we have a tendency to like things brought to their fruition, to be finished, we could say?And, you know, this goes back to Aristotle and ancient Greek. They have this term telos that you've probably heard of, which we translate as end or goal, and that gets turned into a all sorts of other constructions a verb that is used for completing but also translated as perfecting bringing to fruition adjectives that are derived from that verb all of which trace back to this original conception of like reaching the end reaching the goal bringing things to the point where you can say “ah, that's it, I have actually done enough.”And I will point out this, when you see that term translated as perfection, I think that in our modern mindset and language, we often interpret that in too maximal of a way. We think that something is perfect if every single thing has been totally fixed, there are no mistakes, nothing possibly wrong or unfinished with it.And that's not exactly what they meant at the time in using this term. They were not perfectionists, so to speak. But they thought that it was important to work things through, to get them to a point where you can stand back and say, “yeah, that's good. That is good enough.”And you might think about it in terms of like writing a book. So I've got some experience with that. And I can tell you that whether it's writing a short thing like a blog post or a newspaper article or writing something longer and more involved and rigorous like an academic article or actually writing an entire book, there are always going to be flaws. There are always going to be some mistakes. There are always going to be errors that you hope somebody would have caught but somehow sneak through. And it doesn't mean that the work isn't finished. or that it hasn't been brought to its fruition, or that in an older sense of it, it hasn't been perfected. It's just not perfect in its entirety.And now shifting back to Aristotle's Poetics as I wrap this up, one of the things that I'll probably talk about a bit more later on that I think is really interesting about this work, particularly as I'm rereading it and thinking about it more, is that it has been interpreted by people in the past, particularly in the 17th century, when Aristotle's Poetics was, you might say, interpreted in a very rigid way by playwrights and critics and philosophers, particularly in France, as if he was providing us with not a set of guidelines, but a set of strict rules for how tragedies have to be written.And now, if you know anything about that time period, you know that it was a time of great, fruitful, French playwriting, the 17th and 18th centuries, I think you can say. And you can take Aristotle's remarks about what makes for a good tragedy and what makes tragedy particularly effective as a kind of canon, a kind of set of guidelines for how you ought to carry out this art form that we call tragedy.That's certainly an option you can do it that way but you don't have to and it kind of goes against Aristotle's own way of looking at things he clearly thinks that tragedy has developed and improved and figured things out kind of by experimentation or trial and error in which the audience is involved and critics are involved.And critics and audience are not something radically distinct from each other. Krites means judge and the audience does judge things. And Aristotle's trying to figure out what makes some tragedies really work well and what makes some not so good. Also epics and comedies and other poetic forms as well. And so when he's saying that, you know, this is the way a tragedy ought to go.He's not laying down some rule for all time that applies to every single thing that you want to call tragedy. He's saying this is actually what works well. This is what gets you closer to the end, to the fruition. And so we got an interesting little dovetailing here of what it is that Aristotle's doing in this work and what it is that I'm trying to do with my own thinking, research, video production, having to do with series that I started at one point and then didn't get all the way through as I was trying to provide helpful commentary on philosophical or other works.So that's a good place, now that we've brought these together, to wrap up these reflections, and I'll probably talk a little bit more about this notion of Aristotle as a rigid rulemaker versus the Aristotle that I see revealed in this text, and how you can, as you're reading the text, get in touch with one of them, namely the author, one who's a bit more flexible and realistic, and divest yourself of an imaginary Aristotle conjured up by all of these interpreters who made him into a rather doctrinaire disciplinarian of drama. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

