Mind & Desire

Gregory B. Sadler

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This podcast takes insights, arguments, distinctions, and practices from complex philosophical texts and thinkers and makes them accessible for anyone who wants to learn. It also provides advice about how to effectively study philosophy and apply it to your own life gregorybsadler.substack.com

20/12/2025

Episode 45 - An Often Lacking But Sorely Needed Skill

This post is public so feel free to share it. I’d say I’ve had a more than normal amount of exchanges in various social media that have been rather unproductive, for a reason that I think goes beyond social media. It’s in fact something that I’ve seen throughout my academic career. And I think it betokens a certain lack of or not using an important skill that I try to foster in my own students and clients when I’m working with them, when it comes to engaging in philosophical discussion. But it’s something that I would say is a much wider application, because it helps to prevent misunderstandings and talking past each other, which is a rather unproductive use of our linguistic and communicative and even intellectual capacities. We human beings, as for example the Stoics, among many others, tell us are not just rational creatures, but that also means creatures that exist in communities, social creatures, creatures that can have an understanding with each other. And so when understanding is blocked, that’s kind of a problem. So let me tell you what I’m talking about first, and I’m going to keep it rather generic. I know that it happened in Substack and Twitter, and it also happens occasionally in LinkedIn or Facebook, or even when I’m posting things in YouTube. Typically what’s going on is I am reposting what somebody else has said, and then I am using it as a sort of platform to say the things that I want to say. I’ll give you just one example of this. I saw somebody who is making some sweeping generalizations about philosophy inside academia and philosophy outside academia. And they were very concerned about the sorts of things that people who are lauding philosophy outside academia say about philosophy inside academia. They thought they were being a bit unfair. And I was staking out a different position, which is there is no such thing really as philosophy inside academia or philosophy outside academia, because there are indeed people doing philosophy inside and outside both. But the experiences, the situations, what counts as academia, what counts as being outside of it, it’s incredibly varied. So any sort of generalization that a person wants to make is probably going to not only be wrong in some sense, you know, admit of exceptions, it’s just not going to be all that applicable. And it’ll typically be very reflective of the frame of reference that the person who’s writing it has. Nobody has enough of a frame of reference to be able to generalize in that way in the present day. Really probably, even in the past, one might make those sorts of generalizations because we certainly can indulge in them, but they wouldn’t be very accurate. And I think a lot of people just didn’t know that. So I weighed in saying that, and then the person was assuming that because I reposted their thing, I’m directly responding to them, which is kind of a bad assumption, because if I was directly responding to them, it would have been a reply statement. to their original post rather than quoting them and then saying, see, here’s part of the problem. Maybe we need to rethink this. I’ve had other things like this coming up as well. People jump into conversations and think that they’re contributing to the conversation, but they’re really not responding to me as such. They’re responding to the original post which I was not endorsing or saying had gotten things basically right. And then they do respond in a comment to me. So I had another one piggybacking off of that who did precisely that, and they thought they were contributing to the conversation. They actually used those words. And my response to them was you’re not actually contributing to the conversation. You want to talk to the person who originally posted that, to which I was kind of responding by quoting their post, but actually saying a whole bunch of other things, which you haven’t bothered to engage at all. As a matter of fact, you’re still engaging in that kind of sweeping generalization that I was criticizing. So this is just one instance out of many. I don’t want to get too hung up on the details of this, but what is the broader problem that shows a kind of carelessness, thoughtlessness, lack of paying attention to things, which could in fact be looked at as a sort of deficit, of a skill or capacity that has to be developed. It’s something that comes up over and over again when, for example, I teach Platonic dialogues, and I have students who don’t seem to grasp the difference between Socrates repeating what somebody else has said, not because he endorses it, but because he’s actually questioning it and probably saying, thinks that it’s wrong and is about to do his famous Socratic refutation, the elenchus that we see attributed to him as, for better or for worse, one of his key characteristics of They’re not able to properly differentiate between saying something about somebody else’s ideas and positively affirming those ideas. And that’s a real problem because if you can’t do that, a dialogue effectively becomes a monologue or it just turns into everybody agreeing and you do have different characters, but they’re all saying the same thing. And that definitely isn’t what’s happening in a platonic dialogue. If you think that is what’s happening, you have gone wrong somehow in your reading of it. And we could say this about all sorts of other things. It doesn’t have to be a dialogue as such. When Aristotle is bringing up somebody else’s point of view, and then shortly after that, he’s going to criticize that point of view, he is not endorsing that point of view, although he might say, well, they’ve got a little bit of correctness to what they’re saying. He’s very good about that sort of thing. So it’s not just when we have different characters speaking. It can also be within the body of a text. I actually ran into something like this the very first semester that I was student teaching with my mentor who had me and the other TA each give two lectures. And it’s, I don’t remember exactly what book it was. It was something, some article about the Holocaust and God that I was supposed to present. And I was presenting not my point of view, but the author’s point of view. And the author was actually citing somebody else who he disagreed with, who was attributing the guilt for the Holocaust of the Jewish people to Christians, if I remember right. So I had a woman who came up to me after class, very angry. And she was very upset with me for saying that somehow God was responsible for the Holocaust. I said, I’m not saying anything. This author is saying that another author is saying that. And she could just not get that through her head because she was so upset. She actually went to the chair and complained to him and he took me aside and gave me some advice about how to handle students like that. But it shows you that there’s a lot of people who just don’t distinguish either because they don’t, simply can’t, in which case this is going to be a really big problem for them in life, or they don’t have much experience in distinguishing, or they haven’t built up those mental muscles, or they’re being careless or kind of lazy, or they’re being tendentious and they’re trying to take offense when no offense is actually intended In any case, it’s not a very useful way to approach things. And if we want to have good communication about complex and oftentimes tricky and, you know, polemical topics, we really have to be clear about who is saying what and for what reason and responding to who. And so the fact that it’s other people who claim to be quite interested in philosophy, including a post-grad in philosophy, who are doing it, shows me that this is definitely something we need to concentrate on more. And maybe we need some sort of skill building curriculum to work on that. That might be something that I actually do some writing about later on down the line. But I think this is a good place to end this. These are some reflections from those recent engagements. But you can see that this is a really perennial human problem that probably isn’t going to go away. But I think we can make some headway into if we’re deliberate and thoughtful ourselves about it and figure out how people wind up going wrong in these ways. Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

12 min
08/11/2025

Episode 44 - Back To Recording In My Office And Lessons Learned From My Fall And Surgery

