Eight Podcast Episodes on The Introduction to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time

One of the most recent series in the Sadler's Lectures podcast - discussing the key ideas from the Martin Heidegger's Introduction to his early work, Being and Time - emerged out of polling my viewers, listeners, and other followers about which thinkers they'd like to hear next in the podcast.  Heidegger was definitely a favorite!

The eight podcast episodes linked to here take the listener through the key ideas and discussions of that introduction.  One of the more difficult aspects of Heidegger's writings for most readers and listeners is the terminology he introduces, uses, and plays around with - and my lectures focus on unpacking and explaining what Heidegger means.

All told, these eight episodes amount to about 2 hours and 20 minutes of downloadable lectures which you can listen to wherever you want and learn about Martin Heidegger's work.

• The Question Of The Meaning Of Being
• Ontic And Ontological 
• The Existential Analysis Of Dasein 
• Interpretations Of Dasein And Temporality 
• The Concept Of Phenomenon 
• The Concept Of Logos 
• The Concept Of Phenomenology 
• Dasein, History, And Tradition 

Session 35 in Worlds of Speculative Fiction - Lewis Carroll

I haven't been posting regularly about this ongoing monthly talk series - Worlds of Speculative Fiction - but I intend to remedy that going forward.  We're now well into year 4 of the series, and I decided to start this one off with some sessions focused on some of the early major contributors to the genres that fall into that broad designation of "speculative fiction" - authors who influenced the other, later writers we have been discussing these last three years.

In January, we kicked off the new year with Edgar Allan Poe.  February was G.K. Chesterton.  March was supposed to be Mary Shelley, but unfortunately, I had to cancel due to illness (we'll hopefully reschedule for later this year).

Lewis Carroll - or, to use his real name, Charles Lutwidge Dogdson - was the fourth in that set, and we held that session a few weeks back.  I'd enjoyed his works on logic back when I was an undergraduate, and had read his Alice and nonsense poetry books to my daughter when she was young.  I decided that the works we'd focus on would be Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and The Hunting of the Snark.  That would allow us to discuss one of the key themes of the series - worldbuilding - as well as getting into some of the philosophical themes raised and played with by Carroll.

Here is the videorecording from the session:

If you're in the Greater Milwaukee area, and looking for a lively, philosophically-informed conversation about speculative fiction, stop on in.  All the sessions are hosted at the Brookfield Public Library, and you can find the events on my Facebook page.  

We also have a free online class site (which I'll be updating once the semester is finished), which you can enroll in, if you'd like to see all of the other session videos and access other curated resources on the authors and their works.

The thinkers we have scheduled right now for the rest of the year include: Tanith Lee, Piers Anthony, Gordon Dickson, August Derleth, Karl Edward Wagner, Aldous Huxley, Bram Stoker, and R. Scott Bakker

Seven Conversations About Modern Stoicism

Over the last year, I have been shooting sit-down interview videos, and seven of those have been conversations with people involved in the modern Stoicism movement.  Attending and speaking at Stoicon in 2017 and 2018 afforded me the opportunity to carry out these interviews.  All of them are with people who I consider friends and colleagues, so as you can tell when you watch them, we had an excellent time recording the conversations

Three of the interviewees - Christopher Gill, Donald Robertson, and Piotr Stankiewicz are team members of the modern Stoicism organization, and as such all three of them have spoken at the annual Stoicon conference.  Walter Matweychuk and Kai Whiting have also been presenters at Stoicon.  Travis Hume and Harald Kavli both are involved in local Stoic organizations and have very interesting writing projects focused on Stoicism.

You can learn a lot about Stoicism and its present prospects by talking with people who devote serious thought to it, and rely upon its principles and practice in their life and work.

Here are the links to those seven interviews - a total of just under 6 hours of conversation about Stoicism:

• Christopher Gill - Stoicism and Virtue Ethics (about 30 minutes)
• Donald Robertson - Stoicism and Psychotherapy (about 45 minutes)
• Walter Matweychuk - Stoicism and Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (about 1 hour)
• Kai Whiting - Stoicism and Sustainability (about 1 hour)
• Piotr Stankiewicz - Modern Stoicism and its Prospects (about 25 minutes)
• Travis Hume - Applying Stoicism (about 48 minutes)
• Harald Kavli - Translating Epictetus (about 25 minutes)

If you're particularly interested in Stoicism, you might check out the Modern Stoicism website, which hosts the Stoicism Today blog.  If you'd like to support my work, consider becoming a Patreon backer!

