Gregory B. Sadler's Blog: Gregory B. Sadler on Medium, page 34

Aristotelian Magnificence And Student Loans

Last weekend, Robert Smith, the commencement speaker at Morehouse College's graduation ceremony, announced a gift of major significance.  Every member of the graduating class would have all of their student loans paid off.  The average student debt, reported by Morehouse's president, is around $24,000, and the entire payout is estimated to be about 40 million dollars.

Smith is a billionaire - they estimate that his net worth is 4.47 billion dollars - so this massive, generous, a...

Video Premiere Today - How To Study Aristotle On Your Own

Coming up at Noon (Central Time) today, I have a new video premiering, the second one in the new series on Self-Directed Study in Philosophy.  You'll see the embedded link for the videos right below

The videos in this series are designed to help people who want to study philosophy on their own - not enrolling in a traditional academic institution - get started and get the most out of their studies.   This one is specifically about Aristotle, and I'll be following it up next mont...

Seven Videos on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground

My summer 6-week Existentialist Philosophy and Literature class, designed and taught for Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, is now nearing the end of its first week.  We are spending about five of those weeks going through selections from 10 key authors in the existentialist movement.  One of the thinkers we are hitting early on - next week in fact - is Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I've assigned the students Part 1 of Notes From Underground, with a chapter from The Brothers Karamazov (The...

Six Videos on Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism

I've been creating new core concept videos to use in my online 6-week Existentialism class (which starts in less than two weeks - countdown ticking!).  One of the texts that I'm using for that class is a classic of Existentialist literature: Jean-Paul Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism".

I already had two videos on that text, shot some time ago in one of my Marist Ethics classes, but knew that I would need to create some additional ones in order to cover the entire essay for my studen...

Virtue Ethics and Pleasure as an End

At a philosophy dissertation defense I attended today - on an excellent project bearing on sex education by Shaun Miller, which I have been following for some time (here's an interview with him on his project) - a very interesting question got put to him.

After critically examining the moral assumptions and foundations of existing sexual education curricula, Shaun advocates for an ascesis- and virtue-ethics-informed approach, general outlines of which are worked through in his nearly 500-...

The Reading List For My Summer Online Existentialism Class

In just a bit over two weeks, I will be opening up my 6-week online summer course for Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design - Existentialist Philosophy and Literature.  Quite a few people have been asking about the reading list for the course, so I decided that it might be good for me to post it here.

Teaching any subject in 6 weeks is tough.  Even though they know it is an intensive class, you simply can't expect students to engage with the same quantity of reading as they would be...

Session 35 in Worlds of Speculative Fiction - Lewis Carroll

I haven't been posting regularly about this ongoing monthly talk series - Worlds of Speculative Fiction - but I intend to remedy that going forward.  We're now well into year 4 of the series, and I decided to start this one off with some sessions focused on some of the early major contributors to the genres that fall into that broad designation of "speculative fiction" - authors who influenced the other, later writers we have been discussing these last three years.

In January, we kicked o...

A Similitude: Commenting From Alongside

My approach to philosophers and text in the videos I produce is quite similar to how I teach my classes, and what I do in many of my talks, workshops, and other public events.  I don't aim to be original, or even "critical", in my presentations of philosophical texts, thinkers, perspectives, and topics.  What status I may have - or rather that people attribute to me - as a reliable interpreter of these philosophical matters seems to stem from one main characteristic of my approach.

M...

AMA (Ask Me Anything) Session Tomorrow

I'm hosting another of my online AMA - Ask Me Anything - sessions tomorrow.  It starts at noon, Central Time, and runs for about an hour-and-a-half.  (I started out scheduling them for an hour, but they've always ended up running over due to the number of questions and comments that I end up getting).

Here's the video page for the session - if you click through to it, you can set yourself a reminder so that you don't miss the event.



If your goal is to get one of your questions asked a...

Video Premiere Today - How To Study Plato On Your Own

Coming up at Noon (Central Time) today, we have a new video premiere, this time for the one you see below.  It is designed to help those who want to study Plato on their own - not enrolling in a traditional academic institution - get started and get the most out of their studies.

Years back, I shot a similar video specifically on self-directed study of Plato, intending for it to be the first in a series that would focus on self-study of important philosophers.  I was never quite happ...