Seven Podcast Episodes on Friedrich Nietzsche's Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense

One of the authors that my listeners and subscribers have been asking for consistently to be included in my Sadler's Lectures podcast is Friedrich Nietzsche.  In fact, he is a consistent favorite when I create polls about who I ought to produce content on next. 

One of his short essays that I shot a series of core concept videos about several years back is his "Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense," in which Nietzsche argues, among other things that truth itself is something invented:

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

He says a good bit more about truth and its presumed opposite, falsehood or lying, as well as about the workings and functions of our intellects, and the inescapability of metaphor. 

These seven podcast lectures run to about an hour-and-a-half - so you can download and listen your way through all of them in a workout or commute or two.  Here they are:

• Dissimulation and the Human Intellect
• The Invention of Truth and Lying
• What Is Truth?
• Metaphor, Language, and Concepts
• Rationality, Abstraction, and Anthropomorphism
• Idealism, Natural Law, and Science
• Myth, Art, Metaphor, and Intuition

I hope that you enjoy them and find them  thought-provoking!  

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New Circuit Meet The Old Circuit

So far, this has been the year of finally getting fit.  My wife enrolled us both in a local gym, and after about a month of watching her go regularly, I decided to start making the time myself.  That was about three months ago.

I started out doing just 40 minutes of cardio - elliptical, rowing, and treadmill - a few times a week.  My cardio workouts now last an hour - 20 minutes of elliptical, 20 of rowing, 10 of the side-stepper, and 10 on a significantly inclined treadmill.  I'm still not a fan of any of those, I have to admit.  But about a month in, I also added the weight machine circuit, and that sort of workout I can say I have come to enjoy, and even look forward to.

You might not know this, but "circuit training" and "weights circuit" are terms that decades back meant something quite different.  They're what, technically speaking, we call "equivocal" or "polysemic" - that is, they have multiple distinct meanings.  When I first started training in high school, and then continued it passionately through my army, college, work, and into my grad school days, I used that earlier meaning.  Then I got out of shape for years, and when I started exercising again, I did so on my own.  Not part of the gym culture, I had no idea that the terms had changed their signification and reference.  And so it was only recently that I learned what they now mean.  I had an experience tonight that brought the old meaning back to mind for me.