Worlds of Speculative Fiction Session 50 - R. Scott Bakker's The Darkness That Comes Before

This Saturday, we will host the first of our three sessions in the Worlds of Speculative Fiction series focused on R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing trilogy (which is part of his larger Second Apocalypse series).  The session will start at Noon Central Time on Saturday, March 13.

As always in covid-19 times, the session is entirely online, and consists of two parts:

• At 12 PM Central, the video I produced on The Darkness That Comes Before will premiere in my YouTube channel.  I'll be engaging in live chat with viewers as they watch and listen to the video.  Here's the link for that.
• At 1:40 PM Central, viewers who are interested are invited to hop on to a Zoom session to continue the conversation about this great book and the series.  Here's the link for that.

We'll be continuing on the next two months with the second and third book in the series, The Warrior Prophet and The Thousandfold Thought.  If you're a fan of this eminently philosophical fantasy writer and worldbuilder, I hope you can join us for these sessions!

Eight Lecture Videos on Plato's Republic book 4

A number of years back, I created two core concept videos - drawn from my classroom discussions - about some of the key issues in Plato's Republic book 4.  This is a particularly important part of the work, for in it, Socrates finally makes good on his promise to tell the other characters of the dialogue his answer to the central question - what is justice?

All of Socrates' lead-up in sketching an ideal city (actually, if you read closely in book 2, the second-best ideal city) - with the idea that the city is a person's soul writ large - bears fruit in Plato's analysis of the soul, its parts, and their functions.

That Republic book 4 analysis of the tripartite soul, and of the four cardinal virtues associated with the parts of the soul, becomes massively influential throughout ancient and medieval philosophy (and theology as well), exercising influence within and without the specifically Platonic tradition.  So studying this part of the work - enjoyable in its own sake - is also important for understanding the history of ideas.

Here are those eight videos:

• Happiness of Citizens and the City
• Plato's City and The Parts of the Soul
• Distinguishing Parts of the Soul
• The Cardinal Virtues in Parts of the Soul
• The Virtue of Courage
• The Virtue of Temperance
• The Virtue of Justice
• Injustice, Overreaching, and Faction

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Short Piece In The Stoic - A Time to Practice Stoic Virtues

Here's my short piece recently published in The Stoic.  I plan to expand it and publish that version in my Medium publishing site in the next week or so.  For the time being, here's the current version.

Widespread Shutdowns 

At the time that I write this, midway through March, responses to COVID19 have shut down a good part of Milwaukee. As in many other places, students have been sent home from schools, colleges, and universities and classes have shifted online. Concerts and sporting events have been cancelled. Libraries, community centers, health clubs, even courthouses have been closed. Many office buildings have emptied, allowing employees to work from home.

Stores sold out of foodstuffs, cleaning items, and toilet paper, and reduced their hours. Bars, restaurants, and cafes began to close. We hosted the last show of our community radio station, WXRW, which then closed until the crisis ends. Social distancing and self-quarantining have become the order of the day for many.

Stoic Guidance 

One of Stoicism’s benefits for its practitioners is providing a systematic and consistent approach to changing conditions and challenges of life. So in times marked by illness, fear, and uncertainty, it provides us with a host of useful responses and reminders.

Epictetus articulated one of those in telling us in Enchiridion 10 that whatever we encounter, we can ask ourselves what capacities we have to deal with it, and we can employ those capacities in order not to simply respond to appearances or impressions, but to behave in a more rational way. Among the capacities that Epictetus names are self-control, fortitude, and patience, each of which is among the virtues.

We should ask ourselves: what capacities do we need in our own present situation? During this COVID-19 crisis, each of the four cardinal virtues of Stoicism is needed in specific ways, helping us deal properly with the challenges the virus poses. And not just the virus itself, but also the unusual conditions it imposes upon us, the reactions of other people, and our own emotional responses to all of these.

