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 bit shorter - closer to 30 minutes in time - but as it turns out, people didn't want the sessions to end as quickly as intended!

The November sessions were devoted to a thinker I talked about quite a bit this month - Friedrich Nietzsche - and specifically to the "three noble responses to the problem of life" laid out in his book The Birth of Tragedy.  If you missed them, here they are:

As always, these sessions are underwritten by the generous support of my Patreon backers.  If you'd like to learn more, or to start supporting the work I do making philosophy accessible world wide, go to my Patreon page!

Happy Birthday, Albert Camus

Very early on in my philosophical formation -- long before I had any idea that I might study, let alone go on to become a professor in that field -- I first encountered the work of Albert Camus, in the form of a paperback, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays.  I had just started high school, and we were on one of our many visits from Wisconsin, where my mother and father had settled in the family's exodus out of Chicago, gone down I-65 into rural Indiana, where my grandparents and great-aunts and -uncles had built the complex of little pre-fab Wausau  houses, facing each other on a common driveway, two of them connected in their basements by a cinderblock garage -- a time and place of sand and sun, snow and wood-burning stoves, oaks and sandburrs, trails, freedom, work, card games and quiet affection that to me, in my childhood was perhaps an image of what paradise could be.  My uncle Aime lived there, in a room partitioned off from the rest of his parents' basement, and I would visit with him in that room where he slept, listened to and reflected on radio programs, and read the books stacked in neat piles, but at casual angles and locations. 

Camus' volume held the top place that day on one of the stacks.  I recognized the name Sisyphus from my readings in Greek mythology, so I picked it up to page through it.  Seeing my interest in it, Aime told me it was worth reading, and asked me if I wanted to take it, so I did, and tried to puzzle my way through the not-entirely-for-beginners prose in the main essay.  Trying to remember back to that time, I can't be sure I really understood much of what now, nearly thirty years later, seems clear enough that I've recently shot several video lectures (one, two, and three) discussing the work.  What I recall is being struck by the boldness of Camus' formulations, an enjoyment arising from turning over the paradoxical phrases, and the feeling that if I just dug at it tenaciously enough, I'd come away from reading equipped with something novel, exciting, something I could integrate within my own life and developing thought.  For me, its fitting that, in celebration of his birthday, I focus mainly on that early work in which I first encountered his intransigent thought, his resolve to live "without appeal."