Gregory B. Sadler's Blog: Gregory B. Sadler on Medium, page 47

Should Stoics Be Concerned About Others?

In a 6-week online course on Epictetus I'm presently teaching though my company, ReasonIO, I got asked a question that keeps popping up, quite naturally, when we're considering Stoic Ethics.  I'm also in the process of consolidating and rewriting posts from my other blogs into pieces here in Orexis Dianoētikē. Here's a piece originally published in Virtue Ethics Digest that frames and addresses those general concerns - Should a Stoic be concerned about (non-)Stoic others? And further, ho...

Musings About Life On YouTube

This weekend, my main YouTube channel - a largely academic channel devoted primarily to lectures about philosophical texts and thinkers  - passed a significant milestone.  Over 30,000 viewers are presently subscribers to the channel, and we're rapidly approaching 3 million total views.

Those numbers are particularly gratifying given that the videos I produce are on the low-tech, low-production - but high-content - end of the spectrum.  It shows that there's a real desire for sub...

Worlds of Speculative Fiction - An Update

Earlier this year, I announced the start of a new public lecture series, called "Worlds of Speculative Fiction," partnering with the Brookfield Public Library.  I've still got the intention of engaging in some writing here about the philosophical themes in the authors and works that we've been focusing on - my involvement in a variety of other projects, and other commitments, have unfortunately precluded me from getting those posts finished and published (but I'll have some coming out in...

New Online Epictetus Course Enrolling!

I'm very happy to be able to report that we now have a third online ReasonIO course starting up soon, and enrolling now - focused on a set of classic Stoic texts  Epictetus' Enchiridion and Discourses!

The class begins officially on Sunday, July 24 with the introductory class sessions (carried out through video-conferencing), but I'll be opening the first course modules a week for students before the class starts.  It is a six-week, entirely online

We'll be starting the cou...

The Eight Basic Tastes or Flavors

Last month, I delivered a talk at one of our local libraries - in Whitefish Bay - straying a bit from philosophy into the field of gastronomy (you can watch the video of the talk here).  This isn't an area in which I do all that much work, but in which I've got a considerable, though basically amateur, interest.  The topic that I proposed is one that has exerted a kind of distracting pull upon my research work for some time - a history of basic tastes or flavors of food.

At present,...

Free Video Resources on St. Anselm's Monologion

Off and on, from March to May, I created a new series of Core Concept videos devoted to a classic text of Medieval Christian philosophy, Saint Anselm's early work, the  Monologion .

This book is in, in fact, Anselm's earliest treatise, written when he was prior of the monastery at Bec, after numerous requests by his fellow monks that he write down some of the arguments, reflections, and explanations about the divine substance that he was providing them with in his teaching and conversations...

Plato's Symposium Class Now Enrolling

As the Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics class gets close to finishing up, we've opened up enrollment for another online class, this time on Plato's Symposium!

I'm very happy to be teaching this 4-week entirely online class again with a new group of students for a number of reasons, but I'll just mention two of those reasons here.

One of them is that this is a Platonic dialogue that I'm particularly interested in.  Each time that I teach it, I learn something new in the process.  And I l...

Online Aristotle Course Now Enrolling!

My various viewers, readers, and subscribers have been asking me for some time about online courses that I might develop and teach, and which they might take.  After having worked with both traditional institutions and innovative startup institutions, creating online courses for them, I've decided it's time to start offering them myself, through ReasonIO

I polled interested potential about some of the course offerings I'm particularly interested to develop, and topping the list is the one...

Freedom, Choice, and Success from An Existentialist Perspective

Last year, during several of the sessions of my Glimpses Into Existence lecture series, we got into an interesting and ongoing discussion that spanned several sessions, a conversation carried out in large part by some of the participating audience members.  The first talk in which this recurring theme came up focused specifically upon Franz Kafka's works and thought.
A Bit About Kafka's PerspectiveAs far as Existentialist thinkers go, Kafka is one of the more cagey ones when it comes to c...

Free Online Resources on Epictetus' Stoic Philosophy

Since the beginning of my career, in my first Ethics class as a graduate student, I have been teaching Epictetus' Stoic philosophy.  At the beginning, I concentrated on his short handbook, the Enchiridion Once I discovered just how much of a richer Stoic perspective the four books of his Discourses (those we currently possess - there may have originally been eight) contribute, I shifted my focus towards introducing students to key passages from that work.

Last Fall, I designed, produced,...