Gregory B. Sadler's Blog: Gregory B. Sadler on Medium, page 43

Deriving The Cardinal Virtues In Cicero's On Duties

Two questions came up recently about Stoicism and the virtues in one of my social media feeds.  How did they end up with those four main virtues - Wisdom, Justice, Courage, and Temperance - and do they provide any argument or rational proof for those being the main virtues?

Quite likely, more complete responses to these questions would be found in some of the Stoic literature that has unfortunately been lost.  But we do still have some more or less complete answers provided in some o...

November Philosophy Pop-Up Sessions

Since August, I've been engaging in a new sort of interaction with my various subscribers, fans, and followers - Philosophy Pop-Up sessions.  These are streaming sessions, hosted monthly on YouTube Live and Facebook Live.  Participants can watch or listen, and have the chance in real time to ask questions or leave comments, to which I do my best to respond.

I schedule each of these for one hour, but they sometimes go a bit longer.  Originally, the goal was to make them a good bi...

Ten Videos On John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism

One of the most commonly taught texts in Ethics classes is John Stuart Mill's classic work,  Utilitarianism [image error].  I give it a central place in my own classes, generally as a companion text to Jeremy Bentham's founding work for utilitarian moral theory,  The Principles of Morals and Legislation [image error] .  Together, they provide a great overview of that approach in ethics.

Students do struggle with Mill's work, so some time back, I started creating short Core Concept videos specifically on...

October Philosophy Pop-Up Sessions

If you missed the monthly Philosophy Pop-Up Sessions we held online earlier on in October - before I got totally bogged down (not complaining - I love that stuff!) with Stoicon 2017, Stoicon-X Toronto, and Stoic Week - there's some good news for you!

In fact, there's two bits of good news.  The first is that I'll be doing another two Philosophy Pop-Ups this coming month of November.  Since I've got several other commitments focused on the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche coming up this...

Seven Videos on Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lying In An Extra-Moral Sense"

I'm slowly making good on some of the video commitments I made to my Patreon supporters.  At the start of the summer, I polled them to find out which thinkers they most wanted me to focus on, and the three winners were Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

First, I created a number of Kant core concept videos, finishing up the sequence I started years back on his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals .  Then I shifted focus to Heidegger, and shot an entire sequen...

Philosophy Pop-Ups From September

Back in August, I started a new side project - doing live Philosophy Pop-Up sessions online.  I held the second set earlier this month.  For each of these, I pick a topic to start with, log on to either Facebook Live or YouTube Live, start talking about the topic, and then start responding to viewers' questions or comments.

Last month, we started out talking about Martin Heidegger's philosophy.  This month, I tackled a topic I'm currently writing a book about - Stoicism and its...

A Baker's Dozen of Interviews and Guest Appearances

I love doing interviews and putting in guest appearances, for several reasons.  Each new podcast, website, video series, or other venue that I go on expands my audience in some way.  That means that the ideas that I'm speaking about get a hearing from a wider range of people - and that's good.  It also adds potential new clients and opens up additional opportunities for the work I do, as a practical philosopher.  Going on someone else's show or site, and getting into conve...

A Perennial Problem - Which Texts to Teach?

Exactly a week ago, I was asked by Marquette University whether I could take on teaching two sections of Ethics, which start next week.  I happily agreed, since I do enjoy face-to-face classroom teaching, and it is just a bit over a mile walk to campus. I'm particularly glad to be teaching Ethics

Ethics is one of my main areas of specialized expertise.  I have been teaching Ethics courses of various sorts my entire career - the very first college course I taught, in fact, was a secti...

Stoicism, Kindness, and Small Gestures

Earlier this week, one of our dogs made the day - if only for a brief moment - of a young man who seemed quite down.  Amica is friendly with strangers by temperament, particularly so when she has a ball in her mouth, so when she saw a young man in an X-man t-shirt approaching sadly from the apartment building across the street, she greeted him as soon as he was close.  Tail wagging, she went right for him, and shoved her ball into his leg.  He reached out tentatively to pet her...

Philosophy Pop-Up Sessions

This month, I started holding a new type of online event - Philosophy Pop-Up sessions - for my viewers, subscribers, supporters, and any other sorts of fans of my work.  These are a bit experimental in nature, and we're still sorting out precisely how they're going to work.

What I had in mind was to go live and interact with the participants for about 30-40 minutes or so.  I thought I'd start by discussing a thinker or topic for a few minutes, and then see what questions or comments...