I'm hosting another online AMA (Ask Me Anything) session tomorrow.  It starts at noon Central Time, and runs for about an hour-and-a-half.  (I started out scheduling them for an hour, but they've always ended up running over due to the number of questions and comments that I end up getting).

Here's the video page for the session - if you click through to it, you can set yourself a reminder so that you don't miss the event.


If your goal is to get one of your questions asked and answered, you'll probably want to get there early in the session.  As the time goes on, the comments and questions start to come in faster and faster, and when I realize we're close to the end of the session, I start looking for ones I can answer fairly easily to cap it off.  I've never succeeded in getting to all of the questions and comments in any given session.

If you'd like to watch and listen to any of the earlier AMA sessions - you can also see what all the questions and comments were for that session by looking at the chat replay on the left side of the screen - here's a link to a playlist containing all of them.

The work involved in these 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.

A Milestone - 500 Core Concept Videos!

Years back, I started producing a new kind of video, in a series I called Philosophy Core Concepts.  After seeing the hour-long videos I recorded in my Critical Thinking, Introduction to Philosophy, and Ethics classes take off, I started thinking about other sorts of videos I might produce that would be useful for my students and for other viewers worldwide.

There were already quite a few short (anywhere from 2-10 minutes), often quite high-production videos on topics and thinkers in philosophy.  But in my view, they were pretty hit and miss.  Some of them could be quite good.  Many of them were actually poorly informed, misleading, or biased.  And then, there were a lot in between.  That's not surprising.  Two things are needed to successfully teach about philosophy in videos.  You've got to really know what you're talking about.  And you've got to give people enough actual content - which then requires a longer amount of time.

I decided to stick with my low-tech, minimally produced approach - if the content is actually engaging, even without animations, sound effects, and the like, people will want to watch it - and started creating these new Core Concept videos.  They range between 10-30 minutes in length.  In format, it's just me in front of the chalkboard, presenting one key idea, distinction, argument, account or other bit of philosophy, from some important thinker.

You can see the entire playlist by clicking here.  Scroll down and you'll find a number of videos on a variety of philosophers from Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern, 19th Century, and 20th Century philosophy.  So far, I've created videos on Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, Augustine, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Soren Kierkegaard, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, W.D. Ross, Ayn Rand, Alasdair MacIntyre, Viriginia Held, James Rachels, and Rosemarie Tong.

Over the years, I have invested in better lighting, a voice recorder, and a superior camera, but I've kept the approach consistent.  Short videos with me lecturing engagingly in front of a chalkboard with notes on it.  I plan to keep on shooting these - they're a valuable resource for the classes I teach, and other people find them useful as well - expanding the series well past the 1,000 video mark.  There are quite literally hundreds of texts and dozens of additional thinkers I'd like to cover.

A bit later today, I'll be hosting a YouTube Live session to celebrate this milestone with my viewers, fans, and subscribers.  If you'd like to join in on that - and get to vote about the area you'd most like to see me focused on for videos in the near future - you can click here to find out more (and set up a reminder for yourself). 

On a final note, if you'd like to support my ongoing work in producing these valuable educational resources, there's two ways you can do that.  To become a monthly supporter, click here to go to my Patreon page.  If you'd like to make a one-time donation, you can do that here through Paypal.

AMA Session Coming Up Today

We have the next AMA - Ask Me Anything - online session coming up later toda for my viewers, subscribers, supporters, and other fans.  It's scheduled at 12:00 PM Central Time. Here's the site for the session - you can set a reminder notification for it on that page - just click the video below.

If you have questions you'd like to ask me, make sure to get them in early on.  I'll keep the session open for an hour and a half, but we invariably end with a number of later-asked questions unanswered.

If you'd like to see any of the previous AMA sessions, here is the list of all of the ones we've held so far.  I expect there's probably the answers to several hundred questions in there.

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
Ask Me Anything Session 7 - May 2018

Ask Me Anything Session 8 - June 2018

Ask Me Anything Session 9 - July 2018

Ask Me Anything Session 10 - August 2018

Ask Me Anything Session 11 - September 2018

Ask Me Anything Session 12 - October 2018

Ask Me Anything Session 13 - November 2018

Ask Me Anything Session 14 - December 2018

Ask Me Anything Session 15 - January 2019
Ask Me Anything Session 16 - February 2019

The work involved in these 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.

Long Post Sum-Up: Don't Give Time to Jerks

As I move Orexis Dianoētikē away from longer essays, I'm shifting that writing activity to other platforms.  

These include Medium, where I published a post earlier today, Don’t Give Them Time.  It's the first in what will be a series of posts on dealing with (you almost think) deliberately difficult, and downright jerkish people in the online world.

Since this blog is now intended for updates and shorter pieces, what I'll do when I publish a longer piece is either summarize or excerpt from it here.  So, here's a passage from the crux of the essay.

[T]his is just the start of my setting down my thoughts about these matters, so I haven’t got some comprehensive, systematically worked out, debated-with-the-decent take on all of this. I do, however, have one main insight about how to handle the contentious, the tendentious, the “debate me bro!” types. 

Jerks don’t get time. 

Or if they do get time, it’s the minimum possible. 

When they do get it, time allotted to them comes after others get attended to.

The basic idea is that all too often, those of us who are devoted to online engagement in substantive conversations get suckered into the idea that we somehow owe our time (and thought, and attention, and emotions, and. . . ) to anyone who happens to come along. 

We don't.  And time is a resource that not only is always in short supply, but that we ought to devote to those who deserve it more than online jerks.  I've been making that a practice, and I'm finding it quite a useful strategy for properly using my time.