Twelve Podcast Episodes on Cicero's On Friendship

One of the texts I started teaching in my classes years ago is On Friendship by the great Roman philosopher and statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero.  I find ways to work reading and discussion of this short but rich book into my Ethics, Introduction to Philosophy, and Philosophy of Love and Friendship classes.  I've been surprised by how much students in the 21st century respond to the work - they find a lot of value in its treatment of the topics.

Cicero of course draws upon some ideas and insights derived from Aristotle's own treatment of the topics involved in friendships and relationships, found in his Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics.  But On Friendship isn't just adding to Aristotle a few centuries afterwards.  It is a thoughtful, incisive examination of a number of important issues arising out of friendships.

A while back, I shot a sequence of lecture videos on this work, and more recently, I edited them into a set of episodes in the Sadler's Lectures podcast.  There are twelve of them, covering all of the key ideas of the work in depth and detail.  Here's links to each of these podcast episodes

• Defining Genuine Friendship
• The Advantages Of Friendship
• Friendship Arising From Nature
• Three Mistaken Views On Friendship
• Avoiding Friendship To Be Free
• Limits On Loyalty To Friends
• Old Friends And New Friends
• Loving Things Vs. Loving Persons
• Friendship, Superiority, And Inferiority
• Criticizing Friends
• Slowly Ending Friendships
• Choosing Friends Carefully

I hope you find these episodes useful and interesting. As always, if you'd like to make a contribution to helping me continue my work making classic philosophical texts, thinkers, and topics accessible for people worldwide, consider becoming a monthly supporter on Patreon. If you'd like to make a one-time donation, you can do so directly on Paypal, or on Buy Me A Coffee.

Results of the Vote - Heidegger Podcast Episodes Coming Up Next

Today, I've finished releasing my latest series of podcast episodes in the Sadler's Lectures podcast, a set on Simone de Beauvoir's work, The Second Sex. I wanted to get some input from viewers, subscribers, followers, and supporters about which thinkers they would like to see the next podcast episodes focus on. So I created and ran polls on my YouTube channel, Patreon page, and Twitter stream. I weighted Patreon supporters' votes much more heavily, since they make a monthly commitment to underwriting the work I do.

Each of the options was a thinker that I've already created some podcast episodes on in the past.  Aristotle, Cicero, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, or Martin Heidegger.  The results were quite interesting.  the formula for each of these is Patreon (x20) + YouTube + Twitter.

• Heidegger 140 + 259 + 56 = 455 total
• Dostoevsky 100+ 259 + 31 = 390 total
• Aristotle 160 + 168 +30 = 358 total 
• Cicero 120 + 84 + 22 = 226 total

So Heidegger was the clear winner of the combined polls, and I'll be producing a set of episodes on one of his key essays, What Is Metaphysics?, with releases starting tomorrow.

It's interesting and heartening to see that there were quite a bit of people wanting to see podcast episodes on the other three thinkers as well.  Once the Heidegger podcast episodes are done, I'll move on to Dostoevsky, and convert my recent core concept lectures on portions of The Brothers Karamazov to podcast episodes.  

After those two thinkers, I'll shift to Aristotle and Cicero, and I plan to concentrate on their discussions of the complex topic of friendship and relationships. So for Aristotle, that's Nicomachean Ethics books 8-9 (supplemented here and there by the Eudemian Ethics).  And for Cicero,  his book On Friendship, of course!

I'll be producing and releasing all of those podcast episodes over the next two months, so if you follow my Soundcloud, you can be sure to hear them as they come out.  One of the perks for my Patreon supporters, of course, is that they get early releases of these, so if that's something you're interested in, you might consider becoming a supporter.

Six Podcast Episodes on Cicero's On Fate

One of the topics I like to teach in my Introduction to Philosophy classes is that of freedom and determinism.  There is a lot of great literature discussing these metaphysical matters, and one of the early important texts is an (unfortunately) incomplete one by Marcus Tullius Cicero, called On Fate. 

The ideas in On Fate get referenced by several other authors who I often teach as well, particularly Augustine of Hippo and Boethius, when they are considering the same issues of freedom of the will and causal determinism. 