I’m recording this new episode of Mind and Desire after a bit of a hiatus here inmy office, where I haven’t been able to be and work for not quite a month, but pretty close to it. As I think all of you know, I had a pretty nasty slip and fall on our hardwood floor in our condo which resulted in me landing just right in order to shatter my hip. As it actually turned out I shattered the head of my femur and a good bit of the bone. So I had to have what’s called emergency hip replacement. As my surgeon explained to me: This is not your dad or your grandpa’s hip replacement, where they have arthritis and it’s getting bad, and they come in and they get it handled in one or two hours. My operation actually took four hours. And because of the trauma of the fall and then trying to get up afterwards, which was not a great idea, and all of the other things that went with it, there’s a lot more pain and damage, a lot more recovery that has to take place. So the “emergency” is really the key term there. But I have been on the mend since the operation, as I’ve written about, it is something that takes a lot of time, because there’s many different steps that you have to go through to fix things. But I’m here for the first time back in my office. And this is you could say a baby step for actually doing things. This is probably the easiest location to get to. I can be dropped off right at the front door. There’s a lift that I can take, and I can get around on my cane to the elevator and then up to the fifth floor where my office is, and over to my office, unlock the door, come in here, sit down at this desk in front of the microphone, and communicate with all of you so that’s pretty good now I’m going to talk in this one, not so much about philosophy, but about some of the things that I’ve learned through this experience. And I’ve already mentioned one of them. Emergency hip replacement is on a whole different level than ordinary hip replacement as far as the toll that it takes on your body and the recovery that it requires. I’ve done a bit of writing in Substack about some of the lessons that I’ve learned, but I haven’t actually gone through all of them. So I’ll just mention a few of them that I have already written about in those three articles so far. One of them is that weird freak stuff happens, and there isn’t really any deeper causality to it. I suppose if you think of the universe as being providentially organized and ordained by some higher mind, maybe you could think that there was some overarching reason for me to have a accident of this sort and undergo this experience. You know, maybe I was getting too big for my britches, or it’s to teach me the value of suffering, or something like that. But if you don’t buy into that, then it’s pretty easy to say, or it should be easy to say rather, that sometimes random stuff happens. I landed on my hip in such a way that it shattered that hip joint. The physician at the emergency room, because we went there, at first was very skeptical. He was like: You’re 55. What, you think you broke your hip? And then he moved my leg and he was like: Oh, maybe we need to do an x-ray. And when he came back from the x-ray, he had a very different attitude and facial expression. And he said something along the lines of: Oh yeah, you really broke that hip. So that sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen to healthy 55-year-olds. A lot of people were searching for the big why of it. Maybe my bones are brittle, so I had to meet with a bone specialist. They asked questions like: Are you safe at home? But really, when it comes down to it, sometimes the stars just align in weird ways. So that’s one important lesson, that we don’t always have to ask for deeper Why’s. And it might be good for us at some point to close that off. Another one was that as somebody who has been suffering from chronic pain in one form or another for decades, and I’m not recommending this, by the way, but it does have a sort of helpful effect. If I was somebody who didn’t experience a lot of routine pain, probably the pain much more intense that I was feeling, because of the fall and break and then the surgery and the recovery, would have gotten to me a lot more. But I’m kind of used to it. So when I was asked, you know, what would I like my pain level to be by one of the nurses, I actually settled on a four. Because to me that seemed just fine and reasonable, because some days I may actually be at a four when I’m normally healthy, and getting around, and getting on with life. Nobody should be in pain ideally, but sometimes having been in pain can be helpful for you. And the third thing that I actually wrote about quite recently had to do with people wishing me a speedy or quick recovery. I said: OK, I understand the sentiment behind it, but it kind of misfires. Because what you really want with this sort of thing is definitely not quick recovery. And to want it to be quick is kind of off base. What you want is all of the little things that have to connect with each other, and cumulatively build you back to a state of health, to be going along and happening as they should. So day-to-day work, doing the PT exercises that you don’t really want to do, every one of them matters. Walking around on it, exercising, eating right, taking care of the pain by getting ahead of it with the painkillers. All of those sorts of things have to do with the healing and none of them are or should be quick. Now, what other lessons have I learned? Well, I’ll give you a hint about one that I’m going to be writing about soon. So they went in for the surgery through my thigh, the front of my thigh, the quadriceps. And that’s where I’ve had a good bit of the pain. And they made a pretty sizable incision. Fortunately, these days they can make them a good bit smaller than they used to in the past, where they’d cut you wide open. But it was still pretty big and they stitched it up with sutures and that’s exactly the way it should be. And it doesn’t look very attractive as these things I imagine never do. So I was looking at it and we’d look at it every single day after we took the big bandage off, because it had to be kept clean and kind of monitored, all of those sorts of things. And you could see it, it was all puckered up and elevated and, you know, there was red blotchy stuff around it. And you could see it slowly getting better. When I went to the surgeon this week... They took the sutures out. And interestingly, when they did that, of course, there’s a little bit of bleeding until they put a bandage on it. When we took the bandage off, I discovered that all of that bunched up ugly skin is now straightened out. And I do have this long line that’s going to be quite a big scar. It doesn’t look great, and it probably never will look great. As a matter of fact, as a side note, when I went in to the ER and they had me get into a gown, so I took off my shirt, they saw the four incision scars from when I had my gallbladder out, and they did that laparoscopically. And they asked, did somebody stab you at one point? And I was like, no, no, it’s just an operational scar. So I’m at the point where I don’t worry too much about attractiveness and all of those sorts of things that I used to be, maybe we could say, obsessed with, in my younger years. And I’m happy. actually, to have these various scars, not because they’re things to show off or anything, but anytime that I look at them, I can remind myself of what it is that I went through. And so I think having a certain kind of attitude towards what happens to our body and what makes it seem less attractive, more ugly in certain respects, can be quite helpful. And I’ll have to think about what other lessons I’ve learned. Those are the biggest ones so far. I could sit down and perhaps plot them out and determine for myself what all the other lessons are. You’ll probably see me doing that in subsequent writings. But that’s probably a good place to leave off here so this doesn’t get overly long. I did want to get back to recording these Mind & Desire podcast episodes. And so it actually fills me with some joy and I would say rightful pride that I’m able to be here once again in the office recording it, even if it’s just a short break, while that I’m here as opposed to spending all day in my office like a workaholic. So that is where I’m going to leave off and you can expect more reflections to come down the line. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

