Gregory B. Sadler's Blog: Gregory B. Sadler on Medium, page 36

A Milestone - 500 Core Concept Videos!

Years back, I started producing a new kind of video, in a series I called Philosophy Core Concepts.  After seeing the hour-long videos I recorded in my Critical Thinking, Introduction to Philosophy, and Ethics classes take off, I started thinking about other sorts of videos I might produce that would be useful for my students and for other viewers worldwide.

There were already quite a few short (anywhere from 2-10 minutes), often quite high-production videos on topics and thinkers in phil...

AMA Session Coming Up Today

We have the next AMA - Ask Me Anything - online session coming up later toda for my viewers, subscribers, supporters, and other fans.  It's scheduled at 12:00 PM Central Time. Here's the site for the session - you can set a reminder notification for it on that page - just click the video below.


If you have questions you'd like to ask me, make sure to get them in early on.  I'll keep the session open for an hour and a half, but we invariably end with a number of later-asked...

A Strange Assumption About Philosophy

Last month, I was invited by Carthage College to provide a workshop to members of their Philosophy Club, and to the philosophy majors.  It's one that I've spoken on a number of times, on a topic that always proves to be a good draw: Outside of academic teaching, with a Philosophy degree, how can you make a living?  

It is much more reflective of our culture - academic, popular, and otherwise - that this is even a question that requires the sort of answers I (and others) provide....

Update For The Month of March

Every month, going back several years, I create a 10-20 minute long update video in my main YouTube channel for my viewers, listeners, readers, and other fans.  I always start that video out by highlighting three "big things for the month ahead," then discuss what went on, what I did, or what came out in the previous month.  Then, in the longest portion of the video, I discuss my plans for the current month.
Sometimes I succeed in all of those plans, more often I don't, but at least...

Four Videos on James Rachels' "Challenge of Cultural Relativism"

One of the most often-anthologized essays in moral philosophy is James Rachels' "The Challenge of Cultural Relativism," which is chapter 2 in his book,   Elements of Moral Philosophy .  I assign and teach it fairly routinely in my own Ethics classes, and for this semester's Ethics for Artists and Designers class, I decided to create some core concept videos for my students.

I provided them to my class and to my Patreon supporters last month, and now I have released them to the gen...

Free Online Course on Epictetus' Enchiridion

Stoic Week is an annual worldwide event started and hosted by the Modern Stoicism organization (whose team I joined back in 2016).  I began participating in Stoic Week in 2013, and then in 2014, 2015 - as I participated - created sets of videos other participants could watch.  In 2016, I decided upon a more ambitious video project. 

That year, I shot a set of 21 roughly half hour videos covering every chapter of Epictetus' short work of Stoic philosophy, The Enchiridion , line by...

Time For That Discussion About Plagiarism Again

Several of my students' recent assignments at one place I'm teaching this term involved plagiarism.  That is a perennial problem in academia, occurring at every level (from K-12 to doctoral work, and sometimes beyond) and in pretty much every type and tier of institution.  Some places I've taught have a very strict policy about it, requiring instructors to report any suspected instance of plagiarism to some type of academic integrity board or office.  Others give instructors a...

Ok - Back To Work!

This has been a tough semester so far!  Even after turning down some offers, to teach, I've taken on five classes - a heavier teaching load than most of my full-time academic colleagues carry - and that is in addition to the work I do through my business, ReasonIO, my service on the Modern Stoicism team and as editor of Stoicism Today, and the video, blog, and podcast content I produce.  There's also slowly getting back in shape with regular exercise, and living a fairly normal life...

Eight Videos On Blaise Pascal's Pensées

Some time back, I decided to shoot some core concept videos on one of my favorite books of philosophy, Blaise Pascal's unfinished but brilliant work, the Pensées.  It's a work that I first encountered back in graduate school, and have often drawn upon, but don't often have a pretext to teach (perhaps I should find one!) in my classes.

The Pensées is a pretty lengthy and quite complex work, so what I've done in these seven videos is in some respects just scratching the surface.&n...

Stoicism, Self-Control, and Optimizing One's Environment

Natasha Brown - someone I've enjoyed interacting with both in person (at Stoicon last year), and virtually (much more often) - raised an issue well worth reflecting upon and discussing in a post in the Facebook Stoicism group earlier today. 

The Stoic virtue of self-control has been the one I’ve found consistently most difficult. Whether it’s continuing long-term exercise, eating healthily & so on. 

I’m reading James Clear’s book ‘Atomic Habits’. He argues self-control isn’t susta...