A friend of mine recently asked me to provide him with some information about myself. And the reason is because he's doing something quite nice and it might say even a little overdue for me. So nice on his part, overdue on my part, not on his. And that is to create a Wikipedia entry page about me as a person, as I suppose a public-facing philosopher, somebody whose work gets used and referenced by a number of different people.So today I have been compiling something that could be used as raw material for a Wikipedia entry. And he asked me for just a blurb and a few things, but I thought, well, why not take the sorts of things that I typically see with authors or musicians or other people that I am interested in on Wikipedia, and provide that sort of information and categories?And it's been an interesting exercise to do for a number of reasons. And one of them is that it winds up being a lot of work to go back and think about all of these different matters that people might want to know about and to put them into a document. I think that that to most people who know anything about me - and it's the reason why on occasion I'll have people come up to me and start talking to me because they recognize me - it's because of my YouTube channel. That is I would expect about 85 percent (and I'm just pulling this number out of the air) of the people who know me and then come up and interact with me, that's where they're getting it from originally.I mean, I do also have a couple podcasts, including this podcast. I have been writing public-facing philosophy in blogs and podcasts. Participating in interviews on podcasts and shows. And I have a radio show that I co-host with a friend of mine for quite some time. So it's not as if it's only the YouTube channel. But I think that is probably where most people know me from. That's my claim to fame if I have any such thing.And it's interesting, so this is a little bit of a digression, but I've had much more massive of an impact with the public-facing philosophy, particularly the YouTube videos than I am likely to ever have with the one academic book and dozens of articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries that I've written through the years,really going back more than 20 years now at this point, more than 25 if I'm actually thinking all the way back to my first article that ever came out. I've had much more impact with those sorts of media than I have with traditional academic publishing.And that's most likely, unless I really shift gears and spend a lot more time on academic publishing, that's what I'm going to be known for, I suppose, through the rest of my lifetime. And if I'm remembered beyond that, other than on personal notes, it'll be for those sorts of reasons.So today I've been engaging in a process of trying to remember, of arranging and organizing, thinking about what I would want to see if somebody were to actually produce a Wikipedia entry about me. What sorts of categories belong in there? What parts of my history or personal life do I want narrated, put out there for people to know about?And because it's Wikipedia, there's one other key thing in mind.Anything that goes in there, as far as I understand it, needs to be able to be documented in one way or another. And fortunately, when it comes to video work or blogging or stuff like that, the evidence is already out there for people to find.And it's kind of a good practice to engage in every once in a while to think back and consider your own biography, whether it's personal or professional, academic or public facing, whatever it's going to be. It doesn't hurt every once in a while to think about how you could explain what it is that you do, and what you've done, to somebody who doesn't know anything about you.What would you put out there first? What would you prioritize? What would you leave in? And what would you leave out?What would you describe in detail? And what would you just talk about in outline or perhaps even gloss over? And so this is where I think that it might be useful, not just for me, to engage in this sort of thing. But you, the listener, you could think about if you were put on the spot, if somebody said, hey, I want to write a Wikipedia entry about you, or I want to write a blog post about this aspect of your life or that aspect of your life. Or if you had a biographer that said, I would like to write an article or a book about your life, because I think that you're interesting, what would you actually tell them? Is it only the stuff that you're currently focused on interested in? Well our lives reach back decades and decades, and we've often forgotten a number of the things that used to be quite important for us and may have shaped us and created the opportunities that we are currently exploring, perhaps even enjoying in the present, but we left the other stuff behind.So, for example, in my case, I had to think about, well, when did I actually get started giving lectures to the non-academic general public? And the answer to that was way back in the early 2000s, 2000s when I started getting invited by various places to come in and give talks. And I don't think I was particularly good at it at that point in time. Or where did you get your interests from? Where did those arise from? I had to think about the fact that, and I think many of you know this, I never intended to become a college professor. That was just not on the horizon for me when I was in high school or even in college. It was only later on when I decided to go to graduate school that that became a viable option for me to even envision. When I was in high school I didn't even plan to go to college. I just thought i was going to go into the military and perhaps be a lifer, or even - and this shows you just how much our mindsets can change over time - perhaps a mercenary. A bit of a pipe dream that, of course, didn't come to pass. So I think it can be a useful exercise, and it may be one that a person person would actually want to do through writing or perhaps other alternative forms of putting something down. It could be talking to yourself with a recording, or it could be video recording yourself, but something that's more than just going off and thinking by yourself, delving into yourmemories and reflecting in your solitude.I think it would be useful for all of us every once in a while to do this, maybe not with the entirety of our life, but to ask this question, how did I get here? What was I doing today? Earlier on? Five years ago? 10 years ago? 20 years ago? That got me to this place where I currently am, that got me to the person that I currently exist as.And so this could be an interesting kind of exercise to carry out, you know. I'm telling you about this as the year is coming to a close, and we'll soon be talking about new years and what lies ahead of us. But perhaps we want to also from time to time take that time to look behind us and find the self who no longer exists as such, except in our own memories or the apparatus by which we have preserved those.And in some respects I may be better off than most other people because as an academic I have a curriculum vitae which I've had to keep current over the years. And I can go back to earlier ones and see the things that I thought were important back then, and perhaps have left off of more recent versions. I also have a lot of writings that I've done, and podcast episodes and videos, and things like that. But we could think about all sorts of other ways and in which we preserve stuff that we used to have, opening up a book and seeing what you underlined or what notes you took. Going into the garage or the attic or the basement and seeing what you've put in boxes from the last time that you moved, or when you needed to store things, and thinking about what those things are and why you held on to them and why they could be important to you.So I don't have any really grand philosophical reflections, but I was struck by this process of writing. And I thought it could be interesting, perhaps even useful, to reflect on it a little bit here in ways that perhaps you could apply within the scope of your own life, however long it has been up till this point. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

