Gregory B. Sadler's Blog: Gregory B. Sadler on Medium, page 53

Critical Thinking: Class or Curriculum?

One of the conversations focused on college curricula and student learning, in which I perennially -- though thankfully not perpetually -- seem to find myself involved takes on the form of a false dilemma, a forced option, which all too often gets used as the framework for thinking out the role of foundational disciplines should play -- and the shape they ought to take -- in higher education. Whether it is a matter of Critical Thinking, Ethics, Writing, or other similar disciplines, the same...

Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy: Apollo and Dionysus

At one time, quite long ago -- A period including the end of my undergraduate studies, the early years of my graduate studies, and the interval between, when I worked a series of low-paying jobs, studied languages, and trained obsessively -- I would unapologetically identify myself as a Nietzschean. That wasn't the hardest thing to do, of course, not least because taking that kind of stance grants a person permission to indulge their appetites and desires, rancor and bitterness, propensit...

Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy (part 1 of 3)

At one time, quite long ago -- A period including the end of my undergraduate studies, the early years of my graduate studies, and the interval between, when I worked a series of low-paying jobs, studied languages, and trained obsessively -- I would unapologetically identify myself as a Nietzschean. That wasn't the hardest thing to do, of course, not least because taking that kind of stance grants a person permission to indulge their appetites and desires, rancor and bitterness, propensit...

Lecture Capture, Technology, and Education

About a year and a half back, while still teaching at Fayetteville State University, I got involved with an activity -- and really, a commitment -- called by the rather elevated or exiting name of "lecture capture." That's not a bad term for it, since one does indeed capture course lectures by some type of recording. But, it is a bit misleading, since it easily gives the impression that the main part of the associated complex of pedagogical activities consists primarily in that...

Summer Break for Orexis Dianoētikē

I ought to have announced this two weeks back -- originally, I'd hoped to continue writing posts over my summer break -- but am finally doing so now:  I'm taking a 5 week break from writing for Orexis Dianoētikē and Virtue Ethics Digest .  I'll resume posting in mid-July.  For the time being, I'm traveling in New York and the Midwest, enjoying the company of my kids, wife, friends, and family.  I'm still teaching an online Ethics class, editing a few videos, answering quest...

Ethics of Sterilization for Drug Addicts

An issue which ought by its very nature to provoke controversy of all sorts -- reproduction and childbirth by drug addicts -- has come to the fore again, centered around an organization, Project Prevention (PrPr, just so as not to confuse them with Planned Parenthood, often abbreviated as PP) whose main activity involves paying drug and alcohol addicts to get sterilized or to use long-term birth-control. There's much more to be said about the purposes of the organization, as well as the m...

Happy Birthday G.K. Chesterton

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite philosophers -- indeed, in my book a writer legitimately termed a philosopher, though many would rather recall him as a novelist, a cultural critic, an essayist, perhaps even in a sense a theologian -- Gilbert Keith Chesterton. If I had to adduce only one reason for calling him that, I might cite his own words from the first page of his own Orthodoxy

I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather...

Is Kierkegaard's Present Age Our Own?

I've been rereading a lot of Soren Kierkegaard's works over the last several weeks, in preparation for a new video venture -- a series of course lectures on Existentialist philosophy and literature -- and I was grateful and gladdened to get to return to one of his short works which I have enjoyed since I was an undergraduate nearly two decades ago, though admittedly I had much less of an appreciation for what he was doing in that text then: The Present Age . I shot roughly an hour of d...

Revisting Conan the Barbarian

Commenting on my post back in January in which I gave mixed reviews, along explicitly Aristotelian lines (derived from the Poetics), to the recent remake, James Brown brought up several very interesting points, which I'd pledged to follow up on:

I think of cinema as being primarily of a kind with the visual arts like painting, not with drama. It is, at base, moving pictures more so than filmed drama. We’re smack dab in the middle of imag...

Happy Birthday, Søren Kierkegaard

More than half of my life now, Søren Kierkegaard has occupied a top seat in the shifting chorus of my favorite philosophers -- something one would hardly guess by looking at my scholarship, which has focused much more upon other thinkers: Aristotle, St. Anselm, Thomas Aquinas,Thomas Hobbes, G.W.F. Hegel, Maurice Blondel, Alasdair MacIntyre, each of which I've found sufficiently fascinating to be drawn into reading and rereading, taking notes upon then writing, and when lucky, publishing a...