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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Six Podcast Episodes on Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism Is a Humanism

One text I teach frequently is Jean-Paul Sartre's succinct summary of his version of Existentialism, his popular lecture "Existentialism is a Humanism".  Over the summer, I took the six lecture videos I created for my students, and turned them into downloadable podcast episodes.

So anywhere you can listen to mp3s, you can learn about Sartre's classic explanation of what Existentialism is, what it means to live as an Existentialist, and the scope of human freedom.

Here are those six episodes - about an hour and a half total of podcast:

• Existence Precedes Essence
• Anguish, Abandonment and Despair
• Criterionless Choice
• Choice and Responsibility
• Persons, Projects, and Actions
• Two Kinds of Humanism

To listen to more podcast episodes - so far on Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Epictetus, and Kierkegaard (with many other thinkers and works yet to come) - you can go to my Soundcloud channel, or find them on iTunes or GooglePlay.

Five Videos on Thomas Aquinas on Happiness

I created another set of short lecture videos for my students, enrolled in my Introduction to Philosophy and my Foundations in Philosophy classes, focused on a key discussion by Thomas Aquinas in question 2 of the First Part of the Second Part of his Summa Theologiae.  It is often called the "treatise on happiness", and that is the focus of those discussions.  What is the nature of human happiness?  What - among the things that people think will make them happy - really does make human beings happy? 

Here are those five videos, which I released early to my Patreon supporters last month:

• Wealth and Human Happiness
• Honor, Fame. and Power and Happiness
• Pleasure and Human Happiness
• Goods of Body or Soul and Happiness
• Can Any Created Good Be Happiness?

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

Eight Videos On Blaise Pascal's Pensées

Some time back, I decided to shoot some core concept videos on one of my favorite books of philosophy, Blaise Pascal's unfinished but brilliant work, the Pensées.  It's a work that I first encountered back in graduate school, and have often drawn upon, but don't often have a pretext to teach (perhaps I should find one!) in my classes.

The Pensées is a pretty lengthy and quite complex work, so what I've done in these seven videos is in some respects just scratching the surface.  Some of the ideas and arguments, though, are among those Pascal is best remembered for.  I hope eventually to return to the text and produce a number of additional videos covering key ideas and distinctions in it.

For the time being, here are those eight videos

• The Intuitive Mind and the Mathematical Mind 
• Correcting By Revealing One-Sidedness
• Diversions, Happiness, and Misery
• Self-Love and Aversion to Truth
• The Two Infinites
• What Tyranny Consists In
• The Philosophers' God and the God of Faith
• The Wager About God's Existence

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.  

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.

Philosophy Pop-Ups From September

Back in August, I started a new side project - doing live Philosophy Pop-Up sessions online.  I held the second set earlier this month.  For each of these, I pick a topic to start with, log on to either Facebook Live or YouTube Live, start talking about the topic, and then start responding to viewers' questions or comments.

Last month, we started out talking about Martin Heidegger's philosophy.  This month, I tackled a topic I'm currently writing a book about - Stoicism and its central focus on "living in accordance with nature".  We had several hundred people watching these live sessions - and quite a few of those people leaving comments or asking questions - so I extended the time from the originally planned 30-40 minutes to over an hour for each.

These are indeed "pop-ups" - I announce them in my social media on the day that I'm holding them.  I do make an exception for my Patreon supporters, as a perk for them - I let them know at the start of the month the day and time when each of the Philosophy Pop-Ups will take place.  (If you're interested in supporting my work - and getting some of those cool perks - here's my Patreon page).

Next month, since we'll be having Stoic Week, I'm also going to focus on something Stoic-related.  I haven't quite decided on the topic - quite likely I'll poll my Patreon supporters to tap their insights about it.  But you can bet there will be two more of these sessions in October - one on Facebook Live, the other on YouTube Live.

For those who missed the sessions this month, here are the video-recordings.

So, if you're not a Patreon supporter, you'll want to stay tuned to my Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or LinkedIn social media presence - I'll be announcing both of the October sessions on Stoicism earlier in the day of those Philosophy Pop-Ups!

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.

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.

Free Class on Epictetus' Enchiridion at the ReasonIO Academy!