I expect that many of you are familiar with the series that I have been writing on Stoicism and grief, which is a topic that I've been thinking about for quite some time, and I had the opportunity to present some of my thoughts, largely drawn from the classic Stoic authors, about how we can look at the emotion of grief and and the activities of grieving back when I went to stoic camp and was an invited speaker there. And subsequently, I've given a few talks, and I've been writing a series of posts, trying to expand on that.It gives me the opportunity to go back to the texts and dig in a bit deeper. I have the freedom to write as much as I'd like since I'm not writing for a press. There's no editor looking over my shoulder who has a certain word count in mind. And I get to go back to these great thinkers, particularly Cicero, who has a lot to say about it, Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, among others.At the stage that I am currently at in the series, I am looking in particular at one work by Cicero, which is called The Tusculan Disputations. It's a really excellent, long, dense work that is not only engages Stoic philosophy, but a number of other philosophical schools of antiquity as well, including the Platonists, the Aristotelians, the Epicureans, also some of the schools that we consider to be kind of minor, like the Cynics and the Cyrenaics. He also talks about the Skeptics, and he brings up examples from a number of other, we could call them one-off or standalone philosophers who are not part of a major school or tradition.And he also will bring up quite a few poets, including playwrights and people that we would nowadays actually call poets who had a philosophical experience. And he's interested in examining their points of view and sifting out what he thinks would be most valuable.I've talked elsewhere about Ciceronian eclecticism, which is the stance of teaching, taking in what is valuable from a variety of philosophical perspectives, methods, traditions, schools, and trying to assimilate or integrate what they have to provide into a coherent position of one's own. And I think that arguably is what Cicero is doing in that work among others. And I'm particularly drawn to that as well, so I like going along for the ride with Cicero. And that's exactly what he's doing in Book 3, particularly when it comes to the issue of consolation.So consolation or comforting is what you do when somebody has experienced a loss. And it can be as simple as going to the funeral and going up to them while they're in the receiving line and you've dressed in some somber clothing. You go up and say, I'm so sorry for your loss. If there's anything that I can do, let me know. And you know, that probably doesn't have a huge effect on their mood, but it shows that you care, and that by itself can be something quite important.I'll mention, as somebody who has been in those receiving lines at funerals quite a lot, including for my mother and my grandparents and a that sometimes the things that people have to say are not particularly helpful. It's much more about them getting to say something that they think is helpful for you but isn't, or is really there to help them out in one way or another. And so not every attempt at consolation, however well-intentioned, it may be, or at least is imagined to be, is going to be on point.But Cicero thinks that philosophers can actually give us some helpful advice about how we ought to console other people. And he's going to look at a number of different positions, including those of the Epicureans and the Cyrenaics, several different Stoic positions, the Peripatetics or Aristotelians, among others. And he's going to give you a critical assessment of what's right about those and what is probably off base about those.Human nature and even human interactions in society have not changed so radically since Cicero's time that these have become useless, although we can certainly say that we've learned some additional lessons. And there are other philosophical and perhaps religious perspectives or even literary perspectives that could be useful that, of course, Cicero didn't have the opportunity to bring in. But I think that the Tusculan Disputations is really quite helpful when it comes to this.And there's two things that I want to say to sort of bring this to a close. And the first is that when you look at a work like the Tusculan Disputations, You could say that it is existentialist in a very, very broad sense. Obviously, Cicero is writing a long, long time before existentialism as a philosophical movement is arising in the 19th and 20th centuries. But we often talk about proto-existentialists, and people will often include figures such as Augustine of Hippo, or Blaise Pascal, or Marcus Aurelius, or even Socrates among them.I think you could make a good argument that Cicero is very, very interested in and concerned with existential matters, the things that are characteristic of existential philosophy. He's interested in how philosophy interpenetrates our lives that we're actually living. He thinks that we don't have to go to Athens in order to philosophize. We can engage in it and we should engage in it wherever we happen to be within the world and he thinks that it can in fact apply to the day-to-day matters of our lives. As a matter of fact Cicero is somebody who it's not as if he disrespects theoretical philosophy or speculative philosophy he thinks that that's important. But he always wants to bring it back to the practical and to real life, we could say, and show how philosophy can helpfully inform that.The other point that I want to linger on a bit is that Cicero is not just sitting back and saying: ‘hey, when you run into grief, I'm going to tell you how to get out of it. I'm the sage on the stage. I'm the super smart guy who has all the answers.” He is writing from a position of common experience, and we could even say common suffering.Cicero himself wrote a book that we no longer possess called the Consolatio, or Consolation. And why did he write it? Well, somebody very important, very close to him, very beloved by him, died. His daughter, Tulia, who appears to have been a really incredible person and somebody who he could see as sort of a peer intellectually and practically. And she dies before him. As a matter of fact, the wife, who's not her mother, who he's married to at the time, in Cicero's view, doesn't sufficiently grieve for Tullia. She might have been a little bit jealous of the affection that Cicero had for his daughter, and he will divorce her afterwards as a result.But coming back to Cicero himself, he feels the loss very deeply, and he goes looking for helpful philosophical works, which unfortunately no longer exist, but we know about through references, for example, Crantor the Platonist's work on grief. And Cicero finds them lacking so he decides to write a work himself now why is this in a way existentialist because he's not just telling other people how they ought to deal with this emotion this experience that he himself has gone through but now is above it all.Instead, he is seeking for words of advice that he can give himself in a kind of inner dialogue, an interior exhortation that can help him navigate these difficult waters of grief and grieving. And in the process like so many other people who do similar projects he writes something that could be useful for others, indeed likely was quite useful for othersAgain we've lost the work, the Consolatio, but we do possess the Tusculan Disputations. And I would say, as somebody who deals with grief himself, that reading through the Tusculan Disputations, and thinking about some of the things that Cicero tells us that other philosophers or other schools have had to say and have suggested as practices or insights bearing upon grief, that we can take that and apply it to our own lives very productively and perhaps lessen our own emotion of grief or restrain it, rein it in, not to banish it entirely.I'd actually don't agree with him on the desirability of that myself, but to keep it within certain reasonable bounds that might make our grief something more reflective of not just our moral values, but the relationship that we have to the person who we have lost and whose loss we are feeling when we grieve.So I think Cicero provides us with a really interesting example that we might follow or at least sit back and admire, when it comes to this particular work and his larger overall project ,and the way that he lived a philosophical life as we see it playing out in particular, at least for me today, in book three of that work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