12 min
06/09/2025

Episode 43 - Why I Like Teaching Cicero's On The Nature Of The Gods

In the last week or so, I have been editing a number of Sadler's Lectures podcast episodes on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods book 2. And if you've been following my YouTube channel, then you're probably going to say, oh, I've seen those already. Well, yes, you've seen the videos, but what I do is take the sound files from the videos and And then I clean them up, take out all the filler words, long pauses, repetitions where I say the same word twice for some reason, just as I do for this Mind and Desire podcast. And it produces something a bit new. And for me, it's kind of cool because when I'm shooting a video, I'm up there in front of the chalkboard. I've got my notes on the board. I've got the text in front of me. And I'm just presenting to the viewers that are going to be watching the video, whether they be my academic students or lifelong learners or fellow professors, whoever's going to be watching that stuff. When I'm editing those videos into podcast episodes, I'm going back over the material again, or rather my presentation of the material to another person, and I'm here, hearing myself talk about the things that are important, interesting, worth taking into account, requiring some explanation from that text or that generally portion of the text that I am presenting on. So for the roughly last week or so, that has been what I've been doing in podcast editing with this work, Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, which I like quite a bit. And I did an entire sequence in the past on book 1 of the work. which has to do with the Epicurean position on not just the gods and religion, but cosmology, the nature of the universe, all those sorts of things. And book 2 takes us into the Stoic position, which Cicero takes a good bit more seriously than he does the Epicureans. As a matter of fact, pretty much everybody in antiquity who is not an Epicurean, you could say that they took Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoic ideas more seriously, viewed them as more plausible than Epicurean ideas. So Cicero himself is not committed to the Stoic views on these matters, but he can present them quite well. And he does so by placing them in the mouth of this guy, Balbus, who is a Stoic. And then he's going to criticize these ideas later on in the next book. So we're not getting a lot of critical examination, but we are getting a lot of exposition. Now, why should we read this work? Well, if you're interested in Stoic cosmology, you obviously want to go to this work because it's one of the main source texts for that, in part because we've lost so much Stoic literature from that period. But there's another reason why somebody might check that out other than just enjoying Cicero or, you know, liking to read ancient texts. And it's because it's, we could say, a underrated text in an area of philosophy that I do some work in and occasionally teach in, in which you may have some interest in as well, which we typically call the philosophy of religion. And this is an area of philosophy, a sub-discipline, if you like, where you can find textbooks and you can find all sorts of resources out there. You can find anthologies and reading lists. And it's been around as, we could say, an official sub-discipline for, you know, over 200 years. I know Hegel certainly has his lectures on the philosophy of religion, and there might be some other people that I'm blanking on who also take a similar approach, where there's these traditional topics that are discussed by a number of earlier thinkers, and we look at what they have to say, and then we kind of go through it. And in the present, what you're most likely going to find is a concentration on, you know, can we define religion? Are there other ways of characterizing what religion is, as opposed to other main areas of life or other disciplines? A lot of investigations into the nature of religious language, a preoccupation with arguments for and against the existence of God of all different sorts, issues of truth claims in religion and how we should adjudicate them, and whether it's possible to have more than one correct religion? Can we have religious pluralism? Those sorts of things tend to be what we focus on. And I really like this text. I have been teaching it now for more than 20 years in philosophy of religion classes precisely because it is a text that is going to bring in alternate but not totally foreign perspectives that give people, who are a little bit too used to thinking about philosophy of religion primarily in terms of theism, usually understood as Christian theism, versus atheism as the main axis for understanding things. So why would this text be interesting in that respect? Well, one reason is because it is dealing with religion as understood by different philosophical schools in antiquity. And these are pre-Christian schools. So Cicero is writing before this Jesus fellow shows up on the scene and people start following him and writing things about him, let alone, you know, developing into a movement that would have some traction and intellectual purchase and contributions within the larger Roman Empire. So it's kind of cool to see that a lot of the issues that we see in the modern: period and in the late modern period, various theists, whether Christian of different denominations or deist, as well as then agnostics, skeptics of different sorts, and then atheists of different brands as well, all debating back and forth, we get to see these ideas, at least some of them, being discussed in a different context. So for example, you'll often hear people talk about the problem of evil, or can you prove that the gods exist, or the ideas that we have of the divine, or whether there's anything like divine providential care for the universe. Well, these are all being discussed in those three books of Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, but they're being looked at by an Epicurean, a Stoic and a Skeptic. There was actually the possibility of having an Aristotelian, but he's not there so he doesn't get to participate But what we get is very interesting because the Stoics are going to provide arguments for the existence of God and the gods, plural we could say. Capital-g God and lowercase-g gods. And a lot of these are going to look kind of similar to arguments that later theists are going to make we can identify arguments from design or what we call teleological arguments. We can identify arguments from effects, which we could call cosmological arguments. There aren't any ontological arguments at that time, but that's going to happen later on. When we see an argument for the existence of, let's just say, the divine, to keep it rather generic, we can sometimes lose our focus and attend only to the argumentation and not where it's actually going. Because we're more focused on the polemics, on debate between people. And what we really should be thinking about is, well, what kind of God or gods is this supposed to be proving the existence of if the arguments should happen to work? And here's where it gets really interesting. Because for the Stoics, we don't have a God who is outside of the universe, who created it or anything like that. I mean, the closest that we get to that is the discussion of the ekpurosis, where the universe essentially gets consumed by fire or, strictly speaking, the kind of fire that ether is and God is still there. And then God starts everything up again. But that's as close as you're going to get. And even all the Stoics didn't necessarily accept that, as we find out in the book. Instead, the Stoics are pantheists, strictly speaking. They believe that the cosmos itself is divine and is not just divine nature in a trivial way, but is the best thing there is. It is rational. It is intelligent. It is all good. It actually cares about us human beings and providentially orders things. And yet at the same time in this book, we're going to see a little tension because the world, the mundus, is also that same God. But then we have the heavens above where the gods also exist. So the arguments, if you accept them, are leading you to a very different place than a say trinitarian god, or even the god of the deists who is still relatively speaking outside of space and time, when you see this. And so here's the upshot of this, especially for my students, is they find that their frame of reference gets shaken a bit. And that's the thing that I think is so cool about teaching these particular works. It's also great, and here's where I'm going to close, sometimes you get religious people who have gotten the wrong message about philosophy and think that philosophy is hostile to religion and you'd better not do philosophy because the philosophers are basically all godless and they're going to lead you away from the true belief. Well, you can find that even the Epicureans thought that there were gods. They were very different than what we think of as divine being or beings, but they believed in that. They weren't atheists, right? You could hedge and say, practically speaking, they were atheists, but now you're playing with words a little bit, rather than attending to what the text actually tells us. The Stoics very, very clearly believed in God and the gods, the divine beings. And they thought that was really important for us humans to have the right ideas about. To avoid, for example, superstition, which is talked about in the work. A distinction is made between genuine religion and superstition. And when you check these things out, you see that Christianity, at least, certainly absorbed a number of ideas and approaches from these ancient philosophies, that at least in the works of the Christian intellectuals who played such a massive role in the early, what we call patristic, period in forming the thought behind what we call Christianity as a religion. So those are some reflections I've had on this experience of going back over the videos to turn them into podcasts on this reall

