Gregory B. Sadler's Blog: Gregory B. Sadler on Medium, page 45

Reflections Upon Gratitude

There's a marked tendency to talk a lot about "gratitude" these days.  In fact, springboarding off an oft-quoted passage from Cicero's speech For Plancius - "gratitude is not only the greatest of the virtues, but the parent of them" - (and then never engaging with Cicero's thought again after that) there's even quite a lot of buzz about gratitude in terms of virtue ethics, or at least what we might call "virtue-lite morality."  There's also a rising and somewhat paradoxical ten...

Worlds Of Speculative Fiction Lecture Series Renewed

Over the course of 2016, I've been providing a monthly lecture and discussion series, hosted by the Brookfield Public Library, focused on - and called - Worlds of Speculative Fiction: Philosophical Themes.  I proposed the idea originally as a way for me to get to engage in a bit of "guilty pleasure" reading, going back to classic science fiction and fantasy works I had enjoyed in my childhood, teens, or college years, and seeing what might be said from a philosophical perspective about t...

So Now, Anger Is What The Good Guys Feel

There's so much to say about this recent American election - and so much that is actually being said -that, other than some short discussions and posts in social media (and a dinner-party discussion), I've been keeping a low profile, watching matters unfold, reflecting, and occasionally posting some of the better bits of analysis.  There's something almost like a communicative paralysis induced by the paradox of choice in the aftermath of this contest.  With so much that could be sa...

Aristotle on Three Parts of the Polity

In our polarized, nominally democratic, political processes, there are a number of things that often get lost.  In my view, Aristotle sets his finger right on one of these, in a distinction he makes at a number of places in his works, most explicitly in the Politics.  One can analyze contemporary politics in terms of an ongoing, argumentative clash between the interests of those who possess wealth, on the one side, and the many, who tend to be poor but also free, on the other. &nbsp...

Free Class on Epictetus' Enchiridion at the ReasonIO Academy!

Over the years, I've worked with a number of online platforms, exploring their various potentials for widening access and enhancing learning for students worldwide - these include YouTube, Moodle, Curious, Coursmos, and Outschool.

We've now created a new learning space on another platform, Teachable - the ReasonIO Academy - and I'm happy to be able to write a bit about the first course I've developed there - Epictetus' Enchiridion:  Ancient Philosophy & Peace of Mind.

Students can enr...

Can People Knowingly Do Wrong? Epictetus' View

When a person does something morally wrong or bad, does that person know what he or she is doing is wrong or bad?  This is one of those interesting questions in ethics and moral theory that seems very simple to ask and then turns out to be complicated to answer - at least if one wants to answer it well.  Easy, one-sided, simplistic answers are always an option, but nearly always turn out to be off-base and get in the way of doing the productive thinking that working out a more adequ...

Epictetus' Conception of Prohairesis

I've been kept rather busy over the last week - first some travel out to New York, to attend and speak at STOICON, and then the start of Stoic Week 2016 itself, and a Stoic Week talk here back home - so I'm just now getting to posting something Stoicism-related that too place the week prior, here in Milwaukee.

For several years now, I've been doing quite a bit of research work - piecing together a lot of passages from a wide array of texts, and reconstructing theoretical and practical perspect...

Stoic Exemplars and Their Differing Roles

Engaging in the practice of Stoic philosophy - or applying any moral theory more generally - is often guided by looking to individuals who particularly exemplify that committed and examined way of life.  This reference to exemplars is good - indeed often necessary - but sometimes what gets lost sight of is precisely what Epictetus points out in this passage:


Living out a deliberate, thoughtful way of life, informed by a moral perspective, does not always take precisely the same form. &nbs...

Stoic Week Activities Coming Up

Every year (at least recently), one of my favorite philosophy-focused celebrations is Stoic Week, and it is coming up later on this month!  I first got involved with it three years ago, enrolling in the free online course developed by the members of the Stoicism Today project, and particularly Donald Robertson.

Since that first year, I've stepped up my own activities during the week and my involvement with the associated project.  The last two years I created a series of videos, one...

One Sentence Summary on Aristotle and Anger

As the current editor of Stoicism Today , and a frequenter of various social media Stoicism-focused groups, I wind up wading into quite a few discussions bearing not only on Stoic philosophy, but on practical philosophy more generally, particularly when the conversation turns to two other matters that I do quite a bit of work on - Aristotelian philosophy, and the emotion of anger.

In the course of one of those discussions in the Facebook Stoicism Group, an interlocutor asked me if I could provi...