Wisdom 

Wisdom or prudence indicates to us what we ought or ought not do, informs our decision-making, and helps us maintain a sense of proportion. Being prudent in the time of COVID-19 means maintaining “information hygiene,” acquiring genuine and reliable information and sticking with it, drawing the right inferences from it, and resisting temptations to spread misinformation.

Justice 

Justice is another needed virtue. For the Stoics, justice is not just a matter of following the right rules, fulfilling commitments, or treating people fairly—for instance not engaging in hoarding resources, whether out of fear or greed. It equally includes kindness towards others, going beyond merely what is expected of one to actively help others in need. Looking in on one’s neighbors, while maintaining requisite distance, for example.

Temperance 

Temperance is needed as well. Living on one’s own, in voluntary quarantine, pulled out of the fabric of one’s routines and interactions requires exercising some self-control, moderation, not just frittering one’s time away, or emotionally eating through one’s stocks.

Fortitude 

And that leads us to fortitude. As Cicero points out in On Duties, while fortitude does involve choosing to do what is right, needed, or noble in the face of fear, it applies to other emotions like anger, sadness, disgust, or desire as well. Virtue is not just a temporary fix We ought to remind ourselves about the need for these virtues not just during this crisis, but after it ends, for the rest of our lives.

Ten Videos on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Earlier this spring, as the semester was coming to a close, and I was getting ready for my online 6-week Existentialist Philosophy and Literature class (developed and taught for the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, now in its 5th week), I shot a sequence of new lecture videos on a classic and extremely influential Existentialist work.

It's one that my subscribers, viewers, followers, and other fans have been asking me to produce videos about for years - Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra!  I decided to make part one of that book a required reading for the online class (with the Genealogy of Morals a supplemental text)

I've just finished releasing all of those videos, so I thought I'd set links to them all in one place. Here are those videos:

• The Superman and Man as a Bridge
• The Last Man
• The Three Metamorphoses
• Suffering and the Afterworld
• The Virtues and One's Own Virtue
• The Body and the Spirit
• War and Warriors
• The Solitary Person
• Values and Valuation
• The State and Superfluous People

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 

Plato's Treatment of Anger

In my last post, I brought up the emotional response of anger as a topic tangentially touched on -- but never worked out in systematic detail by Plato.  Not surprisingly, given the master dialogue-writer's skill  not only in leading the reader through complexities of dialectic, but in bringing before our eyes living characters, believable situations -- the sorts of encounters and exchanges in which moral discussion so often does take place -- anger does get mentioned in a variety of contexts within many of his dialogues.  I dedicated the last post mainly to enumerating instances of anger, to classifying those instances, and then to examining two sides of the same coin: who gets angry (or could get angry) in the dialogues, and who does not get angry (even though they could have)?

This follow-up post intends to dig deeper into the Plato's texts and thought, determining just how much of a systematic theoretical perspective on anger could actually be derived from those scattered passages.  It's certainly nothing as well-developed or complex as, say, Aristotle's treatment, nor for that matter even one comparable to Epictetus' Stoic perspective -- but it's nevertheless of interest.  Plato only briefly discusses what we might call the "somatic mechanics" of the passion. But he does devote some thought to the psychological workings of anger -- how it arises, what part of our soul or personality it arises within, why people become and stay angry -- and he does consider moral dimensions of it as well -- including questions such as: Is anger a bad or good thing? When should or shouldn't we be angry? -- but also extending to the very connection between anger and moral values.

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 of the classic (1982) version of Conan the Barbarian, 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 imagery and representation where color and optical illusions sway the spectator the way eloquence and rhetoric sway the listener. . . . John Milius accomplishes what a film-maker tries to do – that is, he is able to draw the spectator into the world of images he created. Once we’re there into that world, we are then in a position to reflect upon the themes that undergird the movie, as you point out.