15 min
22/08/2025

Episode 42 - Reflections From A Walk Among The Flowers In Milwaukee

I just got back inside from taking a walk for about half an hour around the area that my office building is located in in Milwaukee. I wanted to step out in part because I hadn't been outside all day, and my office doesn't have any windows, so it's nice to get outside and feel the air on you, hear the sounds of the city, but also of nature. And in my case, something else that's particularly refreshing, for both my eyes and I would say my soul, is seeing all the flowers that are still in bloom, while there's an opportunity to do so. If you follow me in social media, you've no doubt seen me posting from time to time as the season rolls from spring into summer and then into fall all the different flowers that I walk past and register. And I've got some musings about them that do have some philosophical import. But before that, I'm going to kind of sketch the scene for you. So our office building is located on a short road that runs parallel to the Menominee River Canal. And the Menominee River is one of three significant rivers that flow through Milwaukee. They all will end up terminating in the Milwaukee River. There's the Milwaukee itself, the Menominee, and the Kinnickinnic. And then they all flow out together into Lake Michigan. And I'm fortunate in that I live and work close enough that I can walk to any of these if I want to. But since I'm already there on the Menominee, I like to take a walk along what's called the Hank Aaron Trail, named after one of our great ball players, the Milwaukee Brewer Hank Aaron. The Hank Aaron trail goes for quite a ways. Some parts of it are simply spectacular. Others are just a path that you walk along. And the portion that we have here, before this massive company and building came in called Rite-Hite, was actually on the spectacular side. But it's still pretty good. And it's nice to walk along the river, and to see the waves, the wildlife, there's a lot of birds, sometimes ducks, or geese, or seagulls, lots of chickadees, swallows, other sorts of birds. Occasionally there's some crows that live around there that I always enjoy seeing. And there's a lot of pollinators, particularly honeybees, and various solitary bees and wasps, and a lot of bumblebees as well, which is a great sign for the health of the area. We get a lot of sulfur butterflies. Those are those beautiful little white and yellow butterflies that we used to actually call cabbage butterflies when we were young. We didn't know their proper name. And occasionally you'll see a monarch or some other butterfly as well. This time of year, the cicadas are in full time living, mating, doing whatever it is that they do activity. Much of it is their singing, which isn't really singing. It's, I think, produced by rubbing their legs together, but it's very loud. And it's a sound that I associate with high summer and the end of summer, as we move into the beginning of the school year. And it's a sound that I particularly like and respond to. I think many people don't enjoy hearing it, but for me, it's a bit of home. And in fact, since I lived far away from here in different regions for so long, to be back in a place that smells and sounds like what I am used to from my childhood, and teenage and early 20-something years, is really comforting on a deep level. So not every single day, but many days that I'm here in my office, I will get out and take a walk around. And we're fortunate in that there's a lot of green space in this city, some of it in the form of parks. That's a relic of Milwaukee's socialist past, that we have a lot more parks than most American cities do, because the socialists who ran the city were dedicated to the idea that ordinary people should be able to enjoy nature. And subsequent political changes haven't really succeeded in closing down or privatizing our parks. We also have, on the other side, a lot of empty space where things just grow. And because we have a lot of native wildflowers here and some non-native invasive species, there's a lot that you get to see as you walk through abandoned lots, or places that have just been allowed to go back to a kind of semi-natural, semi-urban state. And then there's things in between where people have deliberately replanted native plants. Sometimes along parking lots or along paths or things like that. And businesses seem to be, at least in certain areas, pretty cool with that. So there's a lot of natural beauty to enjoy and appreciate. And in these walks, I get to see many different types of flowers and insects and birds and to hear both the sounds of the city and traffic, but also to hear the calling of the birds, or the murmur of the water, or the blowing of the wind, sometimes through the tree leaves, or through dried grasses and flowering plants and bushes. I'm very thankful for that. And I do enjoy all four seasons of the year that we have here in southeastern Wisconsin. But I have to say that this is one of my favorite times of year, when there's still a lot of colorful flowers of different sorts to walk past and take in and to see the pollinators drawing nectar from trees. That's a aspect of natural beauty that I have been responding to since I was a child. And as a matter of fact, a bit of trivia about me that I think very few people know is that when we had to take aptitude tests and figure out what sort of jobs we might want to have, way back when I was in high school, one of the professions that I seriously considered was florist. I never went any further with it, but I've always been taking in the beauty of blooms, and cutting flowers and making arrangements both for other people and for myself, and appreciating when other people do that well also. So I mentioned that there would be some philosophical meat to this. And you could say that the appreciation of beauty is an aesthetic topic. And so we've already done a little bit of philosophizing on the way, even though we haven't mentioned Plato, or Augustine, or Kant, or any other person who writes about aesthetics. But what I want to focus on is something a bit different, namely, the contingency of the sights that we get to see, meaning that they didn't have to be that way. It's possible that there could have been no flowers whatsoever, that the weather patterns could change, that we could have blights. It could be that the kinds of flowers that we see would be replaced by other things, types of plants, maybe flowering, maybe not. It could be that the people who lived in this city didn't value natural beauty and just paved everything over instead, as indeed has happened in some places, or allowed it to turn into wasteland or desert without the rich profusion of that. So every time that we're able to enjoy that, we're really enjoying something that we might call hyper-contingent. It's not just that one efficient cause brought all this about. There are myriad interlocking intersecting causes, some of which are of this season, some of which date back perhaps centuries, and many of which are entirely contingent themselves, not depending on big-picture things like laws of nature or the way that species evolve and express their being, but rather incredibly contingent things, like seeds having sprouted in this particular place or somebody volunteering to plant a certain flowering plant or even berry producing plant. (There's some beautiful berries this time of year on various bushes that we can see before the birds come around and eat them all up.) All of this could be very different than it is. And indeed in just a few days, some of the things that are flowering will have dried up and won't be flowering anymore. And some new blooms until we reach the end of the season will not take their place so much because they don't occupy the same space, but instead draw the eye away from what is dead to what is living. And what is the proper response to this? I would say that thinking about things in this way, and you don't have to think about it constantly or very deeply, but thinking about things in this way opens up the possibility for some aesthetic and some emotional responses. I think that joy is certainly one of them. Pleasure. Perhaps desire, drawing you on further into seeing them. It could be tinged with a bit of sadness or melancholy as you think about all the flowers past, and the fact that these flowers will be gone soon. Also, satisfaction as you think about how they are furnishing food for all of these wonderful pollinating creatures that are part of this vast world that we live in. One might even feel a sense of awe or wonder or gratitude for the possibility of walking along and running one's eyes and perhaps even reaching out and touching and smelling some of these flowering plants that are available to us, fortunately, for the short time that that we have them. So I thought I would share this with you. It's not, I think, particularly profound reflections, but it might be something that at least some of you listeners resonate with and make you recall your own experiences of natural beauty or whatever it happens to be. Maybe flowers aren't your thing, but you like looking over a landscape or looking at a dry desert and watching long enough to see some of the signs of life in it. Whatever it happens to be, I think that engagement with nature, in a kind of unprogrammed way, is something needed for us human beings. Sometimes people don't realize that, but it's usually because they haven't had the opportunity to experience it much, or they've forgotten about it or locked it away. But I think this is something quite important. And I'll just end these reflections with that. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