Over the years, I've worked with a number of online platforms, exploring their various potentials for widening access and enhancing learning for students worldwide - these include YouTube, Moodle, Curious, Coursmos, and Outschool.

We've now created a new learning space on another platform, Teachable - the ReasonIO Academy - and I'm happy to be able to write a bit about the first course I've developed there - Epictetus' Enchiridion:  Ancient Philosophy & Peace of Mind.

Students can enroll in this course for FREE, and they get access to 22 videos, 16 downloadable handouts and worksheets, and a host of other resources (quizzes, reflection questions, discussion forums, lesson pages, curated links. . .)  So, why create this course?  And why offer it for free?

Stoic Comedy and Commentary

A few years back, I came across some of an Australian comedian, Michael Connell's, philosophically-focused comedy routines on YouTube.  After I emailed him and proposed having a chat sometime, we ended up not only doing that, but also carrying on an online correspondence and occasionally collaborating on various projects where our skills and interests intersected.

The first of these collaborations took place on my long-since-lapsed philosophy forum series.  Back then, I was experimenting with Google Hangouts on Air, and so I proposed that Michael and I discuss philosophy and comedy.  Each of us was a seasoned professional in one field and an interested amateur in the other, and it went quite well, I think.

Since then, Michael has been developing a lot more philosophy-informed content - really excellent stuff! - including a short bit with him dressed like the Stoic Emperor, Marcus Aurelius.  More recently, he released his much longer Stoic Comedy Special.   He's also engaged in some thoughtful and illuminating discussion about what attracted him to Stoic philosophy, how he managed to fit it into his comedy work and his life, and what implications it has had for his own craft.

New Online Epictetus Course Enrolling!

I'm very happy to be able to report that we now have a third online ReasonIO course starting up soon, and enrolling now - focused on a set of classic Stoic texts  Epictetus' Enchiridion and Discourses!

The class begins officially on Sunday, July 24 with the introductory class sessions (carried out through video-conferencing), but I'll be opening the first course modules a week for students before the class starts.  It is a six-week, entirely online

We'll be starting the course with some general discussion of Stoicism as a movement, and then focusing on the shorter work, the Enchiridion for the entire first week.  Each week following that, we will work through one of the four books of the Discourses.  Then, we'll finish with a full week devoted to further in-depth discussion of student-selected topics in Epictetus' Stoic philosophy.

Plato's Symposium Class Now Enrolling

As the Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics class gets close to finishing up, we've opened up enrollment for another online class, this time on Plato's Symposium!

I'm very happy to be teaching this 4-week entirely online class again with a new group of students for a number of reasons, but I'll just mention two of those reasons here.

One of them is that this is a Platonic dialogue that I'm particularly interested in.  Each time that I teach it, I learn something new in the process.  And I love initiating new readers into this very rich, complexly crafted philosophical text - getting to see their own reactions, their puzzles, and eventually their own articulated understanding of the speeches Plato places in his character's mouths, all about that most important of topics - Love.

Our Move Back To Milwaukee

Three weeks ago, my wife and I (and our aging dogs) finished a long-planned move from Kingston, NY to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The trip took two very long days of driving, and some adventures (which you can hear about in this video, if you're so inclined), and moving everything into our new apartment took the entirety of a day as well.

Both Andi and I maintain some pretty heavy workloads, with a lot of deadlined projects -- and in her case, ten days away in California for her work -- so the process of unpacking and entirely settling in has taken considerably longer than we'd anticipated.  But, we are definitely back home!  I imagine that many of my readers, viewers, subscribers, and so forth, might be curious about why we moved to this particular Midwestern city, and what this move means for the future.  So there's probably no better place to write about that then here, in the longest-established of all of my blogs.

Understanding Anger - Lecture 3: Plato on Anger

The series "Understanding Anger" continued with the third installment -- a lecture focused now not on literary or religious texts, as the previous two were, but on a philosophical perspective upon the emotion of anger.  At least in Western Philosophy, Plato is one of the first philosophers to devote sustained -- though not exactly systematic -- attention to anger in his works.

To be sure, there were a few pre-Socratic philosophers who made isolated, though interesting remarks about anger, but those don't provide enough to say that we have any real articulated perspective upon anger and the many other phenomena with which it is -- or can be -- connected.  In Plato's works, we find considerably more intellectual resources available -- as I discussed in my talk (the video of which you can see here).

