Wisdom For Life Radio Show - Questions and Suggestions

Our first episode of the Wisdom for Life radio show aired last Friday evening on Riverwest Radio - WXRW 104.1 FM - here in Milwaukee.  My co-host, Dan Hayes, and I go live every other Friday from 5 to 6 PM, discussing philosophy and its applications to challenges, problems, and issues of everyday life.

The first show went pretty well - not perfect, of course, but that's part of the fun of live radio!  We introduced the main idea of the show and ourselves as hosts, then shifted into discussing what philosophy as a way of life is and how it differs from the academic philosophy one might encounter in textbooks or classes.  We also introduced the idea of philosophical practices, and at the end of show introduced one drawn primarily from Stoicism - negative visualisation.  Between those two segments, we also looked at a real-life problem about how to make and maintain healthy boundaries.

If you missed the show and would like to give it a listen - or if you were one of the people who tuned in live worldwide, and would like to hear it again - here's two places you can do so:

• Riverwest Radio's archived recording of the show - listen here
• My YouTube channel video - added bonus - you can listen or watch here

I've no doubt that the show is going to evolve over time, but for now, we're planning on sticking to the format we've got so far

• a bit of banter at the start
• a half-hour of back and forth discussion of some key topics
• roughly ten minutes of in-depth examination of a common problem
• another ten minutes or so about a philosophical practice and how to use it
• signing off

Dan and I are meeting today to go over the first episode and think about what else we might want to talk about or do on the show - and how to improve bits of it - so here's my two invitations to you:

• If you've listened to the show, and have suggestions about what you'd like to see in upcoming episodes, go ahead and send them to me.
  
• Whether you've listened to the show or not, if you've got a problem, challenge, or issue in your life, and you'd like to see what philosophy might contribute to dealing with it, send me that as well, and we might discuss it on the air

You can send suggestions or questions to me in Twitter, on my Facebook page, or by email.

Eight Recent Appearances

Since posting back in September about "A Baker's Dozen of Interviews and Guest Appearances", I've continued to do a number of other appearances on podcasts and radio shows.  These might be of interest to some of my readers, subscribers, followers, and fans. 

So it's about time for another round-up of the more recent  podcast and show appearances since then - what I've been doing over the last five months.  So, here they are - the shows, a brief description of what topics we talked about, and where you can watch or listen to each of them:


The Death Hangout (hosted by Olivier Lavor and Keith Clarke) - what legacy means to us, death and the soul, Stoic views on legacy and life, Martin Heidegger and "being towards death", emotional attitudes towards death – listen here

Zero Books Podcast (hosted by Doug Lain) - my backstory, the Half Hour Hegel project, doing philosophy on YouTube, some Marx, some Nietzsche, modern Stoicism, and the notion of eclecticism – listen here

Image For Hire Radio Show (hosted by The Skrauss on Riverwest Radio) - my work as a “freelance philosopher”, Plato’s allegory of the cave, what philosophical counseling does, what virtue ethics and images have to do with each other, and even some H.P. Lovecraft – listen here

Paul Kovalski Podcast (hosted by Paul Kovalski) - transition from being a traditional academic to a practical philosopher and entrepreneur, lessons I’ve learned, fears and obstacles entrepreneurs encounter, and how Stoic philosophy and other virtue ethics can be useful – listen here

The Panpsycast (hosted by Jack Symes and Olly Marley) - Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, key themes of his works, the death of God and transvaluation of values, and his relevance for the present – listen to the first part here and the second part here

The Stoic Creative (hosted by Scott Perry) - a roundtable discussion on Stoicism and creativity, featuring myself, Chris Gill, Debbie Joffe-Ellis, and others – you can watch or listen here

The Stoic Body Podcast (hosted by Philip Ghezelbash) -  discussing Stoic philosophy as applied to health, veering off into discussion of food, animal rights, and fasting – watch or listen here

Stoic Mettle Podcast: hosted by Scott Hebert, discussing Stoicon and Stoic Week, the growth of modern Stoicism, prospects for Stoic philosophy in the present – you can listen here

If you've got a podcast, video channel, show or site and you'd like to bring me on, reach out to me, and we'll get a conversation going!

Image For Hire Guest Appearance

Last night, I ventured out into the cold Milwaukee night and drove up to the Riverwest neighborhood.  I had a 9:00 PM appointment to go on as a guest on the Image for Hire radio show, hosted by The Skrauss on 104.1 FM.  That's Riverwest Radio, a community station here in Milwaukee that broadcasts on the radio locally and over the internet worldwide.