What I particularly like about this text - as a teacher - are several things.  First, it's short.  True, it's shorter than we'd like since we've lost part of the text!  But it's easy enough to cover in a class session. Second, it introduces some key ideas that have been used to make sense of the topics involved.  It also introduces them to a common argument favoring fatalism, and some ideas about determinism that still show up in the present.  And third, it provides some useful summaries about the positions of four important thinkers and schools on these matters in antiquity.

The six podcast episodes come to a bit under an hour and a half of listening time.  Here they are:

• Temperament And Geographical Determinism
• Diodorus' Megarian Position
• Epicurus' Position
• Chrysippus' Stoic Position
• Carneades' Academic Skeptic Position
• The Idle Argument

If you'd like to make a contribution to helping me continue my work making classic philosophical texts, thinkers, and topics accessible for people worldwide, consider becoming a monthly supporter on Patreon.  If you'd like to make a one-time donation, you can do so directly on Paypal, or on Buy Me A Coffee.

Twelve Videos on Cicero's On Friendship

Marcus Tullius Cicero's short work On Friendship is one that I occasionally teach in my Intro to Philosophy and my Ethics classes, usually counterposed to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics books 8 and 9, which also focus on the topic of friendship.  When I teach classes focused specifically on Love, Friendship, and Relationships, On Friendship is one of the central works for the class.

I like to have core concept videos available as supplemental resources for students in my face-to-face classes.  For online classes, they're even more important.  This semester I was teaching two online ethics classes - an Ethics class in the Second Chance Pell program for Milwaukee Area Technical College, and an Ethics for Artists and Designers class for Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.  So I thought it was about time that I created a sequence of videos going through all of On Friendship.

As it turns out, that required twelve videos, all of which are linked to here

• Defining Genuine Friendship 
• Friendship Arising From Nature 
• The Advantages of Friendship 
• Three Mistaken Limits on Friendship
• Avoiding Friendship to be Free 
• Loving Things vs. Loving Persons
• Choosing Friends Carefully 
• New Friends and Old Friends
• Superiority, Inferiority, and Friendship 
• Limits on Loyalty to Friends 
• Criticizing Friends
• Slowly Ending Friendships

I'm planning on creating an affordable and engaging online class on this work over the summer, which will incorporate these videos, but also provide a number of downloadable handouts, lesson pages, reflection prompts, and a number of other resources designed to help learners understand and apply the key ideas of On Friendship.  Stay tuned to our Study With Sadler online academy for more on that and other classes coming out this summer!

Moving Video Premiere Date to November 30

One of the new series of videos I started this year provide viewers with my expert advice about how to engage in self-directed study in the field of Philosophy.  Once I have produced a video in this series, I premiere it on YouTube.  That allows anyone who is interested in the topic and the particular thinker to join in via live chat, while everyone watches it for the first time.  I answer questions and address comments over the hour that the video airs.

This month, the plan is to produce, release, and premiere a video focused on how to productively study the range of writers that fall under the rubric of "early Christian philosophy".  This includes a host of thinkers from the very early generations of that new religion, way of life, and indeed in some cases, philosophy all the way though what we might call the "era of Augustine" (though some are his contemporaries).

There were quite a few early Christian writers who explicitly framed Christianity as a "philosophy" and sometimes even called themselves "philosophers".  These were almost invariably Christian writers who had a substantial background in a wide range of the philosophical schools, ideas, and controversies of ancient Mediterranean culture, and who engaged some of those movements and thinkers as interlocutors.  Sometimes they willingly borrowed from pagan thinkers, when there was something of value to incorporate into the new synthesis and the new philosophy as a way of life, centered around the figure and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and the developing community of the Church.

In the case of some of the authors I'll be discussing - Justin Martyr, Lactantius, Clement of Alexandria, John Cassian, as examples - I've been reading and thinking about their works (and occasionally teaching them as well) for about two decades.  So I've got a lot of advice to assemble and organize for the video.  Given my extraordinarily heavy teaching load this semester (seven classes), I'm a bit behind on video production.