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.

Another Anselm Lecture

I'm finally getting around to posting this here in Orexis Dianoētikē -- I can plausibly plead as an excuse  the pressures imposed by (attempting) solid work in my ongoing classes -- a recent lecture I've given on Saint Anselm of Canterbury. 

This particular talk, with some very lively Q & A at the end, comes from the recent conference focused on the question "Must Morality Be Grounded Upon God," hosted by the Franciscan University of Steubenville (incidentally -- and this is entirely off topic -- incorporating the name of one of my long-time heroes, the Baron Von Steuben, drillmaster to the budding Continental Army during our American Revolution).



In this talk, I answer the question structuring the conference with some typically Anselmian, "let's make some distinctions. . .  and then Yes. . .  and No" -- but more Yes than No in Anselm's case.

I'm not entirely happy with the shape of the paper, some I'm loath to upload it into my usual channels like Academia.edu or GoogleDrive -- once I've reworked it, added all the references it need, and I'm satisfied with it, I'll definitely post a copy for public viewing.

There's a reason I rather tongue-in-cheek call this post "another Anselm lecture" -- I've given quite a few of them over the last five years.  Here's a representative sampling:

• A Personalist Aspect of Saint Anselm's Metaphysics
• Non Modo Verbis Sed Et Verberibus: Saint Anselm on Punishment, Violence and Coercion
• What Kind of Moral Theory Does St. Anselm Hold? 
• Freedom, Inclinations of the Will, and Virtue in Anselm’s Moral Theory 
• A Perfectly Simple God and Our Complicated Lives: The 2008 Saint Anselm Lecture 
• Justice as a Degree of Ontological Dignity: An Anselmian Problematic and Solution

All of these are supposed in one way or another to feed into the book project I started years back, specifically devoted to systematically reconstructing and setting out Anselm's moral theory.  Although I've written several chapters, work on that particular project moves slower than I'd like.  But, that -- as well as additional work on translating the De Similitudinibus and the Dicta Anselmi -- are matters to which I plan to give much attention this coming summer and fall.

Recent Talk: Jeremy Bentham's Philosophy of Action

Earlier this month, I delivered a talk digging into a set of topics I've been interested in for quite some time -- the Utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham's philosophy of action -- as part of the Marist College Philosophy and Religious Studies Speaker Series.




I've taught Bentham's Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation for some time in my Ethics classes (you can watch video lectures from those classes, and shorter Core Concept videos here), and I've often been struck by just how much attention he devotes to analysing elements of moral live and action which we don't usually associate with Utilitarian moral theory -- intentions, motives, dispositions, even (in his later works) virtues and vices. I decided it was a topic well worth researching and presenting on, and an opportunity to start reading through some of Bentham's less often perused, more mature works.

 As it turned out, the audience was primarily composed of undergraduate non-majors, so I tailored my examples and discussion to them.  For the very first time in my career, I was surprised that, after the talk, nobody had any questions, including the philosophy faculty who attended -- when I asked them about it later, their unanimous reply was that the presentation was so clear as to preclude any need for questions.

Here are the slides for the presentation.

Streamlining Life, Thinking, and Writing

If you're a long-term reader of this blog -- or of my other main philosophy blog, Virtue Ethics Digest -- you may have noticed a relative paucity of posts over the last year or so, a lower degree of productivity (or at least prolixity) than previously.  If you're a new reader to this blog, of course, you need only look to the sidebar post archive list, where you can see the numbers.  In either case, you might wonder why that has been the case, and whether or not this is the "new normal," as they say.

You might also have noticed a rather startling change to the look and even feel and function of the blog.  It started out as something like a playground or preserve for philosophical musings and rants, and for about two years I've done more or less what I liked with aesthetics, content,  even eventually scheduling.  Really a decision -- or at least a dissatisfaction -- coming down the pike for a long time, matters finally came to a head this Thanksgiving break, as I reflected on what else I've wanted to do with Orexis Dianoētikē, what I wanted to make of it.  I wanted something considerably more disciplined, focused, well-integrated with my other projects and purposes . . .  streamlined, you might say.  That's reflective of a broader resolve, one extending to (and through) numerous aspects of my own life, incorporating Orexis Dianoētikē within that larger reorientation.