It was a great conversation, but before I go any further, here's the link - if you want to hear the conversation, click here.

I really like that central idea motivating The Skrauss' show - all about images, how affect and image go together, and how they can be used to "hack reality".  We don't usually talk about it in those terms, but that what moral philosophy - when it is done, studied, and applied in practical (rather than just academic) ways - aims to accomplish. 

The human person is part of reality, after all, and we use images not only to make sense of who we are, but also as models that allow us to make choices about who we are.  So, understanding, evaluating, and applying images winds up being a good part of what we do as practicing - or as Skrauss put it, "freelance" philosophers working with clients, students, or organizations.

We delved into a lot of topics:  Plato's allegory of the cave and a bit of Martin Heidegger's interpretation of it, what philosophical counseling is and how I use it with clients, whether philosophy and mysticism have any overlap (which depends on what we mean by "mysticism"), my work producing philosophy-focused YouTube videos, even our Worlds of Speculative Fiction talk series and online class (which you can enroll in here). Those are just a few!

A very fun and far-ranging conversation - and I'm looking forward to going on again sometime later this year!  And, a special thanks to my Patreon backers - their support underwrites my engagments in public philosophy!

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.

Hello Again From Saas-Fee!

A bit under a year ago, I decided to put my blogging endeavors on hold -- announced in the post just below this one -- including this one, my oldest blog.  It has indeed been a year packed with projects and opportunities, changes and events. 

The medium in which I've done the most work in that time -- outside of the interactions of the classroom and course management system -- has been video, specifically producing, releasing, and curating mainly philosophy-related videos in my YouTube channel.  But, I've also been engaged in considerably more public speaking, brought into interesting conversations as a consultant, and even found some time for working on a few articles and book chapters.  At Google's invitation, I began offering 1-on-1 video Helpout sessions.   I also became certified by the American Philosophical Practioner's Association in philosophical counseling -- something I'd found myself doing occasionally in less formal and structured ways for years -- and am now in process of developing a practice, based physically in the Hudson Valley, but virtually able to engage clients nearly anywhere in the world.

As exciting as everything has been, I've missed getting to do the kind of writing -- as well as resource development -- that the rather over-ambitiously rolled out blogs of the past afforded me chances to work on.  So, as my 44th birthday, and along with it this trip over the Atlantic and across the Alps, approached, I decided it was time to start contributing to those electronic forums again -- as well as to reconsider and streamline their designs. 

Sadler's Existentialist Updates needed attending to first, since I've been doing a lot of lecturing and course development precisely on that philosophical movement -- and after redesigning it in minor ways, I started writing again -- and, after a hiatus of ten months, it felt great to post content again!  I also realized that I'd actually need to create another new blog, Half Hour Hegel, sooner than later in order to organize the video content of an ongoing, probably 3-year-to-complete series of a (projected) 250 to 300 videos working methodically through G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.  So I did it.

The question was then which blog to start work on next.  I'd hoped by this birthday I might find enough time to restart another blog that I had "given" myself  as a kind of birthday present last year, Heavy Metal Philosopher -- and I am looking forward to getting to write again in that one soon.  But, given the time that was available to me, it seemed to me that this one -- my longest running, my first, my most comprehensive site -- was really the one to refurbish and restart today.

As I write this, I'm high up in the Swiss Alps, in Saas-Fee, where European Graduate School has its campus, and where they are holding intensive classes and hosting lectures, taught by some of the cutting-edge theorists and practitioners of continental philosophy -- a program in which my wife and collaborator is enrolled.  I'm here for her last week, attending some of the lectures, meeting and conversing with some of the students and professors, traipsing around the narrow mountain streets, gaping like a tourist up at the massive, snow-brilliant peaks, slowly recollecting enough of my German to get by in the shops, and doing some work of my own -- a bit of writing, shooting some video footage, and . . . well, this!

So I'll be back to using this as my sounding-board for ideas I'm working out or working on, occasional reflections on perennial matters spurred by current events, and for mentioning some of the other projects I've got going on, when there's something to say about them.  There's a lot of forward movement, as they say, but that almost appears to require time as its fuel or compensation.  Given the degree to which I'm finding those days, hours, and minutes allotted, demanded, parceled out, I expect I'm going to have to write in a somewhat less polished -- some might say, laborious -- style than that I've indulged myself in here during past years.  But, perhaps that's all to the good . . .