May AMA (Ask Me Anything) Session Tomorrow!

We have another of our online AMA - Ask Me Anything - sessions coming up tomorrow.  I started hosting these last year for my viewers, subscribers, readers, and other fans.  We use YouTube Live for these events, and you can access it by clicking on this link, once the session starts. You can even click on it now, and set up a reminder for the event.  The session will take place between 12-1 PM Central Time, this Saturday, May 12.


Usually there are already a few questions or comments lined up for me when the event starts.  And as it goes on, they do tend to accumulate a bit quicker than I can work through all of them.  So - just a bit of advice - if you want to be fairly sure that I'll get to your question or comment, you definitely want to ask it early on!  I don't always have the time to get to all of those people ask at the end (even with often going overtime in these sessions).

If you'd like to see the  previous sessions, engaged in fielding questions, addressing comments, even tackling complaints and confusions, here are the links to those previous six AMA sessions:

• Ask Me Anything Session 1 - September 2017
• Ask Me Anything Session 2 - December 2017
• Ask Me Anything Session 3 - January 2018
• Ask Me Anything Session 4 - February 2018
• Ask Me Anything Session 5 - March 2018
• Ask Me Anything Session 6 - April 2018

All the time and labor involved in these - and many other - free online events are underwritten by my Patreon supporters.  Their pledges help me earn a living for myself and my family doing work I love - making philosophy accessible to people of all walks of life, all over the world.  If you'd like to become a supporter, here's where you can do that.

October Philosophy Pop-Up Sessions

If you missed the monthly Philosophy Pop-Up Sessions we held online earlier on in October - before I got totally bogged down (not complaining - I love that stuff!) with Stoicon 2017, Stoicon-X Toronto, and Stoic Week - there's some good news for you!

In fact, there's two bits of good news.  The first is that I'll be doing another two Philosophy Pop-Ups this coming month of November.  Since I've got several other commitments focused on the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche coming up this month - a podcast episode, a webinar, and two online seminars - that will be the main theme for the pop-up sessions this time around.

All of my Patreon supporters find out the exact dates and times for these live events at the start of each month.  For everyone else, I announce the Philosophy Pop-Ups earlier on the day that we hold them - so you can check my social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google+) to find out when they are occurring.

The second bit of good news is that, since we hold these sessions through YouTube Live and Facebook Live, you can always go back and watch them later.  You can even write comments on the videos.  This month, the sessions focused on Stoicism, and specifically on Epictetus and what is called the "dichotomy of control".

Here are the videos from those two sessions:

Patreon Crowdfunding - Why I Created My Page

As some readers may already know, I recently made a Patreon page to support my work creating free high-quality philosophy content online.  The resources I've created - videos, blog posts, articles, handouts, even free courses, among others - have helped tens of thousands of people all over the world understand difficult philosophical ideas, thinkers, and texts.

That work demands considerable time, energy, and thought on my part - and I've been happy to devote all three of those over the last six years, not least because I see (and in many cases, read) how much of an impact resources I've developed and offered to the public for free have had on so many people's grades, minds, and even lives.

Actually, I can't take most of the credit for this impact on learners.  What allows me to create materials explaining philosophy to others is precisely the existence of those brilliant philosophers and rich texts that I focus upon!  Provided I do my own job well, it is really Plato, or Hegel, or Epictetus who is doing the heavy lifting  (as I've discussed in another post here).

Viewers, subscribers, and social media followers have been expressing gratitude for the work that I do, and some of them have been suggesting that I create a Patreon page to allow them to support that ongoing work in tangible ways.  So that's precisely what I've done - you can check it out here, or watch my video about it here.   If you enjoy my work or find it useful - and you want to give something back - or if you recognize the value it brings to many other people - and you want to help me continue and expand it - then you should consider becoming one of my Patreon supporters!

The Philosophy Fans Have Spoken!

It is an astounding number, but at this point, I have created over 300 short Philosophy Core Concept videos - check out the playlist here - covering a pretty extensive range of philosophers.

Looking to expand the figures that I included in the series, I decided to get some input from my viewers, subscribers, and social media followers.  So I created a poll.  And the results were quite interesting.

The philosophy fans have spoken!  It looks like this summer - in addition to the other video production I have planned - I'll be shooting, editing, and releasing a lot of new video content on three main thinkers, all of them German:  Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Nietzsche.  (By the way, I've also created a Patreon page to support that time-intensive video production work)

Half Hour Hegel Hits #100

One of the projects I started a bit over two years back - Half Hour Hegel - has crossed an important threshold.  The video lectures I've been creating, engaging in paragraph by paragraph commentary on G.W.F. Hegel's notoriously difficult Phenomenology of Spirit, now number in the triple digits.

With video #100, we're now just at the beginning of a lengthy section of the work, Reason (the second-longest portion of the text). We've gone through the Preface, the Introduction, the Consciousness section, and the Self-Consciousness section (which includes the famous Master-Slave dialectic).  So, although we're still early in the project as a whole, there's a pretty substantive digital commentary publicly available - for free - to anyone who has access to an internet connection and YouTube.

There are, of course (and thankfully!) some engaged fans and supporters who financially underwrite some of the work involved, through the Patreon site I set up to crowdfund this effort (if you'd like to see what's involved in creating one of these videos, here's one that I created walking viewers through the process).

It's quite a massive commitment and undertaking, likely to take me at least another three years of hard work to see through to the very end.  But, it's not only a project I view as an enjoyable challenge, but also hope will provide a useful commentary that will assist people in studying Hegel for decades to come.