14 min
01/08/2025

Episode 41 - Taking The More Scenic Route In Your Studies

Just a little bit earlier today, I had a very interesting, although short, conversation that got me thinking about something that could be turned into a decent analogy for philosophical study. And it wasn't directly about philosophy. It was actually about taking different routes, whether you stay on the interstate highways, which are pretty quicker, more direct in many cases, but also kind of boring, even mind numbing to drive on. And the alternative is to take what we often call the scenic route, where you're driving through towns and perhaps you don't have as many lanes, but it's more interesting to drive in and to look around at as you are making your path. And here's how the conversation went. Somebody was talking about driving up to Door County, which is a pretty ritzy and well-known vacation spot here in southern Wisconsin. It's actually past Green Bay. If you've ever seen the map of Wisconsin, you're going up that little finger that comes off. And it's very much, in my point of view, like Montauk and other parts of Long Island in in New York where the Hamptons are out there. It's really for rich people and the people who hold jobs out there working for rich people. That's the way Door County is. And so it's got kind of a reputation of being there for the rich people in Wisconsin and then people coming up from Chicago to go there. Just like Long Island, the Hamptons in Long Island has the reputation of being there for people who who come down from Connecticut or drive from other parts of New York and they've got the money to go out there. Anyway, they were talking about going up to Door County and what's the best way to go. So you can take the interstate for a good ways. Or you can get off the interstate, and take a more interesting and probably a lot more stimulating drive that gets you to see a lot more of the local foliage (it can be very nice during fall when the colors are all turning on the trees). But you also might go close to Lake Michigan, or drive through some scenic towns, and see some cool stuff. So where am I going with this? I think you can probably guess. This is a philosophy focused podcast, so it's going to have something to do with studying philosophy. And I think that there's a great case to be made for spending the time to take the more interesting but time-consuming route. I think a lot of people get themselves into, I won't say trouble, but they save time, but they also waste time by not going into the detours, the backwaters, the smaller routes that you're not quite sure exactly what you're getting into. And they think that they're being more efficient in learning philosophy by only focusing on what other people have told them is the most important stuff, or even taking shortcuts like, you know, having AIs summarize information for you, which we could probably do an entire discussion of covering why that's actually a terrible idea if your goal is to learn anything, not just in philosophy, but in history, in English, in the humanities in general. Probably not even great for doing stuff in the sciences either. Anyway, back to the main topic. So I got to thinking about when I was doing my first full-time gig where I was, as many of you know, teaching up in Michigan City in Indiana, almost on the border of Michigan, at Indiana State Prison. And if I took the interstate, I had about an hour commute, but the interstate was very, very boring. And even with books on CD, I kind of got tired of that after a while. And I would take that up in the morning to make sure I was there on time. But then coming home, I would often take state highways.So, for example, I might take 231, and go south a good ways, and get to see some cool stuff and go over some interesting bridges and go through some towns. Or I might take Highway 20 or Highway 12, which would roughly parallel the interstate that I was on. But there was a lot more to see, especially on 12. And it would take you longer, but it was more enjoyable and stimulating. So what would the equivalent of that be in philosophy? So imagine that you're going to read Plato's Republic. You could easily say: “OK, I just want the bare bones of this. I don't want to dilly dally over some of these discussions, which to me seem a little bit off topic. I just want the argument or I just want the key ideas.” Well, you can certainly do that. I mean, it's a free country. You can do anything you want with your reading. But are you really getting what you want out of it? You may not even suspect what you're missing if you're skipping over too many of the interesting features. If you're unwilling to go down side routes, into alleys where you're not sure what's there, or take a route and linger with Socrates as he seems to go off on a big digression, or even go into myth or something along those lines, you don't really know what you're missing out on. I suppose you could have something like the guidebook where a great commentator could say: “Well, make sure that you read this part. You may be tempted to skip over it, but it's really the equivalent of a Michelin star restaurant. You have to stop in.” Helpful for some people, I guess, if you think that you need somebody with some prestige to tell you: “Oh you have to stop here” or “You need to check this out”. But those of us who have enough judgment, or common sense, or whatever you want to say, experience perhaps, to know that much of the time we just need to explore, we need to see what's actually there for ourselves, and that might be the way to go. And I think if you need somebody like me, who's not quite as prestigious as the people who write the big commentaries and get published with big academic presses, but you know, presumably knows a little bit about philosophy and its study. If you need somebody like me to say to you: “Hey, when you're reading Thomas Hobbes, don't just jump to the stuff about the state of nature. Read the stuff in the book one of Leviathan, where he's talking about words being counters for things and the different kinds of passions, even though it seems a little bit off-topic, or digressions, or a waste of time. It's pretty cool stuff, and it actually turns out to be quite interesting and important. Or, I mean, Aristotle's prone to all sorts of digressions, as is Seneca. I mean it's almost endemic in ancient philosophy, I would say. But you could always check it out for yourself. I'm not saying you have to go down every single bywater and investigate, because who's got the time for that? But sometimes you probably do want to take, I won't say “the road less traveled”, invoking the Robert Frost poem, but one that certainly doesn't have quite as wide of a path, and doesn't seem to have quite as many people traveling that same way as you. That could turn out to be quite interesting. And there are so many things. that you would discover along the way that you might not find in a guidebook, or in Yelp, or whatever else the equivalent is for these sources that we use for deciding what's worth actually digging into, spending time with, going to see and checking out. There's often a lot of things along the way that you just have to run across. So I think that this is, of course, an analogy, a metaphor. Is this supposed to be something that you can use in every single circumstance? No, you have to have some good judgment about how to interpret and apply this. But I think this might be a very useful reminder for some people out there, about what they could be depriving themselves of, if they're only studying what turns out to be the equivalent of staying on the interstate highway, as they're working their way through philosophical texts and thinkers. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