I plan for this to be the last post (at least for a while) discussing my reflections about various matter stemming from our big move earlier this Fall, during which we left behind our two-story loft apartment in the Westown neighborhood of Milwaukee, and moved into a smaller living space in the Third Ward, and took up an office space in the Walkers Point neighborhood. That had the interesting and unintended effect of producing a new kind of work/life balance that I haven’t had in my life for quite a while.In this episode, I reflect on why work/life balance is important for a good life, and I go into the particulars of how I ended up with it. It is working out well for me, though it certainly still needs some fine-tuning. In some ways, I’m finding myself less productive, but in others more productive, and I explain why and how that is. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

Following up on my previous episode discussing the big move that we recently made to a new living space and a new office space, splitting functions we previously did in our loft apartment in the downtown of Milwaukee, I gave some thought to a problem related to and revealed by the move that my wife and I have given a good bit of thought to.We have moved several times now. When you move, you pack stuff up. For us, that generally means putting stuff either into plastic storage tubs or (what I prefer) into bankers boxes. That’s not a problem at all. It’s nice to have the things one is moving organized like that.The problem that was driven home to me by our recent move was that after the move 9 years ago, quite a few of those boxes and storage tubs that came from our previous home in Kingston, NY went into our walk-in storage closet, and then, in that entire 9 years, they never got unpacked. In fact, we recently moved each of those without unpacking them, nearly all of them going into a third destination for our move, a sizable storage locker. And there they sit right now, where they will sit, until we decide to do something different and finally unpack and go through all of that stuff.I realized that I’ve been doing that in a more specific way going back not just to the last two moves, but for decades, all the way back to graduate school. In may case, it is notebooks and photocopied articles that I have saved, stored, and brought from place to place, reluctant to let them go, just in case down the line they might prove useful, important, insightful, even necessary for my work down the line.It’s worth thinking about the motivation(s) that leads otherwise reasonable people to hold onto things they’ve packed, never getting around to unpacking them, sorting through them, and that’s what I reflect upon a bit in this podcast episode. There’s a good bit more to think through and say, but this is where I’ll leave off in these reflections for the moment. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

There’s a good reason why I’ve been a bit radio-silent on the podcast front as of late. Earlier this month, we finished a big move from our old apartment to a new living space and a new office. Previously, we had been both living and working in the same place, and now they are separated by about 4/10 of a mile (and funny enough, in two different zip codes). Since I recorded and edited this new Mind & Desire podcast episode from the new office, that got me ruminating a bit about offices I’ve worked from before and thinking about how much I’m enjoying this new office we’ve moved into.What’s so great about this new office, you might ask? It’s been a long time since I’ve had my own office space, one I could really settle into, bring our shelves and books in, work in without interruption, at whatever hours I’d like to. The last time I had anything like that was 13 years ago, when I was an assistant professor of philosophy at Fayetteville State University. In the meantime, I’ve shared adjunct offices at Marist College, Marquette University, and Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Not quite the same as having your own place to work in.This new space has a lot of advantages. It’s in a commercial building where a lot of the firms are innovators in the Milwaukee area, and it’s quite a aesthetically pleasuing building set just a little distance from both of the major rivers (Menominee and Milwaukee) that feed into the city, eventually merging and emptying into Lake Michigan. Not only do we have our office there on the fifth floor, but as tenants, we also have access to an auditorium and conference room, so we will likely be able to start holding events there down the line.It’s quite interesting to notice just how good it feels to have this new space to work in. I suppose I’d been going without, or making do, for so long that I’d forgotten what it was like. I expect that now that I’m settled in, I’ll be able to get a lot more done, and get it done more consistently, than I was able to do before. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