Aristotle Didn't Say That! - On The Topic Of Criticism

The internet is full of fake quotations attributed to famous authors.  For some reason, Aristotle seems to attract more of these than most others, typically posted and then sometimes commented upon by people who know fairly little about him and his thought.  Here's a gem that has been making its way around the web - particularly in leadership, self-help, and personal development contexts:


Criticism is something you can easily avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

This time around it happened to be cited by the Tiny Buddha site - using the quote as a springboard for what proved in parts an interesting article - starting, of course, by parroting an erroneous attribution that just a few moments' casual research would have revealed as such. 

Where does this quote actually come from?  Why couldn't it be from Aristotle?  Why would people unthinkingly accept and repeat that attribution.  Even if it is not from Aristotle, is there some value to the saying?  Those are some interesting questions that I'll answer below - though not in quite that order.

Kicking off my Book Tour in National Library Week

Nearly a week and a half of busily packed days have passed since I officially started the tour for my book Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France  at our own Charles Chesnutt Library at Fayetteville State University.  I didn't realize until I started putting my presentation together precisely how appropriate an occasion and location that was.  The story that I'm going to tell, reflect upon, draw some implications from, and conclude with an argument about resources and policies - - the story of my research and the book that eventually emerged from is also the story of a library, the University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Library, a library of a certain type that unfortunately seems to be at risk for gradually dwindling away, faced with the twin pressures of a digital age and the costs of maintaining library stacks.

I'm not going to talk much about my book in this entry, other than to say that I'll be adding a video (to My New Book) discussing how it is intended to make contributions to scholarship in several respects somewhat different than and complementary the volumes of secondary literature -- or even original groundbreaking work in Philosophy, Religion, History, Political Theory, or Rhetoric -- the disciplinary circles in which I move and appreciate the works of my peers.  What I will note first about Reason Fulfilled By Revelation is that were it not for the existence nearby of a certain kind of library, a certain form of repository of human knowledge, of intellectual striving and dialogue, the research that I carried out would have been. . . . well, not entirely inconceivable, but practically speaking rendered impossible

Anselm on the Seven Levels of Humility

Having finished the six-entry series on Anselm's views on anger, I've decided on a new Sunday blogging project for the time being, one which still focuses on the (somewhat inaptly epitheted) Scholastic Doctor, but now on a different aspect of his moral theory:  the virtue of humility, so central to his life, practice, thought, and counsels -- so difficult and trying a virtue to cultivate (I'll admit, in my experience and after very limited success).  Humility, Anselm says, is needed in order to prepare the ground for, and to stabilize the other moral virtues. 

Unlike anger, Anselm did devote some thematic discussion to humility as such, particularly through a metaphor he develops in considerable depth -- that of a mountain with levels.  Each level corresponds to one degree of humility, a new qualitative addition or deepening of that virtue, in practice, in action.  In the weeks to come, I'm going to compare Anselm's treatment, and the successive levels he outlines, with those of other Christian thinkers who also discussed humility, and similarly distinguished successive degrees, steps, or levels, of that virtue.  One of these at least Anselm knew with an intimacy than which a greater can barely be conceived, for St. Benedict, the founder of the very order in which Anselm lived out nearly all of his adult life, distinguishes and briefly discusses twelve steps or levels of humility.

Metal Music, (Heideggerian) Mood, and Memory

Right now, as I start writing this entry, blogging from my (temporary) iPad, I'm sitting in an Irish pub in the Boston airport waiting on a connecting flight to Chicago O'Hare, where I then grab a rental car and drive down the Dan Ryan through the city, up on the Skyway, and south into Indiana, where I watch my daughter dance her parts in a local ballet production of Sleeping Beauty. After that brief respite, enjoying my girl's deepening initiation into one of the high arts, a discipline inducing and perfecting grace and balance, I retrace my steps almost exactly, driving back to O'Hare to catch a flight to Boston, then another down to Raleigh-Durham, then drive back to Fayetteville, to resume classes again Monday morning and finish out what remains of my last semester at Fayetteville State.

On the first flight, suspended in the sky, relocating constantly over who knows what terrain, as I switched back and forth between rereading Platonic dialogues on an iBook reader and writing notes preparatory to an upcoming presentation in a word processor, listening to metal songs shuffling through the sequence my internal iPod randomly spun out, I found myself washed over by the sorrow of nostalgia, an always unfinished grief for times past, that unpredictably swells up out of imperceptibility, and wells up tears -- a reaction I've experienced enough times to know and be comfortable with as much as one becomes towards eccentricities of long-lived-with companions

You see, once you possess halls of memories stretching out long enough for you to have forgotten great portions of what lies behind, once they have looped over each other, sometimes crisscrossedly repeating, sometimes referring, confabulating -- or to forge another hallmark, when some of your memories are of times and moments where you remembered, you ruminated upon, you brought back to affective vivacity other intervals and events -- then enough of your own life is behind you for the past to assume aspects, dimensions more acute and complex than the young can really imagine (though they can yearn for it when they read of it -- glimpses with the heart's eye are afforded some of them).