He goes on to explore this distinction in a bit more detail, culling out its implications for several different movies:

Six Dimensions to Anger in Aristotle

A week ago, I gave a talk at Marist College (slides, handouts, and video), opening the cover, rifling through the pages, almost reading a few passages -- so to speak -- from a not-yet-existent book I'm in process of writing.  It still lacks a title or an introduction.  The organization of chapters, even their ordering, shifts occasionally, attaining new configurations as the research, reflection and writing continue.   But, the subject matter remains a constant -- Anger, and Aristotle's understanding of it.  I've long been fascinated by this topic -- anger in general, but also in Aristotle's works, where that emotion, or set of affective responses, or virtue and vices, or . . .  you see how complex it already shows itself to be just when trying to categorize it . . . where anger plays an important role but never gets a full systematic treatment.

Back when I was regularly contributing a set of posts on anger here -- straying rather eclectically through pieces on Epictetus, John Cassian, Anselm of Canterbury, and Martin Luther King -- I devoted two to Aristotle (one and two) in which I praised his complex, attentive, nuanced approach to anger.  Without being very explicit about this, Aristotle clearly distinguished between anger as understood from different vantage points.  At the time I wrote those posts, my view was that there were three main dimensions to the Aristotelian treatment of anger.  Now, after much reconsideration -- and this is what my talk was about -- I actually now think that there are six distinct dimensions of analysis contained in Aristotle's texts -- main books concerning anger comprising a surprisingly large list: Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, Rhetoric, Politics, and the De Anima, with yet others contributing interesting reflections upon the topic as well.

Conan the Barbarian, Mark II

Spoiler Alert -- tongue in cheek, because for reasons I will soon set out, what I'll inevitably reveal about the plot and events of the new Conan movie are unlikely to ruin anyone's movie-going or -watching experience.  But on the off-chance that someone hasn't yet seen the movie who has been hankering to do so, and would be shocked or disappointed to learn what occurs in the face of dangers braved by Conan and his compatriots. . . well, they'll want to stop reading here, or at the break just below.  Or, if of easily offended sensibilities about our times and the inferiority of their cinematic products, right about now.

For the new Conan remake suffers under many of the same defects that typically plague relatively recent epic action, adventure, and combat movies -- when they are remakes or retellings, for then the comparisons to previous incarnations become inescapable.  These are not defects of choreography, special effects, costume, staging, casting, even acting -- all of those tend towards greater and greater triumphs.  The deficiencies, the decline, appear on a less glitzy and more fundamental level of storytelling, for they concern the all-important elements of plot and character.

Which ISME Do You Mean?

Last week, with my partner, I participated in and presented in an excellent, fruitful conference of one of the two ISME organizations with which I am involved.  There are, as it turns out, at least four associations bearing that acronym (as well as a women's fashion catalog, not surprising given that Philosophy also names a skin care product line, and Orexis a rather dubiously successful male enhancement pill).  I've been a longstanding member of the International Society for MacIntyrian Enquiry, and more recently became involved (in a currently much more amateur manner) with the International Society for Military Ethics.

Last week's conference was the meeting of the former organization -- and I'll write more in posts soon to come about selected highlights of those sessions -- but I was not the only attendant to belong to -- or even note the anacronymic ambiguity of -- the two organizations.  The MacIntyrian ISME as a matter of deliberate policy -- since this is in fact what the tradition-dependent moral inquiry Alasdair MacIntyre espouses requires -- invites keynote speakers who are not for the most part MacIntryre scholars or even admirers (sometimes, they are strong critics). One of the keynote speakers, James Connelly, began by noting that he was more accustomed to thinking of the second organization, in whose conversations, projects, inquiries, and debates he was very active.  His presentation dealt with two different fields of ethics, typically called and thought of under the rubric of "applied ethics":  military ethics and environmental ethics.  And the guiding question, which he developed into a stark and detailed contrast, was: what are thought of, spoken about, or advocated as "virtues" in these two fields?