11 min
22/07/2025

Episode 40: Why Using AI To Study Philosophy Is A Foolish Idea

I had an interesting exchange today on Twitter with somebody who direct messaged me, and they were talking about starting the Half Hour Hegel series, which, if you don't know, that is a video series that I published. And it took me about nine years of work to see it through, in part because it had roughly 370 or so videos, each one focused on anywhere from one to four paragraphs from Hegel's Phenomenology, which is viewed as one of the more difficult works of Western philosophy. And there's good reasons for that, which we don't have to go into right here. So this person was enthusiastic about starting the series, and that's understandable. I think that a lot of people have the impression that, sort of like with Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or Benedict Spinoza's Ethics, the Phenomenology of Spirit is a text that if you're really serious about studying philosophy, you have to dive into and work your way through at some point, and so better sooner than later, which is actually not the case in several different ways. But again, sort of a side topic. So he was looking forward to going through the series. And another thing that he said is that when he'd finished the series, then he'd write me again. So I wrote him back and I said, well, I'll see you in a year or two, because there are, again, 370 plus half hour videos. And they are complicated stuff because Hegel is a complicated thinker, and so the explanation of it is not going to be simple either. I use my chalkboard. I draw diagrams. I unpack Hegel's German at certain points, and talk about examples of what he's saying to illustrate it, since he doesn't really give you many examples. So deciding to embark on that that's kind of a big thing, i's a major commitment, you might say, of one's thought and time. In any case, I wrote him back and said, all right, I will see you in a year or two. And then he wrote me back and he said, no, no, you'll see me sooner than that. And what he wrote following that quip, which is rather optimistic, was the part that I'm going to be responding to here. So I'm paraphrasing what he said, because I don't have it verbatim in front of me. He was saying that he's using AI to scrape the videos, and what he means by that is go to the transcripts of the videos, which are probably decent but are going to get a lot of the German words wrong, and probably mix up some other things. And he would have an AI essentially summarize and bullet point things out for him, as he worked his way through Hegel's phenomenology. And he wanted to know whether I would update the transcripts so that the AI would function better. I wrote him back and I said, this is a terrible idea. This is something that I think we could apply more broadly. It could be taking AI to try to work your way through any important philosophical text, for example, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, or even better, his Metaphysics, or Plato's Republic, or one of his later dialogues like The Statesman, or Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods.We could go on and on and on. If you're relying on an AI to do some of the work for you, you are really cheating yourself and you're also setting yourself up for going wrong in a number of ways. It's sort of like as if you had decided, for whatever reason, could be that you think you're not smart, smart enough. It could be that you think you'll save yourself some time, whatever it happens to be. It's like deciding you're only going to read secondary literature about particular philosophers and that that will be good enough for you. You will never actually do the work, set aside the time, devote your mind to readings the text that the thinker actually wrote. And if you do that, it's pretty much guaranteed that you are going to miss out on some important stuff within the text. I don't think that you could even take, for example, Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and rely solely upon a secondary work to give you everything that's going on there. You actually do need to read the text yourself. Using AI strikes me as an even more thoughtless and foolish way to try to effectively cut corners. So there's a number of reasons why that's the case. And this person seems to be involved in AI in some respect. So I imagine that he's probably already aware of some of these issues. But the fact that he wants to apply this to Hegel's phenomenology shows me that perhaps he doesn't take those issues seriously. So what would the problems be? Well, first of all, there are what they call hallucinations, which is just a fancy word, probably an ill-chosen one, for just making stuff up that isn't true and may be completely imaginary, let's say. And imaginary there is being used as a metaphor because artificial intelligence, which itself is a metaphor, it's not actually intelligent, doesn't have an imagination. But if we understand imagination is like thinking up something that doesn't actually have reality by taking components of things and smooshing them together or modifying them. Okay, imagination works. So AIs will just make stuff up. Sometimes if you call them on it, they'll actually admit it and say, oh, I'm sorry, let me see if I can fix that. And then they'll go on to make something else up. For example, when I asked ChatGPT a while back about the books that I had written, it gave me one book that I actually have written, which is my main book that's out there. And then it attributed six other books to me, five of which were real books that some of my colleagues have written, and it lied and said that I wrote those books. One of the books was completely fictional. Fictional in the sense not that it's a book of fiction. It's a book that doesn't exist. So just imagine what would happen if you're feeding in Hegel's phenomenology and my commentary on it, all the crazy crap that it's going to come up with and say, yeah, this is what's going on here. It could make up anything you want. And unless you actually know Hegel, you won't know that you're getting duped by something that you chose to put your trust in. Another big problem is going to be superficiality of interpretation. So the way that these large language models work is they've scoured a vast amount of data that was available there on the internet, and hopefully they haven't started scouring other AI-generated data, which is a whole other problem that we can talk about somewhere else. But what they've done essentially is take what was available out there, and you could say that it's in many respects kind of lowest common denominator stuff. So there's a lot of crappy takes on hegel out there a lot of misinformed takes. I'll just give you one great example. Hegel in the Phenomenology does not use a thesis-antithesis-synthesis approach to things.As a matter of fact he actually criticizes a schematicism of that sort at various points in the Phenomenology. However, a lot of the people out there who have written things on Hegel over the years, including on a lot of websites and other videos and podcasts, have been replicating this wrongheaded approach to Hegel's thought and work. So you can guarantee that the AI is going to be working off of that stuff ,and is going to feed you erroneous material, and it's going to get things wrong. And again if you don't know Hegel you don't know what you don't know, namely that this thing is giving you bad information generated from many other people's bad information. The third thing is that AI leads to a kind of flattening of matters. It doesn't think. It doesn't have intelligence. It doesn't learn. It doesn't do any of these sorts of things, which would be problematic already with a lot of philosophers. But when you're looking at somebody like Hegel, within whose work the very problem of thinking itself is being thematized in a way that's supposed to draw you, the reader, in and get you thinking along with, but also against Hegel himself at different points. well, the AI is totally going to lose the thread and (let's say it was intelligent) wouldn't be able to grasp where it's getting things wrong. But it's not even intelligent. And it's rather foolish to think that it's going to give you an accurate take on something so complex, so convoluted as the movements of thought going on in Hegel's Phenomenology. Even I, a commentator on Hegel, couldn't actually film every single day that I got up there in front of the chalkboard to do it because sometimes I would lose the train of thought myself, somebody who had been studying Hegel for 20 years by the time that I started that project. So an AI is going to be totally out of its depth, and it's not going to tell you that it's out of its depth. So long story short, I told this person, this is a terrible idea. I don't think that you should do this. If you're going to study Hegel, actually study Hegel. Feel free to use the videos as a resource, but this is a counterproductive way to go, you may think that you're actually helping yourself, but you're getting in your own way. And then I capped it by saying, listen, if you're committed to this sort of using AI to essentially substitute for the work that's involved in understanding a complex classic work of philosophy, don't contact me again, because there wouldn't be any point in having a conversation. I don't know where it's going to go. Ididn't get a response after that. Perhaps they got discouraged, or perhaps they thought oh this guy's just a Luddite or some fuddy-duddy who doesn't understand AI like somebody smart and hip like I do And frankly, it doesn't really matter what his response is unless it's something like, yeah, I see that this would be a real mistake to go down this path. I don't foresee any useful conversation with somebody who has effectively deluded themselves, probably in conjunction with a lot of other people helping them with that delusion. sharing it, replicating it within their little teams, there wouldn't be much point in continuing a discussi