I was hoping to have this next video on self-directed study in philosophy ready to premiere this Saturday, but now think that unlikely.  Accordingly, I'm moving the date for this release - and the Q&A session - out to Saturday, November 30.  In the meantime, here's the other videos in the series:

• Self-Directed Study - Plato's Philosophy
• Self-Directed Study - Aristotle's Philosophy
• Self-Directed Study - Stoic Philosophy
• Self-Directed Study - Epicurean Philosophy
• Self-Directed Study - Cicero's Philosophy
• Self-Directed Study - Anselm of Canterbury's Philosophy

Eleven Videos on Cicero's On The Ends

On The Ends (also translated as On Moral Ends) is one of my favorite works by the great Roman orator, politician, and philosopher, Marcus Tullius Cicero.  In its five books, through interlocutors representing several great philosophical schools of antiquity, he presents their key moral doctrines in systematic detail, and in the case of the Epicureans and Stoics, levies tough criticisms of those positions as well.

I taught books 1 and 3 to the students in two of my classes this semester (Foundations in Philosophy at Marquette University and Philosophies of Human Nature at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design).  These are the parts of the work in which Torquatus sets out the Epicurean position and Cato sets out the Stoic position.  I also created some new core concept videos as resources for my students in those classes.

They may be of interest or of use to the broader public, so I've compiled them here:

Book 1 - Epicurean ethics

• Epicureans on Pleasure as the Basis
• Pleasure, Pain, and Moral Virtue
• Pleasure and Removal of Pain 
• Mental and Bodily Pleasures
• Epicurean Friendship

Book 3 - Stoic Ethics

• Primary Impulses of Human Nature
• What Is In Accordance With Nature
• Virtue as the Good
• Virtue and Preferred Indifferents
• Indifferents Preferred, Rejected, and Neutral
• Appropriate Acts or Duties (Officia)

Down the line, I'll likely shoot many more videos on these two books.  Then I'll go on to key concepts from the other three books.  

Five Podcast Episodes on Cicero's Stoic Paradoxes

Earlier this year, I started producing podcast episodes drawn from my shorter YouTube lectures, boosting their sound quality and editing them slightly.  Among the episodes I decided to start were a set on a short work by Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Stoic Paradoxes. 

What he means by "paradoxes" are assertions  that the Stoic philosophers made which seem counter-intuitive, or even fantastic, to most people, but whose startling formulations do make good sense within the context of the Stoic system.  It provides a great introduction to some of the key ideas of Stoic Ethics.

I have five lectures lined up for listeners on this text, amounting to a bit under an hour of discussion of these key ideas and arguments.  You can download them and listen to them anywhere.  You can listen directly from my Soundcloud channel - or get them on iTunes /Apple Podcasts or Google Play (I hope to adding more alternative formats in the coming months). 

• What is Genuinely Good and What Is Not
• Why Virtue is Sufficient for Happiness
• The Equality of Good and Bad Things
• Wisdom, Foolishness, Freedom, and Slavery
• Why Only The Wise are Rich

For those who are looking for more podcast content on Stoicism, I have started working on additional episodes on Epictetus, and I'll be releasing more of them in the coming months.

Over 450 Videos in the Philosophy Core Concept Series

Since the beginning of the semester, I have been quite simply swamped with work!  In addition to teaching 5 different courses at 4 different academic institutions, I had my usual duties as editor of Stoicism Today - including Stoicon 2018 and Stoic Week - as well as a heavy load of speaking, meetings with clients, and consulting work.  I did manage to get some video production in there as well.

One type of video I've been routinely creating are "Philosophy Core Concepts".  These are short (10-25 minute) discussions of key ideas, arguments, or distinctions made by major philosophical thinkers.  They span the gamut from ancient philosophy down to 20th century thinkers (check out the list below).  I've produced quite a few of these.  Today, I took a look at the playlist, to see how many I'd done so far.

Over 450!  That's the number of the ones I've publicly released (my Patreon supporters get an early look at these videos before the general public does).  In fact, we hit number 451 today with the latest release, discussing the Epicurean distinction between mental and bodily pleasures.  So I thought I'd step back a bit, reflect, and write a few things about that video series (which I think will likely pass 500 videos early next year!)

