Ten Podcast Episodes on Martin Heidegger's What Is Metaphysics?

When I polled my viewers, listeners, subscribers, and supporters recently, about which thinker I should produce new podcast episodes on first, Martin Heidegger edged out Fyodor Dostoevsky, Aristotle, and Cicero.  So earlier this month, I created ten new Sadler's Lectures episodes on his seminal lecture, What Is Metaphysics?

Each of the Sadler's Lectures episodes are produced by taking one of my core concept videos, improving the sound quality, and editing out pauses, "ums" and "ahs," and any other distracting sounds, generating a downloadable podcast version that can be played anywhere.  I provide them as resources to students in my academic classes, but they get used by many more people all over the world.

Here are those ten Heidegger podcast episodes. They run just a bit over two hours altogether, so you can listen your way through these lectures in the space of an afternoon.

• The Nature Of Metaphysical Inquir
• The Nothing, Not, And Negation
• The Mood Of Anxiety
• The Nothing And Nihilation
• Modalities Of Nihilative Behavior
• Sciences, Logic, And The Nothing
• Mood and The Totality Of Beings
• Original Anxiety And Everydayness
• Previous Metaphysical Views On Nothing 
• The Nothing, Selfhood, And Freedom

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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

Ten Videos on Heidegger's "What Is Metaphysics?"

In June, just after I created my Patreon page to crowdfund my work in public philosophy, I ran a poll, asking my viewers, subscribers, and supporters which philosophical figures they were most interested in seeing me tackle next.

Surprisingly, Martin Heidegger came out on top, with Friedrich and Immanuel Kant in the number 2 and 3 spots!  So, later on on June, after wrapping up the last of the core concept videos on Aristotle's Categories, I started preparing to shoot videos on Heidegger.  I decided to go with his short and relatively accessible essay, "What Is Metaphysics?" (which you can find here, if you'd like to have the translation I prefer).

Before I actually do the work of producing videos, I never know exactly how many of them will be required to adequately cover a given text.  Sometimes - as was the case this time - my initial guess is a bit off, and I realize that I need to create some additional ones in order to get through all of the core concepts.  The total count ended up being ten this time around.  And here they are:

• The Nature of Metaphysical Inquiry
• The Sciences, Logic, and the Nothing
• The Nothing, Not, and Negation
• The Totality of Beings and Attunement or Mood
• The Mood of Anxiety
• Original Anxiety and Everydayness
• The Nothing and Nihilation - Philosophy
• Modalities of Nihilative Behavior
• The Nothing, Selfhood, and Freedom
• Previous Metaphysical Interpretations of the Nothing

Why did I pick this particular essay - actually an inaugural lecture Heidegger gave in 1929 at the University of Freiburg - as the first work of Heidegger's I would tackle? (It's actually not technically the first, since I'd previously created a number of hour-long lectures in the Existentialism sequence years back - but it is the first that I've done through core concept videos)  It's a good piece, in my view, for introducing some of the key ideas of Heidegger's thought, without getting too deep in the details.

This work contains a discussion of what Metaphysics is and extends to, the contrast between intellectual and affective ways of grasping being, the revelatory importance of moods, anxiety as a mood that discloses beings and the nothing, the priority of the nothing and nihilation over negation,  the scope of logic, human freedom and action, and even some discussion of previous metaphysical interpretations.  So not every major theme of Heidegger's works, by any measure, but quite a few of them. . .