15 min
04/07/2025

Episode 39 - Why Academics Enjoy Going To Conferences

Last week, I spent three days at a local conference, and it's one that I typically go to every year and occasionally present at (I think I've done three or four talks there over the last 10 or so years), and it's held at Marquette University and called the Aristotle and Aristotelian Tradition Conference. The theme changes from year to year, so you get different people and different kinds of papers and discussions at each of the conferences, depending on what the theme is and how it ties in with the kind of work that people are doing. So this year, it was about Aristotle and his predecessors, meaning Aristotle's own discussions, treatments, criticisms, interpretations of people, not just including Plato, his old teacher, but all of these other philosophers that had come before him. And you can find discussions about that sort of thing, for example, in Metaphysics book 1, where he tells us what all these different philosophers thought about the causes of and why they didn't have the four-cause schema that he did, but were on the way to developing it. Or you can look in other works. For example, there's some references in the Nicomachean Ethics to other people's viewpoints on things. And we don't have to belabor that point. Suffice it to say that Aristotle is very interested in what other people had to say, and he's also equally interested in in taking what's useful or right or even just half developed in their works and incorporating it into his own larger, fairly systematic perspective on matters, but stripping away the things that he thought were off base and saying, at least at certain points in his works, why he thought they were off base. Now, it's Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition, so it doesn't just include attention to Aristotle himself, but also to later thinkers, some of whom are also writing in Greek, some of whom are in various other places, you know Arabic writers on Aristotle, some works from the middle ages. I don't think there was anything on contemporary aristotelianism but i might have missed that because I had to miss a few of the sessions. In any case, why am I talking about this conference here? I had the luxury of not having to present any of my own work. I actually had a thought about what I might propose as a topic. It would have been a little bit out of the usual extent of this, which is much more focused on logic and metaphysics and matters like that, I would have focused on Aristotle and his engagements with predecessors in what we call the ethico-political works, which include the Ethics and the Politics, but also the Rhetoric and the Poetics, and a few other works of those sorts. So I didn't get a proposal together. And the good news about that was I didn't have to present anything. I could just sit back and see what other people had to say. And that was quite enjoyable. Sometimes I could go up to them afterwards or even in the session, ask questions. And I could also see what other people were interested in asking about or even debating about. And this is what you do at a good academic conference.It's one reason why we have this sort of, let's say genre or format or arrangement for doing that sort of thing. You might wonder, well, what would I get out of going to an academic conference? And with some of them, it might not be very good at all! Maybe you don't get any good discussion with anybody or you're kind of shut out because it turns out to be a gathering of people who all know each other. But in many cases, it's pretty cool to go because you meet up with other people who share a few things in common with him. So one of them is an interest in something that is probably pretty uncommon. If you meet up with somebody else who routinely reads Aristotle and wants to talk about metaphysical views on, say, causality or the principle of non-contradiction or the nature of the heavens or whatever, anything like that, that is a very, very small amount of people. You could say it's like a weird, tiny fandom, right? But it's not just fandom, because people who are interested in these things are putting in the time and effort to study them because they think there's something not just interesting, but potentially useful there, something worth knowing about and talking about. And here's another thing that you share in common with them. They're willing to write papers that very few people in the grand scheme of things are ever going to read, let alone read attentively, let alone read. give them useful feedback and responses about. So they're not just willing to write that. They're willing to travel, to hang out for three days with other people. They're willing to, to some degree, dress up when they're presenting and take what other people have to say about it seriously, and then perhaps go out for dinner later or meet together and discuss it over lunch. So these are quite often very important ways in which people get stimulation. And it kind of takes me back. Many of you probably know my first full-time teaching position was at Indiana State Prison. And I was teaching for Ball State University in a four-year degree program. But aside from the other professors in the prison program, and there was only one of them who actually taught any philosophy classes, you wouldn't get a lot of what we call peer interaction. I mean, the students were pretty good on the whole, interested, older, so a bit more mature. Very motivated, at least at a certain point, to learn and discuss and get as much as they could out of their education. but they didn't have access to the kinds of materials that we did because of the prison regime. And typically they were working on their bachelor's. So they weren't people who had done graduate work on Aristotle, or Hegel, or Maurice Blondel, or pick whoever else it happens to be. You do want — most people, I would say if you're an academic — you do want to engage with other people who are not just on your level in terms of their background and preparation and education and research, but who have a similar level of interest in what it is that you're focused on. And so for me, I mean, you do get some good interaction through reading other people and you can correspond by email or (we didn't have social media back then) but nowadays you could do it in social media. But there's something about actually being in the same space, the same place, the same conversation as other people that is quite valuable. And I think this is something that many people out there are quite starved for, have this deep desire. I think it's something much more important common and widespread among human beings who are interesting people, because they're interested in interesting things. And so those of you who are listening to this may recognize yourself in there. Even if you don't have a background academically in philosophy and you came to it kind of late, you might say to yourself, yeah, this is something that I wish I could get more of. And so academic conferences and do satisfy that desire to some degree. They're often more intense, but we could think about other venues in which this can happen. For example, something that I was fortunate to be invited to participate in just last year, Stoic Camp out in Wyoming, where a bunch of people, some of whom are academics, but many, most of whom are are not, and are from all sorts of walks of life, but are interested in Stoicism, get together way out in the wilderness at a camp and hang out and, you know, do camp things like eating meals together and taking hikes and bonfires, but also intensively study, and talk about, and practice this philosophy as a way of life together for some time. And you get to know people as you're doing this and I think that's quite valuable it's quite enjoyable it's something that has a lot of dimensions to recommend it so I thought I would talk a little bit here about what it's like to participate in an academic conference. I think now that I've said it, this is actually a very small subset of a much larger set of ways in which we engage each other about things that matter to us, and really have some substance and depth to them, so they can be explored and shared in common. And I think that's probably where I'll end. You can think about that yourself, whether you crave, need, desire those sorts of engagements or whether you do just fine without that and what the reason for yourself happens to be for being disposed one way in this matter or in the other direction. Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