Texts and Authors I'm Teaching This Fall

We're now at the end of Week 2 of the classes I'm teaching locally for Marquette University and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.  Many readers, viewers, subscribers, supporters, and other fans have expressed curiosity about the thinkers and texts we're covering in my Foundations in Philosophy (Marquette) and Philosophies of Human Nature (MIAD) classes, so I thought I'd take a bit of time and discuss those a bit.

There is a good bit of overlap in the material covered in these two classes, and there's several reasons for that.  Every one of the texts and authors we're reading and discussing is someone I think well worth engaging with for a student just beginning in philosophy.  Some of them are thinkers I've previously developed resources on when I taught them in the past, so I have good handouts, lesson page, or videos ready at hand. And, since I'm teaching a LOT this semester, I wanted to keep from having two entirely different preps for these two classes.

So for all of you who have been inquiring about my classes - and anyone else who is interested in the matter - here's the reading lists, followed by a bit more about new resources I'm developing not only for those academic classes, but also for my other online students, as well as for the general public.

Podcasting Has Begun!

Yesterday, I uploaded and released the first three files for my new podcast.  Three short lectures on key ideas in Plato's text, The Apology!  I've created a Soundcloud site, which you can access by clicking here.  You can also go to the Sadler's Sound Files blog where I'll be posting podcast episodes individually and most news about the podcast from this point on.

For years, viewers, subscribers, supporters, and other fans have been asking me if I would convert my massive and growing stock of online philosophy lecture videos into mp3 files.

There definitely are some advantages to doing so.  Many people listen to, as well as watch, my philosophy lectures and presentations.  But streaming video requires a lot more data than downloading a podcast.  So that's one good reason.  Another is that it affords me the chance to edit and improve the sound quality of many of the recordings.

It requires that I carve out additional time from my busy schedule, though, so for a long time that held me back.  What has made it possible now is reaching a sufficient level of support through crowdfunding (if you're interested in supporting my work, check out my Patreon site).  That effectively underwrites the time and work needed to produce the sound files.

I'm starting for the moment with converting videos on Plato into podcast lectures.  In the coming months you can expect to see episodes on six other main thinkers, three from ancient philosophy - Aristotle, Cicero, and Epictetus - and three from the Existentialist movement - Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.  I'm hoping to get 10-15 podcast episodes done per month, though greater support will help me work through the videos more quickly, and perhaps eventually get caught up with the videos

The People Have Spoken - Podcasts Start With Plato!

As I start writing this, we are about to hit a major milestone on Patreon.  Thanks to several recent generous pledges, and several longstanding supporters increasing their level of support, we are right on the threshold of another goal!  And once we pass it, I have committed to doing something major.

For several years, viewers, subscribers, followers, and other fans of my main YouTube channel have been asking me to convert those videos into podcast episodes that they could listen to on the go.  I'd say at this point, I've been asked about that well over 1,000 times.  Doing that sort of work takes a good bit of time, so I committed to starting that process once I reach a sufficient level of crowdfunding support on Patreon.  And now we're almost there! (if you'd like to get us over the line, here's where you can become a supporter).

I don't do a lot of "market research" when it comes to my various projects.  Actually, it would be more accurate to say that I do almost none.  I'm much more about studying and presenting the material in ways that are faithful to the texts and thinkers, rigorous but also accessible to the world-wide audience of people interested in philosophy.  Before starting up the podcast, though, I thought it might be prudent to get some input about what material I should start with,  So I ran a poll, and we've already got some useful results.

Video Lecture Sequence - Cicero's On Duties, Book 1

Last week, I finished creating a sequence of core concept videos focused specifically on topics within Marcus Tullius Cicero's work of Stoic ethics, On Duties.  I began shooting these last semester for my students enrolled in the two Ethics classes I was teaching for Marquette University. 

I typically include some Stoic ethics in my courses, and this time around I decided instead of having them read selections from Epictetus' Discourses, I would introduce them to Cicero instead.  On Duties provides a more systematic framework, which gives them a brief look at natural law theory as well as Stoic virtue ethics.

