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.

Six Videos on Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism

I've been creating new core concept videos to use in my online 6-week Existentialism class (which starts in less than two weeks - countdown ticking!).  One of the texts that I'm using for that class is a classic of Existentialist literature: Jean-Paul Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism".

I already had two videos on that text, shot some time ago in one of my Marist Ethics classes, but knew that I would need to create some additional ones in order to cover the entire essay for my students.  So I produced another four last month, covering the additional topics that had been left out.

Here is the entire set of videos on "Existentialism is a Humanism":

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

I hope you find them useful!

Over 450 Videos in the Philosophy Core Concept Series

Since the beginning of the semester, I have been quite simply swamped with work!  In addition to teaching 5 different courses at 4 different academic institutions, I had my usual duties as editor of Stoicism Today - including Stoicon 2018 and Stoic Week - as well as a heavy load of speaking, meetings with clients, and consulting work.  I did manage to get some video production in there as well.

One type of video I've been routinely creating are "Philosophy Core Concepts".  These are short (10-25 minute) discussions of key ideas, arguments, or distinctions made by major philosophical thinkers.  They span the gamut from ancient philosophy down to 20th century thinkers (check out the list below).  I've produced quite a few of these.  Today, I took a look at the playlist, to see how many I'd done so far.

Over 450!  That's the number of the ones I've publicly released (my Patreon supporters get an early look at these videos before the general public does).  In fact, we hit number 451 today with the latest release, discussing the Epicurean distinction between mental and bodily pleasures.  So I thought I'd step back a bit, reflect, and write a few things about that video series (which I think will likely pass 500 videos early next year!)

Texts and Authors I'm Teaching This Fall

We're now at the end of Week 2 of the classes I'm teaching locally for Marquette University and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.  Many readers, viewers, subscribers, supporters, and other fans have expressed curiosity about the thinkers and texts we're covering in my Foundations in Philosophy (Marquette) and Philosophies of Human Nature (MIAD) classes, so I thought I'd take a bit of time and discuss those a bit.

There is a good bit of overlap in the material covered in these two classes, and there's several reasons for that.  Every one of the texts and authors we're reading and discussing is someone I think well worth engaging with for a student just beginning in philosophy.  Some of them are thinkers I've previously developed resources on when I taught them in the past, so I have good handouts, lesson page, or videos ready at hand. And, since I'm teaching a LOT this semester, I wanted to keep from having two entirely different preps for these two classes.

So for all of you who have been inquiring about my classes - and anyone else who is interested in the matter - here's the reading lists, followed by a bit more about new resources I'm developing not only for those academic classes, but also for my other online students, as well as for the general public.

Existential Freedom in Sartre's The Flies

Last month, I took part in an online discussion - hosted on the Noetic platform - about a classic Existentialist play by Jean-Paul Sartre, The Flies.  I was particularly happy after rereading the work several years back to have a similar experience to that in returning to a number of other Existentialist works that I originally read some years back, and now revisit with a perspective altered by time, maturation, and further study.  Sometimes works that I remember turn out not to possess the excellences I originally attributed to them.  In this case, however, the opposite is true.  I didn't appreciate The Flies as much when I first encountered it to the extent that I do in the present.

One of the central themes of the work - one running through pretty much every work in Sartre's corpus - is that of human freedom. As I'll explain in more detail below, Sartre maintained that freedom is both at the essence of what it is to be a human being, and emerges from and engages with the concrete situations or conditions of one's existence.  In this play, however, precisely because of the historical situation - the Nazi occupation of France - in which it was written and then presented to the public, there is a further resonance to the situations and choices of the characters, particularly those of Orestes and Electra on the one hand, and Zeus, Aegistheus, and Clytemnestra on the other.  

10 Famous Lines By Philosophers You Should Definitely Read

Every once in a while, a philosopher comes up with a great line, a saying that for one reason or another "sticks", so well that many - even most - of the people who employ the saying couldn't tell you which work the quip came from.  Why is that?  In most cases, it is because they haven't read that philosopher's work, or perhaps anything by that philosopher.  They just know - or rather, think they know - that the philosopher said it.  And it sounds cool, or apropos, or at least relevant.

After seeing yet one more person start out a post ostensibly focused on gratitude by citing Cicero - who did in fact say that gratitude is the "parent of the other virtues" - a post that made it clear that the author either had never read Cicero, or if she did, had managed to forget everything that she had read, I decided it was time, rather than to silently curse the intellectual darkness again, to shed a bit of light.

I put out a challenge in three of the social media platforms I use - Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. Here it is: What quotations of philosophers, in your view, best meet these four criteria:

1) the passage is posted online fairly often
2) the passage was actually said somewhere by that philosopher
3) almost none of the the people posting the quote would be able to say what work it comes from
4) most of the people posting the quote have not read more than a bit of that philosopher's actual work

Two Working Papers from the ACPA Conference

When I'm able to, I typically attend the American Catholic Philosophical Association, one of the larger and more important annual philosophy conferences in the United States.  As a graduate student and young professor, I started out giving papers in the main ACPA sessions (including these on Hegel, Blondel, Anselm, and Aristotle). In more recent (and busier) years, I've tended to miss the traditional April deadline for submitting papers.  But, I've also been asked to contribute papers for what are called "satellite sessions" -- which are, by the way, one of my favorite features of the ACPA conference.

This year, I was approached by several different organizations to give a paper at their satellite sessions, and I actually had to turn some down -- two is effectively the maximum for me.  The Gabriel Marcel Society and the International Etienne Gilson Society assembled their panels the quickest, so I committed to speaking during their sessions.