13 min
15/06/2025

Episode 38 - Getting Angry Over Important Ideas Not Being Taught

Today I had an interesting conversation that in many respects was a repeat of a number of other conversations I've had in the past where there's a theme that comes up over and over again having to do with philosophy, but not just philosophy in the abstract. Particularly philosophy, we could say in its great thinkers, the ones who form a sort of canon in Western philosophy. And that canon actually needs to be rather deep and broad and diverse. Otherwise, it's not really a canon. It's just kind of a little bit of a club that people like to hang out in. It would include people that come to mind like Plato and Aristotle and David Hume and Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant. But it should also include a whole host of thinkers from ancient, medieval, early modern, late modern philosophy. Probably it should be so extensive that any one given person would look at the list and say, oh wow, here's somebody on here who I haven't actually read, but maybe they're worth checking out. Now coming back to the conversation, the thematic involved is that somebody says, wow, I didn't know that this kind of thought with its particular useful application was actually out there, or I didn't know that these thinkers who I've heard about actually had these really cool and interesting and potentially useful things to say. In the case of the person I was talking with today, they were coming from a background where they'd had one philosophy class in college, and it was a formal logic class, so they didn't really learn much about any particular thinker or delve into texts. And they'd recently become aware of at least with certain philosophers just how much they had to offer and they were thinking: well why didn't I get this in the course of my education, particularly in high school, and then in college, and then in professional studies later on Why wasn't anybody introducing me to, for example, what Aristotle has to say about having decent conversations with people by using something that gets called dialectic. There are a lot of other ways in which this sort of thing can arise as well. It's very common if you did study philosophy, but you did so in a way what we call analytic philosophical tradition department, that you're probably not going to get much deep reading of texts and thinkers, because analytics typically don't read an awful lot. They like to stick to small portions of texts. The more that they actually, like for example, Robert Brandom, pay attention to thinkers and their works as a whole, the less analytic they tend to be over time. So the general tendency is to say, we just want the arguments. We just want the gist of it. Don't bother to read all of Bentham or Kant or whoever it's going to be. You might think that on the other side of the so-called analytic continental divide: that it would be a bit better. But what we see, unfortunately, happening there, as well as in departments and programs that share a similar kind of approach and canon, for example English departments that are really into, say, Derrida and all of his successors, what we see instead is they don't spend much time on the pre-19th century thinkers unless that's the flavor of the day. And they're going to read certain things and highlight those but you won't go to a department like that and get a really solid introduction to Plato or Aristotle, let alone somebody like Cicero or Plutarch or Augustine or any of these other thinkers. If you know much about the current landscape of philosophy, then you'll say, okay well, if you didn't get it from going to a place which really doesn't do philosophy much at all, or in an analytic department or a continental department, well, I know where you'll get this sort of stuff, and you'll get it good. It'll be in some sort of school that either specializes in history of philosophy or takes a kind of classical Great Books approach. And you'd think that would be the case. However, even there, what you find is it's pretty hit or miss because a lot of the places that bill themselves as providing a classical education don't really do much of that. They may teach some Aristotle, but usually in a way that goes against the very spirit of Aristotle's texts, which are all about, you know, inquiry and thinking through issues. They often will treat Aristotle as if he's just a precursor to Thomas Aquinas, or he's articulated these wonderful principles once and for all, and they ignore the, let's call it, dialectical aspects of Aristotle's own texts. And we could say the same about people reading Cicero or Plato or Augustine. Thomas Aquinas is particularly subject to that sort of treatment. So there's a lot of ways that one can go and then later on find out by actually reading the texts of philosophers just how much they missed out on. It can come from a lot of different backgrounds in this respect. And interestingly, what I've observed with this is that there's an entire spectrum running from irritation and frustration on one end all the way up to rage on the other end. And what is this spectrum? Well, this is the continuum of the broad emotion of anger. where we have sort of a low-grade thing on one side, frustration, and we have full-blown anger beyond anger, rage, fury on the other hand, and everything in between. And ironically, if you want to know about that, well, there's all sorts of great philosophical resources on that in the Western tradition. You probably heard me talk about quite a few of them. Aristotle is one of the thinkers who does, in fact, tell us an awful lot about that emotion. Seneca would be another one. He wrote an entire book on anger. And one of the common elements to the philosophical treatments of anger is that there's a realization it's a complex emotion and it arises out of the perception that some sort of wrong has been done to you or to others. Somebody or something that you care about or feel responsible for or identify with. And that wrong is unjust. It shouldn't have happened. And so you desire to respond in some way that would set this right by punishing, by retaliating. And that's what anger at its core really involves. There's more to it than that. We don't have to worry about the other elements because what we're really interested in here is that emotion so often arising in relation to realizing that what you studied is didn't actually give you what you see you could have gotten, what you should have gotten, right? There is an ought, a moral obligation there that you feel has been violated in some way. And especially if you paid for that education, you would be rightly thinking, I paid all this money. Why didn't I get what they should have provided me with? And quite often, the answer is they didn't know any better than you. Those people who were teaching you, who were setting up the curriculum, they probably were themselves fairly ignorant and in an unphilosophical way, relying uncritically on what other people had to say about where you would actually go to find the cool stuff that now you're discovering. And what we see all too often, I think this is quite surprising to people who imagine that philosophers are all these hyper-rational people, which indeed they're not. What we see happening is a replication of a vicious circle. So we'll take an example in continental philosophy. Why would you read Aristotle? You know that he's committed to a substance, metaphysics, and an ethics that focuses on virtue. We know that these sorts of concepts have been used in ways that go against human dignity, or are logocentric and phallocentric, or not rhizomatic enough, or pick whatever flavor of the day you've got for the cool kids ideas that are being bandied about. So we don't need to actually read Aristotle. It's enough that we criticize him and then move on to the more interesting stuff that we're going to talk about and what happens we have generations of people who don't actually know what's there in Aristotle's works This could equally happen in a great books program where people have far too narrow conceptions about what Aristotle is teaching and what his method is and ideas like that. And they just transmit that to their students in a dogmatic fashion. The remedy for this is pretty straightforward and simple. You got to actually read the texts and see what's in there. And until you do that, you really don't know, do you? And if an expert claims that they know exactly what's in those texts, but they haven't read them recently, you should probably be a little bit suspicious of that self-proclaimed or proclaimed by many others expert. In the end, the remedy is not to get angry and say there ought to be a law, we ought to change things. It's much lower level. You can change it for yourself. You can find other people who are, in fact, reading these thinkers and texts and talking about the important issues. And if you want to incorporate any of those insights into your own life and thinking, there is literally nothing stopping you except the demand on your own part that somebody else go along on the journey with you. Somebody who probably is invested in going on a different journey. So this is a topic I probably need to do some writing about because I've been thinking about it for quite a long time. Having encountered this sort of realization and then reaction on the part of so many of the people I have talked to over the years. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe

14 min

This podcast takes insights, arguments, distinctions, and practices from complex philosophical texts and thinkers and makes them accessible for anyone who wants to learn. It also provides advice about how to effectively study philosophy and apply it to your own life gregorybsadler.substack.com

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Gregory B. Sadler
Años de actividad

2024 - 2025
Episodios

45
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Apto
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© Gregory B. Sadler, ReasonIO / Reason at Work, LLC
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