Hopefully these will be of use to others who would like to study a classic work of Stoic ethics.  Cicero himself was not a Stoic, but he drew heavily upon Stoic philosophy, and this book is a reworking and addition to an earlier work by Panaetius, the sixth leader of the Stoic school.

Here are the 22 videos, associated into sections by content, starting with the introductory material.  hopefully they will help viewers better understand the key ideas as they work their way through Cicero's On Duties.

• General Issues Concerning Duty
• Nature and Reason
• The Four Sources of the Right 

New Milwaukee Chapter of SOPHIA - And Our First Event!

Milwaukee now has a local chapter of SOPHIA!  This is a national organization devoted to bringing philosophy out of the academy and back into the public sphere.

For those of you in the area, we'd love for you to join us at our first event for the general public - Where Do Justice and Kindness Meet?

We will be meeting in the Community Room of the Milwaukee Public Library - Central Branch.  The event begins at 1:30 PM, and runs until about 4:00 PM on Saturday, March 17.  To sign up for this event, to learn more, or to join our local SOPHIA chapter, go to our Meetup page.

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 of the literature discussing and presenting Stoic doctrines.  Anyone who wants to understand what Stoics actually taught and thought about the virtues can check out the discussions in Diogenes Laertes, Lives of the Philosophers, book 7 - which focuses entirely on the Stoic school - or in Arius Didymus' Epitome of Stoic Ethics.

Another excellent place to go is the works of Marcus Tullius Cicero, who - although not a Stoic himself - certainly viewed their moral philosophy in a positive light.  He provides not only their views, but also many of their arguments, in work after work.  One book that is particularly important for understanding how the Stoics came up with their four virtues is On Duties.

I taught book 1 of that work last semester, in my Ethics classes at Marquette University.  As I typically do, I created some new core concept videos on key ideas from On Duties for my students.  These below focus on the four virtues and how the Stoics derived a proper understanding of each of these virtues from consideration of basic features and impulses of human nature.

• Cicero On Nature and Reason
• Cicero on The Four Sources of the Right
• Cicero On Wisdom as the First Source of Duty
• Cicero On Justice as the Second Source of Duty
• Cicero on Courage as the Third Source of Duty
• Cicero on Temperance as the Fourth Source of Duty

You'll notice - as you read the early chapters of book 1 of On Duty - that Cicero and the Stoics aren't arbitrarily picking these four virtues out of a hat.  Each of them is a main mode of distinctively human excellence, rooted in our common and complex human nature.

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 - she's a big, muscular, energetic dog - and when I said "she's showing off her ball to you," his face brightened, he smiled, petted her briefly, and strode off visibly changed in his body language.

That brought home to me important but often overlooked aspect of Stoic moral theory.  When you read the classic authors - Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius - you'll see a good bit of advice that one ought to display attitudes of kindness, friendliness, and cheerfulness towards others.  Is this merely about being "nice," observing social conventions, getting along and fitting in?   For classical Stoicism, the answer is No.  When genuine or authentic, such attitudes, feelings, and actions actually comprise an integral part of virtue or moral goodness.

I was particularly reminded of a discussion by an earlier writer, Marcus Tullius Cicero, who was not himself a member of the Stoic school, but who admired and appreciated many of their doctrines.  His book, On Duties, presents Stoic moral theory systematically and in great detail.  In his discussion of the virtues - morally good states of character a person ought to develop and act in accordance with - he sets alongside justice a disposition we can call "kindness,"  "benevolence," or "charity" (he uses the terms benevolentia and beneficientia, "willing good" and "doing good" to another).  What my dog did, without giving it a thought, and in an admittedly small way, reflects what the Stoics think we ought to do - how we ought to act - with our fellow human beings.

Just Reached 100 Videos On Stoic Philosophy!

In the last two weeks, I have released five short videos discussing key ideas of Cicero's Stoic Paradoxes.  Here's where two main focuses of my work in recent years come together.  One of these involves studying, applying, and teaching about Stoic philosophy.  The other is producing popular online videos on a wide range of thinkers, texts, and topics in philosophy.

Adding in those Stoic Paradoxes videos to the many others I have created brings the total today to exactly 100!  I don't expect to rest on my laurels - I'll be producing many more! - but I do feel that reaching that number is a significant milestone that deserves some celebration.

