Gregory B. Sadler's Blog: Gregory B. Sadler on Medium, page 38

Ten Videos on Augustine's City of God

Last semester, I started shooting a set of short lecture videos on the early Christian philosopher, Augustine of Hippo's City of God as resources for my students in two of my classes.  That late work of Augustine is a pretty massive tome, so we were just covering a selection of topics in books 5, 11, and 19 of the text.

The topics that we examined - human free will and divine foreknowledge, the role of Christian revelation in philosophy, created time and space, what human happiness r...

Eight Short Videos on Epicurus' Thought

Some time back, I created a set of eight core concept videos focused specifically on several key ideas from the few texts we still possess authored by the great Hellenistic hedonist philosopher, Epicurus (which you can find assembled together here)

Although I'm far from being an Epicurean myself, I frequently teach his ideas in my Ethics and Introduction to Philosophy classes, so developing these short lecture videos has been very useful for me and my students.

I'll be discussing the Epicurean...

Thinkers and Texts I'm Teaching This Spring

This Spring, I'm returning to Marquette University, where I'll be teaching two sections of their new core class, Foundations in Philosophy.  Like many Catholic schools, their core curriculum has gone through recent changes that have reduced the number of required Philosophy courses (and Theology, and other courses in the humanities as well).  Having replaced both their Philosophy of Human Nature and their Ethics courses, this new Foundations course has to do quite a lot in one semes...

Seven Conversations About Modern Stoicism

Over the last year, I have been shooting sit-down interview videos, and seven of those have been conversations with people involved in the modern Stoicism movement.  Attending and speaking at Stoicon in 2017 and 2018 afforded me the opportunity to carry out these interviews.  All of them are with people who I consider friends and colleagues, so as you can tell when you watch them, we had an excellent time recording the conversations

Three of the interviewees - Christopher Gill, Donal...

The Numbers Are In: It's Huxley, Stoker, and Bakker

Last week, after an initial round of suggestions, I held a runoff vote for the three fan-chosen authors I would add to the monthly talks in the Worlds of Speculative Fiction series for 2019.

The seven authors in the run-off were:  Bram Stoker, Thomas Ligoti, Stephen Donaldson, Katherine Kurtz, Aldous Huxley, Robert Jordan, and R Scott. Bakker.

Patreon supporters of my work got one additional vote.  Everyone who voted was allowed to choose up to three authors. There were 51 votes total...

Nine Podcast Episodes on Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling

Earlier this term, I created a set of nine core concept videos on the great early existentialist, Søren Kierkegaard's, work Fear and Trembling.  I then converted all of those videos into podcast episodes, boosting the sound quality.

I provided both the videos and the podcasts to my students in my Foundations of Philosophy class (at Marquette University), and early released them to my Patreon supporters.  Then, episode after episode, video after video, I released them to the general p...

Get In On The Vote - Worlds of Speculative Fiction 2019

Last week, I created a video about our upcoming year of monthly talks in the Worlds of Speculative Fiction series.  We're going into year four, and in lining up the new authors I'm scheduled to discuss, I deliberately left three slots open so that I could get some input from my viewers, subscribers, supporters and other fans.  After listing the nine authors I'd already picked out (see below), I asked viewers to leave comments with their initial suggestions for authors to fill those...

Eleven Videos on Cicero's On The Ends

On The Ends (also translated as On Moral Ends) is one of my favorite works by the great Roman orator, politician, and philosopher, Marcus Tullius Cicero.  In its five books, through interlocutors representing several great philosophical schools of antiquity, he presents their key moral doctrines in systematic detail, and in the case of the Epicureans and Stoics, levies tough criticisms of those positions as well.

I taught books 1 and 3 to the students in two of my classes this semester (F...

Upcoming Video Premiere - Albert Camus, An Absurd World, and Resistance to Evil

Earlier this month, I gave a talk on the French philosopher, novelist, and playwright Albert Camus.  We recorded the talk, and for all of my subscribers, viewers, followers, and anyone else interested in seeing it, it will premiere this coming Saturday at 12:00 PM Central Time.  You can join us and watch it anywhere in the world on YouTube Live right here (where you can also set a reminder for yourself).

This talk runs a little over an hour, and discusses Camus' life, key i...

Five Podcast Episodes on Cicero's Stoic Paradoxes

Earlier this year, I started producing podcast episodes drawn from my shorter YouTube lectures, boosting their sound quality and editing them slightly.  Among the episodes I decided to start were a set on a short work by Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Stoic Paradoxes. 

What he means by "paradoxes" are assertions  that the Stoic philosophers made which seem counter-intuitive, or even fantastic, to most people, but whose startling formulations do make good sense within the context of...