Four Podcast Lectures on Plato's Crito

I've been continuing on with my newly started podcast, Sadler's Lectures, converting my video lectures into edited mp3 sound files.   After finishing up with the six lectures on Platos' Apology, we've moved on to the four lectures on its logical successor, his dialogue, The Crito.

These four lectures on this dialogue comprise about 50 minutes of material - so you can listen your way through all of them through the average workout, commute, or lunch break.  You can easily download them from my channel and start learning!  If iTunes /Apple Podcasts or Google Play is more your speed, you can find my channel there as well.

Here are the four lectures:

• Crito's Arguments With Socrates 
• Socrates On Living In Accordance With Principle
• Socrates On The Many And The Wise
• The Laws' Arguments

As a reference, you might want to get The Last Days of Socrates, which includes the Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, and Phaedo.

The work involved in creating these podcast episodes is underwritten by my monthly supporters on Patreon. Want to become one? Click here!

Ethics and Prison Education

This past August, my colleague Joseph Osei and I provided a workshop on moral transformation and teaching philosophy in prisons at the American Association of Philosophy Teachers (my portion, with handouts, is available here, and videos here)  Joseph had proposed the workshop idea to me back in winter, and I readily agreed.  I came to Fayetteville State directly after having taught six years full time for Ball State University at Indiana State Prison, and I had been mulling over the experiences of working in a prison, interacting with inmates, seeing growth and transformation in some of them, unsure as to what to do with those experiences and reflections.  I knew that eventually I wanted to write about it, but the topic was so vast, so heterogeneous, had so many vantage points from which it could be looked at, that I never got around to doing more than corresponding with a few of my former students and answering questions people asked once they found out about my years at ISP

So, the conference and the panel provided me the occasion to finally start thinking, researching, and writing on prison education in a more serious and directed way.  I began reading my way through the literature on prison education, some of which is admittedly quite poorly thought out or bent so ideologically as to be useless for anyone who has not boarded that particular thought-train.  There are a number of very interesting, useful, and thought-provoking articles available, albeit relatively few on Philosophy.  There are more writings on ethics and on moral development written by non-philosophers, since academic philosophers are generally uninterested in any serious way in prisons, crime, punishment, and moral reformation in prisons.