You can find all 100 videos assembled in one massive YouTube playlist - Ancient Philosophy: The Stoic School - but for those who would like that list broken down into categories, you can find some of those below.  In addition to that - for any viewers who would like to support my ongoing video production - I'll put in a plug for my new Patreon page.

10 Famous Lines By Philosophers You Should Definitely Read

Every once in a while, a philosopher comes up with a great line, a saying that for one reason or another "sticks", so well that many - even most - of the people who employ the saying couldn't tell you which work the quip came from.  Why is that?  In most cases, it is because they haven't read that philosopher's work, or perhaps anything by that philosopher.  They just know - or rather, think they know - that the philosopher said it.  And it sounds cool, or apropos, or at least relevant.

After seeing yet one more person start out a post ostensibly focused on gratitude by citing Cicero - who did in fact say that gratitude is the "parent of the other virtues" - a post that made it clear that the author either had never read Cicero, or if she did, had managed to forget everything that she had read, I decided it was time, rather than to silently curse the intellectual darkness again, to shed a bit of light.

I put out a challenge in three of the social media platforms I use - Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. Here it is: What quotations of philosophers, in your view, best meet these four criteria:

1) the passage is posted online fairly often
2) the passage was actually said somewhere by that philosopher
3) almost none of the the people posting the quote would be able to say what work it comes from
4) most of the people posting the quote have not read more than a bit of that philosopher's actual work

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 tendency to focus on the positive effects of gratitude on the life, the attitude, even the physical health of the grateful person.

I wonder myself at times whether we really ought to include "gratitude" among the virtues, or whether -  as I've argued elsewhere about forgiveness - we ought instead better regard it as something connected with and flowing from virtues, but not actually a virtue in its own right.  That's a topic on which I admittedly need to do more thinking.  But, one thing I have been reflecting upon quite a bit lately, is what gratitude ought to look like.  Or, you might say, how far it ought to extend in attitude and action, if it is really to be gratitude.

Stoic Week 2014

Last year, I unfortunately allowed an opportune occasion -- the best kind, organized by someone else! -- for celebrating a philosophical school pass me by.  It's not often that we philosophers get a day, let alone an entire week, set aside as a public observance.  November actually contains both of those -- first UNESCO World Philosophy Day and then towards the end of the month, Stoic Week.

The latter is much newer, having started in 2012, organized by a number of interested and intrepid scholars, professors, and practitioners at the University of Exeter who realized just how much interest there is out there among the general educated public in not only Stoic philosophy but also in its applications and practice within modern life.

I'm not a Stoic as such myself -- and likely won't ever be such, strongly drawn as I am to other philosophical traditions which, on some points, view matters differently than do Stoics.  But there is a considerable amount that I do find admirable, interesting, and valuable in the doctrines, reasonings, and practices of that school -- and it's a philosophical approach that I do end up teaching about quite frequently -- so Stoic Week seemed like a prime opportunity for me to focus my own work on Stoicism for a bit.

Symposia, Then and Now

Some time back, it was proposed to me to give a talk of some sort for students at the Culinary Institute of America's Feasting and Foraging event, a day devoted to discussion, demonstration, and even some experiential learning focused on ancient ways of food production and everything that went with that.  I brainstormed through several topics that might fit the overall theme -- Aristotle's discussion of modes of food production and the ways of life they make possible, the still-controversial thesis that fermentation of alcoholic beverages was a major motive for early agriculture. . . . and then decided to propose a talk about drinking parties -- symposia -- a term which we now associate with rather stolid, well-organized, academic affairs.

I proposed, they accepted, and then fortuitously things came together -- one of the instructors at the culinary, a specialist in the history of alcoholic beverages -- had decided to brew up a batch of hard apple-maple cider, and it was determined that we would have a bit of a "drinking-party" (in which the of-age students could participate).  Towards the end of the day, we'd all gather, there'd be a tasting (well, more than simply a tasting, since there turned out to be enough cider for everyone to have several small glasses), and I'd give a fairly informal, interactive talk focusing on what Greek symposia were really like, and contrasting our present-day, academic symposium with the ancient symposium.