Right Racket After All, Says the Philosopher

Last week, I fortuitously came across another piece in which a reporter tells us how a social scientist has (re)discovered some truths long well-known and taught by philosophers and theologians.  Talk Deeply, Be Happy? discusses psychologist Matthias Mehl's findings which seem to show a correlation between reported levels of happiness and the proportion of "substantive" or "deep" conversations as opposed to "small talk" people routinely engage in with others.

This summary, by Tara Parker-Pope, is fairly careful not to draw conclusions ranging beyond the research -- a frequent problem, as I wrote last week, in some reporting on social scientific (re)discoveries of insights long commonplace in other literature, which miraculously multiply a small amount of  information, loaves and fishes-like, into baskets of grandiose speculations.  (Even after the feasting, though, crumbs enough remains for later, more sober, nourishment of the mind.)

Permitting Mehl to speak in his own words about the construction of his study, his assumptions, his inferences, Talk Deeply, Be Happy? opens intriguing questions, which can be and call to be pushed, explored, examined further -- precisely what I intend to do here.  To someone fortunate enough to be involved -- at least part of the time -- in sounding depths of philosophical (and, sometimes political, social, and theological) questions, texts, viewpoints, for a person experienced in  the joys and frustrations, the requirements and obstacles, the wax and wane of desire germane to such activity -- in short in the genuine intellectal life -- there are a number of long-discovered, systematically articulated and passed down, insights on these matters which it seems almost akin to robbery not to share.

Anselm on "In What Way an Upright Person. . . "

For today, taking a cue from John Allen, who from time to time supplies translations from Arabic on his blog Thicket and Thorp, instead of continuing the series of recent posts discussing various facets or theories of anger, I've decided to provide translation of chapter of a yet untranslated Latin work, the Dicta Anselmi.  It does have to do with anger, in a somewhat oblique manner, since the passage has to do with the approach one ought to take not only towards good people but also bad people.  Among the possible approaches towards the actions of bad people is to feel and act out emotions of anger (or righteous indignation, or hatred) towards them.

Anselm cautions against following the dictates of our carnal, i.e. fallen and fleshly, appetites, and counsels following the dictates of reason and God's precepts.  The human will is placed between these, and in anselmian moral theory, has the capacity to tilt itself towards following the call of one or the other.

What's Lost in Translation, and What's Not (part 2)

As if I were addressing a room, rather than casting my bread upon the waters of cyberspace, I'll start with an anecdote, one which I find funny.  Hopefully you will also see the somewhat dark humor in it.

Several years back, Alasdair MacIntyre was on some panel at the Modernity:  Yearing for the Infinite conference at Notre Dame.  I entirely forget what the discussion was about, but remember well a remark he interjected, or at least its essential content.  So, in Thucydidian reformulation (having the characters in one's narrative say not what they really said but what they ought to have said, given their ethos) :

When I was a boy, we were beaten if we did not learn Greek irregular verbs well.  I am not defending beating children.  In fact that is a very bad thing to do, both for the children and for those beating them.  It was painful, and produced anxiety.  But now . . . I can read Sophocles and you can't.

A fellow philosopher Dave O'Hara and I started a conversation on Twitter about languages and translations in philosophy, one which I am certain just as much on his side as on mine, reverberates with countless conversations he carried out with other people down the years. When students in class, other professors, parishioners in study groups, fellow travelers passing the time with talk, and the host of other seemingly chance interlocutors find out that you can read a text in its original language, a language they do not know, there are some standard lines in which the discussion typically develops.  Guiding, understandable, but mistaken assumptions come to light.  Sometimes I point them out.  nowadays, I usually just pass over them and allow the conversation to go as the other person seemingly needs it to proceed.

What's Lost in Translation, and What's Not (part 1)

A philosophical colleague of mine, Dave O'Hara, who I must admit not to knowing well, has been carrying on an interesting exchange with me about languages, translations, and philosophy.  So far, we've been conversing about it via the bite-size  passages the microblog Twitter permits (though Dave used the "part 1. . .  part 3" multiple post way around the length limit).  I found myself, as I often do with Twitter, somewhat frustrated at having to reduce complex thoughts on tricky matters to easily misinterpreted sound bites (though I must admit, I also do enjoy the challenge), and the issues raised are genuinely deep philosophical ones, so I decided those issues deserved a blog entry.

Here's how the exchange developed:

Davoh (Dave O'Hara)

Philo tweeps: how important do you consider learning languages for the study of philosophy? Which languages?

philosopher70 (me)

Langs? Absolutely important! For Western: Greek, Latin, French, German. Ex: Aristotle, key concepts across texts lost in translation