There is a passage in the first section of David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that, every time I read the work, makes me pause and reflect. It has to do with assessments of which past thinkers or writers are read in the present and will be read in the future. Some of Hume’s choices and predictions strike us in the present as rather quaint. But perhaps there’s a lesson for us there.Here’s what he says:The fame of Cicero flourishes at present; but that of Aristotle is utterly decayed. La Bruyere passes the seas, and still maintains his reputation: But the glory of Malebranche is confined to his own nation, and to his own age. And Addison, perhaps, will be read with pleasure, when Locke shall be entirely forgottenAs I point out, not even 100 years later, at least in the field of philosophy, the positions of Cicero and Aristotle will be reversed. I’ve never read Bruyere or Addison, but I’ve read Malebranche, and you really can’t avoid Locke if you aim to have a decent philosophical education, at least one cognizant of the discipline’s history!So there’s a lot to think about that we can apply to our own present situation. Who will be the authors considered interesting and worth reading 100 years from now? You can guarantee that most of the people considered absolutely important right now won’t stand the test of time.A little bonus in this episode: I tell the story of one of my professors advising me against selecting Derrida as the thinker I would write my dissertation upon, and the reasoning he set out for his advice. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

How much time do you need to give to a philosophical text in order to adequately understand it? That is a question I get asked, both in general and with respect to specific texts and authors, very often. There isn’t any good precise answer to a question like that. It depends on so many different factors. How complex and difficult is the text or the thought of that author? How well-equipped is the reader for grappling with philosophical texts? Are they already familiar with the author, or are they coming to the text “cold” as it were? How deep or extensive of an understanding are you hoping to develop?What I can say, as a rough and ready rule of thumb, though is that texts require what they require. And often our initial ideas about that amount can be way off base. We have to find this out through experience. Or rather, experiences, since no one single experience of reading will be enough to conclusively tell us that we’ve understood matters well enough (except with authors who have little to offer us).How long should it take you to read and thoroughly understand a massively important and influential work like Rene Descartes’ Meditations On First Philosophy? Is giving each of the meditations one quick read enough? Some of my students mistakenly assume that is the case, and then find out they were in error when it comes time to explaining what is going on in the text, even at a beginner level.Descartes himself suggests by the format of the Meditations that each of them should be read and thought about for a day, so that working through the six meditations would then take a little less than a week. But interestingly, in one of this responses to objections, he tells his interlocutor that each of the short meditations really ought to require a month, or at a minimum a week.That’s the author himself writing to people who have a solid education in philosophy, so presumably he would have a good idea about what his own work requires! That might be a useful caution to us, not to try to cut corners or “optimize'“ our reading, speeding through philosophical texts quicker than we ought to. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

I’m currently teaching an online class on Rene Descartes’ Meditations, as well as on the Objections other philosophers and theologians provided about his work, and Descartes’ own replies to those objections. One of the points I emphasize to my students is that this willingness to see our feedback from other thinkers is something important not just for Descartes himself but for doing philosophy well in general.Descartes himself tells us a good bit about this in his Preface to the Reader of the Meditations. This doesn’t mean that he wants to considers every single objection coming from anyone whosoever. It is critical that would-be critics have actually read, understood, and thought about a work before they are in any way equipped to say anything intelligent about it. But there are intellectually well-developed critics out there, and Descartes thinks it essential to engage with them.As I note, there is an interesting similarity between what Descartes does in publishing his Meditations with the much longer Objections and Replies added to it, and what Anselm of Canterbury did centuries earlier with one of his major works, the Proslogion. Another monk, Gaunillo wrote a set of objections on behalf of the Biblical fool mentioned in chapters 2-4 of the Proslogion, and Anselm himself wrote a response. Like Descartes, he required that the work, in its official publication, have Gaunillo’s criticisms and his own response included.Thinking about these works, and these editorial decision by their authors provides us with a valuable opportunity to think about what it takes to do philosophy well as a practice. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

It can be easy to get mistaken impressions or even erroneous entire accounts about what it is that a philosopher actually says in their writings, what their position on key topics are, what they thought and stood for.A prime example of that, one that has been on my mind, is Rene Descartes. He is often referenced as a person who buys into what we call mind-body dualism, which is indeed part of his philosophical perspective. But is the idea that the mind and the body are entirely distinct substances, and that we are our minds and not our bodies, the sum of his views on matters? Not if we read attentivelyWhen we read through the whole of his Meditations, all the way to the end, to the sixth meditation, we discover that the analogy of the mind and body being like a person in a vehicle (in this case a pilot or sailor in a ship) doesn’t actually express his point of view. We as minds are, in his view, much more closely connected (even mixed up) with our bodies than a sailor is with a ship, he says, and this connection ends up being quite important throughout that meditation.In fact, he goes so far as to call the interconnection of mind and body a “unity”. This isn’t something he explains entirely to his own satisfaction in the meditations, and perhaps not even later on his his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth or the late work he writes, spurred by her questions and challenges, The Passions of the Soul. But that’s all right. It’s a tricky and complex philosophical problem, after all.The ultimate point is - using Descartes’ views and writings as an example - that we really do need to go to the primary texts themselves, and not just read bits of them, but the whole. Certainly something doable in the case of a book as short as the Meditations on First Philosophy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

I’m currently teaching on 8-week online course on Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, so his philosophy is often on my mind. This goes especially for some of the key passages of the work that created an impression upon me during one reading or another.Among them is his answer to a question raised in the second Meditation. He has determined that, even if there is an evil demon who turns all of his efforts to deceiving Descartes, he must exist if he is being deceived. And then the question naturally arises: “all right, then what am I?” And Descartes has a short answer to that. “I’m a thinking thing.” But what is that?That’s a question that takes us deeper. A question answering which provides us with a much more substantive understanding of what it is that we are, at least as thinking beings. Descartes’ own answer lists off a number of different kinds of thinking, distinct types of mental activities. That is what he is, and that - at least to the extent that Descartes is correct - is what we ourselves are as well.So, here’s a short episode setting out the passages where Descartes discusses these matters, and giving you a few of my own reflections on them as well! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

Plato’s Crito is a short and dramatic dialogue. It starts out with just two interlocutors, Socrates and the Crito who the dialogue is named after. Socrates’ execution had been postponed due to a religious ritual, but now is slated to happen, and Crito has bribed the guards in preparation for spiriting Socrates away to a different Greek city. And then Socrates says: let’s think this through. . . .In the process of addressing Crito’s arguments in favor of leaving, Socrates will do something rather unexpected. He introduces a new interlocutor, the Laws of Athens, and stages an imaginary dialogue in which those Laws accuse Socrates of injustice if he should violate them, and flee Athens. Is this something that we could do with our own political communities’ laws in this late modern age? Would that make sense for us? What would it mean to personify and give voice, even intellect and argument to, whatever moral norms that might be analogous to these Laws? Those are just a few of the issues raised in this episode This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

While I was out at Wyoming Stoic Camp last month, in the course of one of our daily group activities, a younger participant expressed a worry that many of my academic students come in to classes with. “Aren’t we judging?” he asked. Now why is that a problem?Somewhere this college student had gotten not just introduced, but likely inundated with a counterproductive and oversimplistic moral norm all too common in our society. He had been told that it’s bad or wrong to judge other people. I tell my students in my classes, particularly ethics classes, that they ought to judge. The issue isn’t whether or not you judge, or whether it is bad to engage in judgements, but the quality and the accuracy of the judgements they make.Matters get even more complicated when it is Stoicism that we are thinking about and trying to apply to our lives, because don’t the Stoic caution us against making judgements? Well. . . . it’s not quite that simple, and in this episode, I explain why that is the case.I hope you enjoy listening to this little story and short reflections. Perhaps they might prove useful to you or those you care about! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

I’ll be resuming examination of some of the key ideas in Plato’s dialogue the Crito here in the Mind and Desire podcast down the line. This coming week, however, I will be somewhere else, specifically Wyoming, where I am one of the guest speakers at the Wyoming Stoic Camp.l So I thought I’d take a little break and tell you a bit about what I expect I’ll be doing, the travel I’ll be undertaking there and back, and what I’m looking forward to.So that’s the topic for the episode this time around. Less philosophical depth perhaps and more a little slice out of a reasonably philosophically-oriented life. I hope you find it interesting, and I’ll have a lot more to say about my experiences and observations once I’ve actually had the opportunity to have them! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

One of the aspects of Platonic dialogues (which you might have noticed already, or this may be a bit new to you), one that I find very rewarding and even fascinating is the fact that there is so much being said. I won't even say between the lines, because it's right there in the lines, but typically the ones that we're not paying adequate attention to, because we think that they're just sort of there to advance the key arguments that we're interested in. And the short dialogue, the Crito, is a prime example of this. I would say, just based on my own experience, that there's two main aspects of the work that most first-time, even second-time readers are going to focus on almost exclusively.One of these, of course, is the interesting feature of the laws of Athens themselves coming in as characters and making accusations and arguments with Socrates. Now, how could you not be struck by that? It's a really cool idea, isn't it? And it kind of prefigures social contract theory, so people interested in political philosophy, focus in on that.And then we have the entire question of whether Socrates should take the invitation that is being urged upon him by his friend Crito to leave Athens without permission, avoid his execution, and go somewhere else where he can live out a few more years being welcomed and celebrated.There is more to this dialogue than that though. And so I'm gonna point out several interconnected features to you that you might've missed, or this might just be review for you, but it's always worth going back over these.And I think that these are not just about this Platonic dialogue, but we can ask whether these should be applied within the scope of our own lives.So the first one, Socrates tells Crito, I appreciate your warm feelings. That is, assuming that they have some justification. If not, the stronger they are, the harder they will be to deal with So let's consider whether we ought to follow your advice or not. You know, this is not a new idea of mine. It has always been my nature never to accept advice from any of my friends unless reflection shows it is the best course that reason offers. I cannot abandon the principles which I used to hold in the past simply because this accident has happened to me. They seem to me to be much as they were, and I respect and regard the same principles now as before. So unless we can find better principles on this occasion, you can be quite sure that I shall not agree with you. Not even if the power of the people conjures up fresh hordes of bogeys to terrify our childish minds by subjecting us to chains and executions and confiscations of our property.So what's going on in that passage? Notice there's a few points that he's making.He tells us, tells Crito, that I've got a way of doing things that I have been carrying out consistently. And I can't just change that, abandon my principles, because I'm in a new situation, a scary situation perhaps. I'm going to get executed. I need to stick to them. Unless somebody can convince me of a better way of looking at things. So two different things going on there that mutually reinforce each other.What does he say in the very next paragraph? He says, was it always right to argue that some opinion should be taken seriously but not others? Or was it always wrong? Perhaps it was right before the question of my death arose, but now we can see clearly it was a mistaken persistence in a point of view, which was really irresponsible nonsense.So there's a couple different possibilities there. Maybe they were always right about that and they should stick with it. Or maybe they were always wrong Or maybe it's something that changes, depending on the situation that you're in. Or maybe it was wrong, but they couldn't see that it was wrong until Socrates was in this deadly situation, and now he can see that it was the wrong point of view.So he tells Crito: I should very much like to inquire into this problem with your help and see whether the argument will appear in any different light to me now that I'm in this position or whether it will remain the same and whether we shall dismiss it or accept it. So they're going to reason together. They're going to think this through.Socrates may be bringing a little bit more to the table than Crito does, or frankly, perhaps a lot more to the table.And here we get to the second key idea. He says that serious thinkers I believe have always held some such view as the one which I mentioned just now, that some of the opinions people entertain should be respected, others should not. And he asks Crito don't you think this is a sound principle, and he says listen you're not going to be executed tomorrow - I mean you could die, but you're probably not going to, so you don't have to worry about that sort of thing, do you think that this is still a sound principle that one should not regard all the opinions people hold, but only some and not others? And Crito says, yeah, that's right. I agree with that.So this leads us then to the third key idea. Whose opinions are good and whose opinions are bad? And Socrates is going to use a couple different terms, a couple different comparisons.He's going to start out by saying, the opinions of the wise are good and the opinions of the foolish are bad. And Crito says, yes, that's quite right. And a little bit later, this is going to be the opinions of the one, the expert, and the opinions of the many, the multitude, the people.Some people actually know what they're talking about. Other people talk more or less at random and can't provide you with good advice. They've got mistaken understandings, mixed up priorities. And if you listen to them, you're probably going to go wrong and do some damage.And Socrates will bring up a couple different examples. One of them is athletic training. Should you listen to everybody? Should you take advice from any random person? Possibly the guy next to you using the weights? No, you should go to somebody who actually knows what they're doing, the trainer. Likewise, medical matters. Well, you could consult your cousin who thinks they know something about diet and viruses or medicine. You could just go to a doctor who actually has studied the matter.And Socrates says we ought to regulate our actions and exercise and eating and drinking by the judgment of an instructor, not by the opinions of the rest of the public in the case of the trainer. Same thing with the doctor. And if you don't do that you're going to screw yourself up we might think about should you trust a financial planner or should you just listen to your cousin who suggests that bitcoin is the best thing you ought to be doing right about nowAnd this is going to bring us to the fourth really important point. This is the crux of it all. If we want our lives, our souls to be good, who should we be listening to? Socrates says, tell me, Crito, we don't want to go through all the examples one by one. Does this apply as a general rule and above all to the sort of actions we're trying to decide about?And notice he's going to talk about three different opposed paths. pairs of types of actions, just and unjust, honorable and dishonorable, good and bad.Ought we to be guided and intimidated by the opinion of the many or by that of the one, assuming there is someone with expert knowledge? Is it true we ought to respect and fear this person more than all the rest put together and that if we do not follow his guidance, we will spoil and mutilate that part of ourselves which, as we used to say, is improved by right conduct and destroyed by wrong? Or is all of this nonsense?And Crito says, no, I think it is true Socrates. Now these are things that Crito and Socrates do agree upon. Something that they have bought into before and they're not going to change. Crito, without changing these things, is not going to succeed in getting Socrates to leave with him breaking the laws of the city of Athens.Now notice three really important things. The first is that we're talking about an entire range of what we can call moral values. So we have the just and the unjust or the right and the wrong. We have the good and the bad in some other senses as well.And then we have what's translated here as the honorable and dishonorable, but which we could also translate as beautiful and ugly, or fair and foul. They correspond to the Greek term kalon and aiskhron, which are difficult to translate, not because there isn't a right word for it, but because there's too many potential right words for translating them, and we have to decide between them.So these are the sorts of things that some kind of expert,somebody who possesses that skill or knowledge, somebody who's wise in that way, understands better than most other people. And notice that Socrates has framed this more or less as a hypothesis. If there is such a person, then we should listen to them, not to the many.Socrates himself doesn't claim to be that person, although perhaps he is. Perhaps he does have that knowledge and acquired it from somebody else or worked it out himself, and that's what his students are carrying forward in the many traditions that come from Socrates' own teaching and example.So what can we take from this for our own lives? We don't have to say that we know everything. Socrates himself isn't asserting anything like that.But we can say if we've found some principles, some ideas that seem to be working pretty well, even if other people don't respect them or agree with them, we should stick with them until we are convinced that there is actually something better out there.And we shouldn't listen to the voice of the many telling us that what we're doing isn't actually right, or cool, or popular, or whatever it is that we're going to worry about.And we've seen that Plato demarcates what we should really be concerned about. What we need to find experts in, these moral values, how to distinguish them, how to tell them apart, how to properly apply these terms and these concepts, how to decide what actually is good and what actually is bad, and thereby to make good decisions for ourselves that will improve us, and not worsen us or ultimately destroy us.Notice that Crito has agreed to all of this along the way, that Socrates himself is convinced of it, that presumably Plato the author also believes this, and that as we read along with this, we most likely agree with all of these points as well, because we're so eager to see where this dialogue is going.We should think about whether we actually do believe these things, whether we do agree with Socrates and Crito - and Plato - on these very important matters for how philosophy intersects with our practical life. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

One common tool that many of us in the field of philosophy make a lot of use out of, sometimes not acknowledging that we're doing so, is what you could call analogy or metaphor, or to use a term that I particularly like for it, similitude, which comes from the Latin simulitudo, meaning something like “likeness” or “likening,” showing how things are connected with each other, how they resemble each other. And in just a bit, I'm going to share with you one that I derived about 20 or so years ago.It occurred to me a number of times while I was engaging not in philosophy, but taking a break in the day from doing philosophy and engaging in a different kind of activity, something that I had been doing since I was a little kid.Now, I do have to make a bit of a proviso before we jump in and start looking at this analogy or similitude. You can only push a metaphor so far before it begins to break down. None of them are perfectly adequate. The map is not the territory or even indeed the other map necessarily if we want to mix metaphors a bit here.I also should say that I'm not trying to make a connection between this activity and anyone whosoever at any given time in any given way engaging in something called philosophy. The field, the discipline, the literature of philosophy is very vast and quite tough to adequately, universally generalize about. So take this for what it is, one way of representing what philosophical activity could be like and providing a few features that might get you thinking about how to do it well.Any analogy, metaphor, or similitude is going to have two main sides. The side of the thing that is being used to compare and what it is being compared to.The side of the thing that is being used to compare and what it is being compared to. So what we're making a comparison to is the practice of philosophy. What then is the other side? What is the activity that I'm saying is like the activity of philosophy in certain ways?I grew up in the countryside, and part of that was here in southeastern Wisconsin. Part of that was also in northwestern Indiana on my larger family's land, my mother's family, the Lemrises, who have had land in that area for quite some time. My grandfather's generation actually retired there and built houses, so I was there for much of each summer and for holidays.Growing up in the countryside, you spend a lot of time traveling around on trails and going through the woods and meadows and other sorts of terrain. And you pay attention, if you're smart, to what's around you. And so there's myriad interesting bushes and trees and other features like that, stones, leaves, flowers. Then in the summer, you have berries.And the berries that we liked the best were not wild strawberries or blueberries. They were black raspberries, which grew in significant profusion in many of the places that I have resided in. And so what is a black raspberry? If you're not familiar with it, you can easily look it up and you'll see that it's a kind of conical sort of thing with a bunch of little fruits all stuck together with seeds inside of them. It's not actually black. It's a dark purple when it's ripe, but dark enough that we could call it black. There are also red raspberries, which tend to be bigger. They're often cultivated. In fact, we had a vast hedge of them so wide that I had to cut a path down the middle when I was a kid and they grew near our garden. We would get so many that we would eat them until we got sick. There are also golden raspberries, which my great-uncle Hubert had cultivated, and those were a bit rarer. Black raspberries are one of the preeminent wild berry out there.They don't need cultivation. They will grow on their own in wasteland, under trees, all over the place. And when you find them, it's really quite a catch because if you get a cluster of them and they're fully ripe, they're sweet, they're tart. They have a complex flavor to them. They're better than the red ones. I would say even better than the softer golden ones, depending on your taste.So as a kid, we would pick these anywhere we went. We were on some sort of camping trip. We'd find some black raspberries. We were out at a park, we would go in the woods and look for black raspberries. We'd go in the woods behind our house and find black raspberries.And this continued on when I went in the army. We had them in Bavaria. I would pick them there with some of the other troops that were similarly from the Midwest. When I was in college, we had a vast woods behind the college in which there were plenty of these growing and I would go out there and harvest them.They couldn't find them in southern Illinois because it's black berries, not black raspberries that grow down there and choke them out. But, you know, it's kind of a similar process to picking those. And then when I lived in northwestern Indiana, after I finished graduate school, I would actually go out and spend a lot of time picking these. And I showed my children how to do so as well.So enough of my back history. How is picking black raspberries remotely like doing philosophy? Well, let's think about what kind of philosophy I typically engage in and maybe many of you do as well. It involves reading texts and thinking about what it is that the thinker has put in front of us. And when you read a philosophical text, the very first time that you do it, you're not going to get everything.It's not as if everything is available to you right on the surface, neatly organized so that you can harvest it and put it into your bucket and take it home for you. It's going to require a good bit more work. So here is where the analogy comes in and might be helpful.When you're picking black raspberries, or for that matter, plenty of other fruit, you will see some of them on the surface, so to speak. So they're in plain sight.You can easily walk over there and pick them and put them into whatever you're using to store them for the time being. And if that's all you want to do, that's fine. You'll leave an awful lot of the berries behind because at any given time, you're probably, from the vantage point that you're in, not going to be able to see most of them. And this is something that you learn from experience. I suppose somebody could tell you this and that would give you a bit of a leg up, but most of us learn this in a more implicit and experiential way.So if you are a picker who has done this a number of times, you know what to look for, which is that things are not going to be readily evident to you on the surface right off the bat.Instead, you've got to get in there. And this probably involves a little bit of discomfort because blackberry bushes have thorns on them. If you're not adequately prepared by wearing long sleeves or having toughened yourself up you're going to have a lot of cuts on your hands and arms and that won't feel all that good that may actually dissuade you from the activity at certain points but it never dissuaded me. And what you find, you go for those first few clusters of ripe berries that are ready for the picking. Now you're closer to the bramble, the tangle of raspberry canes, which are a profusion. And not all of the plants there are going to be blackberries. There'll be other things in there as well. And here's where it's now up to you and your eyes, your brain, and your initiative.If you really want to harvest the blackberries, not all of them, because you're probably never actually going to find all of them. You have to do some work and you have to be attentive. One of the things that you'll need to do is lift up and turn over some of the canes and the leaves that are concealing things. So as you get closer you can see more of the berries, but you've got to push, you've got to pull, you've got to do a bit of work you have to try to see through the foliage so that you can find these things And as you're doing this, here's where it gets very, very interesting. As you move from one to the next, your vantage point changes and you see not necessarily more as a totality, but you see things that you didn't see from where you were standing and looking before. You find other clusters that because of the way shadows were falling or where other leaves were, or even berries standing in front of other berries, you hadn't seen them before.And so you proceed and you move through. And over time, you get really good and efficient at finding all or at least most of the berries that are available in a certain area. And what you find is not just a little bit more than the neophyte, the person who doesn't know what they're doing. You will pick four. You will pick ten times as many berries as they do. You will come away with gallon buckets full where they only found a pint.So what does this then have to do with philosophy as an activity? Well, philosophy, reading texts, thinking about what thinkers have to put forward is exactly like this. Or if not exactly, at least quite similar. When you read a text the first time, you're not going to find most of the clusters of ideas, of arguments, of distinctions, of thoughts, of concepts available there. And you may come away having said “well you know, I went through this person's text and I got everything I could out of it.” No you didn't! You only got a little bit, and if you knew where to look, if you had practice in getting your hands in there and moving things around and putting your eyes in the right place, you would have come away with much, much more.Now, I'm not saying that to make you feel bad or knock you. As I said, this takes experience and it takes just as much experience reading through philosophical texts as it does learning how to be a good woods-person, or berry-picker, or anything along those lines.One of the key things, one of the advantages that the experienced person has over the beginner is knowing that they have to keep doing work, that there is more to see, that they have to dig in, that they have to make connections, that they have to look at things from different angles. That they have to read the same part of the text multiple times before they're going to get everything that they can out of it. And sometimes you actually have to do the equivalent of pulling up the vine so you can see what else is underneath it. Oftentimes, what I was doing as I was going out to the wind-rows and picking berries in the heat of the day was taking a break from my philosophical work as a professor. So while I went out there, as I was engaged in this activity for an hour or two of picking berries, these thoughts occurred to me.I never wrote them down. I've only mentioned them to a few people. But I thought they would be interesting, useful, perhaps even entertaining to you, my listeners. And if they are indeed helpful, I would love to hear about this.If this isn't a metaphor that you can relate to easily, you should feel free to come up with analogies or similitudes of your own that help you make progress in studying philosophy and getting out of it everything that you are capable of. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

In this fourth episode, I discuss a key insight coming from Aristotle, discussed in his Nicomachean Ethics book 6, chapter 2, where he says that “choice may be called either thought related to desire or desire related to thought.” The term we translate as choice is prohairesis, and that denotes something much more complicated than just the term "choice" would seem to signify. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

Today is the two-year anniversary of the death of an animal companion who was very close to me. She was a cat, and her name was Sassy, but like many beloved animals she wound up with a whole bunch of other names instead. But this isn't really about that! What I wanted to talk about were some reflections from Seneca, the great Stoic philosopher, about grieving and memory and friendship.And this may seem a little incongruous to some, the fact that I'm going to use a cat as a prime example here, because you might say, ah, you know, they're just dumb animals. They're not human beings. They're not persons. And that's certainly true that they're not rational agents in the same degree as we are, but I think you can say that there's a lot more going on, at least in some animal life, than many philosophers, particularly in the past, accounted for. So they're not rational in the same way that we are, but they certainly do have and act on and show emotions and they have desires and they engage us. And we can form bonds with at least certain animals.And that was the case for me and Sassy. She was the animal companion that I have been closest to in my entire life. We knew each other for 12 of her 19 and a half years and spent an awful lot of time together. She came to trust me as her whatever you want to call it companion. cat daddy, her person. And she'd even go around looking for me when I wasn't home and use a special little cry that my wife would sometimes try to record and would tell me about later on. So Sassy was very important to me and I was very important to Sassy.Her end came as it typically does with a lot of older animals with not a complete steady decline except at the end, but she would decline a bit and then she would rally, but it was never quite as strong or high the rally compared to where she'd been before. And so what we observed were several years of slowly becoming less mobile, slowly having more troubles with her body. And towards the end, the decline was actually pretty quick.I spent three days constantly with her, sleeping beside her, trying to get her to eat, helping her to use the litter box when she was still doing so. And in the end, just comforting her and holding her. So as far as animals go, she had a good death. She went out surrounded by people who loved her, comforting her, petting her, telling her that she was loved and was a good girl.And then, as is so often the case with loss, you're left behind. And what do you do? Well, Seneca wrote about something like this to Lucilius, starting by saying, “I'm sorry your friend Flaccus has passed away, but I want you not to grieve excessively.And he tells him, not grieving at all, that would be extraordinary and I'm not going to ask that of you. And then he gives him a number of bits of advice and rules and principles to use.The one that I particularly like is where he tells his friend: “Let us try to make the memory of those who are gone a pleasant one. If the thought brings torment, one does not willingly return to it, and so here we are bound to feel abiding when the names of loved ones come to mind, but even this has its own pleasure."And then he brings up his friend Attalus, who used to say about this: “the memory of friends who have died gives a pleasure like that of apples that are both tart and sweet, or like the pleasing acidity of an old wine. After a time, though, all that pains us is extinguished and only the pleasure remains.”Seneca goes on and says: “if we're to believe him, thinking of friends safe and sound is cakes and honey, remembering those who have gone is bittersweet. Yet who would deny that sharp and even bitter flavors are sometimes to our taste?”Seneca then says: “my experience is different. To me, the thought of friends who have died is sweet, even comforting. For when I had friends, I had them as one who would lose them. Now that I have lost them, I am as one who still has them.”Now, that is a very interesting idea, is it not, that you can retain your connection to the lost, the missing, or the dead friend, the one who you feel affection towards and who felt affection towards you, goodwill, perhaps even love of some sort. Seneca is one of many philosophers over the years who have talked about keeping something of the other person within yourself through the function of memory.Now the question is: How does it feel? Seneca is a good Stoic. He thinks that pain or trouble or grief is not a good thing in itself. It's actually a bad thing for us to feel, but it's also something that's quite natural for us to feel. And so he's not going to say don't try to feel or express any of it.But when we're remembering those who we have lost, once the loss is past us, we don't always have to be grieving. We don't always have to feel bad or bereft or unhappy. We don't have to feel sad about them. We have the choice about what we're going to remember. And this is the thing that I really take from this letter, and I think perhaps it could be useful for anyone else who wants to apply it.Attalus and Seneca, who is recalling him to mind and bringing him up as advice for his friend, Lachilius, are using, we could say, gustatory metaphors. They're talking about sweetness. They're talking about bitterness. They actually are also talking about acerbity or sourness and something that we can translate as roughness or austerity. And all of these are tastes that can go together.And our memories metaphorically can be expressed as having these sorts of qualities or tendencies to them. So we can have a bitter memory. We can have a sweet memory. We can have a sour memory. We can have a salty memory, although Seneca doesn't use all of those terms here. And it's up to us what we want to focus on.We can think about how unfortunate it is for us that we are deprived of the presence and the engagement with the person or the companion who we were so close to and enjoyed spending time with, or we can think about that time. We can think about that enjoyment. We can consider what it was that we loved about them.There's nothing that says we can't keep on thinking about that and remembering that and turning it over in our mind. In the case of Sassy, there are myriad things that I think about. The walks that we took outside together here in Milwaukee, going outside in the yard together in Kingston, spending time curled up together, how she used to jump up in my lap and go to sleep or sometimes try to sample the food that I was eating.She was very food motivated, that cat.And with anybody who we're involved with for a long time, we can call up similar memories and we can think about what was good in those. What did we feel joy in What did we desire and then find fulfilled as a desire? What did we go through together? What experiences did we share?We exercise our faculty of memory, and this can be done in quite deliberate ways. This is incredibly powerful and liberating. And we can do this not just with people or companions who have passed away. We can do this with people who somehow got left behind in all of our travels or moves or who left us behind. Any of the things that are good in our memory, there's nothing that stands in the way other than our own ideas about it to keep us from calling them up and enjoying them.So I find this very useful to think about, to remind myself of, to bring into my memory, you could say, if we want to get a little bit meta here.Maybe it will be equally useful for you.The last thing that I'll say is one thing the Stoics consistently tell us about grief is that although we are going to grieve, we don't need to tell ourselves that the bad feelings that we have are the sign of whether we truly love the person or not. Those are two separate things. The love can go on long after the grief has worn itself out or we've set it aside. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

In this second Episode of the Mind & Desire podcast, I kick things off by looking at one of the places philosophy can begin its activity. Epictetus the Stoic philosopher in his Discourses book 2, chapter 11, tells us two things about the beginning of philosophy."The beginning of philosophy with those who take it up as they should, and enter in, as it were, by the gate, is a consciousness of a man's own weakness and impotence with reference to the things of real consequence in life.""Behold the beginning of philosophy!—a recognition of the conflict between the opinions of men, and a search for the origin of that conflict, and a condemnation of mere opinion, coupled with scepticism regarding it, and a kind of investigation to determine whether the opinion is rightly held, together with the invention of a kind of standard of judgement."(these are from the Oldfather translation, which you can find here https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Epictetus,_the_Discourses_as_reported_by_Arrian,_the_Manual,_and_Fragments/Book_2/Chapter_11) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

This is the very first episode of a new podcast that I’m starting. I’ve chose the title Mind & Desire for reasons discussed in the episode. This podcast will in general air first for paid subscribers of this Substack, and then episodes will become available to all readers later on down the like. That isn’t the case for this first episode, though, since I’d like everyone to know what I’m up to with it! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe