Mind & Desire

Thanks for reading Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy! This post is public so feel free to share it. In one of my most recent interviews, I got a compliment that I’ve received several times, which I think is kind of telling. It doesn’t often come up when I’m having a conversation with somebody who is directly within, let’s call it, the world or discipline of philosophy But it does happen quit...

Today I had an interesting conversation with a client and a practice you could say emerged out of it. A practice that I myself have been doing in certain circumstances that I’ll tell you about in just a few moments, which I thought would be useful for them as well. It’s probably best to begin by talking about the circumstances in which you would want to engage in this practice, and then I’ll tell...

Thanks for reading Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy! This post is public so feel free to share it. Today I had an interesting conversation with somebody who I would call a colleague, somebody working in my building who was hoping to actually get some advice from me about a situation that they had to deal with earlier on in the week. And it’s the sort of thing that comes up, at least in one...

A number of the ideas that people use to make sense of the world and try to formulate what we ought to be doing, make recommendations, set up their own lives, engage with others, are essentially fictions or myths. And I’d like to talk about one of them in particular today that I’ve encountered, now going back at least 20 years in my work as an educator. I’m sure many of you have heard these terms...

This post is public so feel free to share it. Recently, I was a guest on another podcast, as I do from time to time, going on other people’s platforms and talking with them about whatever it is that they want to bring me in for. And in this case, the person wanted to talk about Stoicism and specifically Epictetus, and they hit me with a term that I wasn’t really familiar with but I could say “I th...

I’ve had a few queries and comments, mostly in YouTube but also in some other places lately, that got me thinking about a sort of general topic. And this is one of those, if the shoe fits, wear it. Many of you listening to this, probably this isn’t the case for you, but you might know somebody that this would be helpful for to hear, or maybe just share this idea with them. And I’m going to put it...

Last week, I gave a podcast interview and we ranged over a number of interesting questions. I got asked one by the host that, you know, it seems sort of a easy question, almost a softball at first. And I suppose for some people, if they have oversimplistic views on ethics, it might really be one. But for me, it was a tough question. I had to think about it quite a bit. And so here’s the question a...

One of the common ways that I see quite a few people who want to study philosophy, whether in academic settings or in the wider world, screwing things up for themselves is a sort of mistaken process, prioritization, and perspective that they assign to the thinkers, the texts, maybe movements that they’re reading from the past. And I suppose that you could say it takes on a certain sort of perfecti...

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...

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 f...

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,...

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 refres...

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 bori...

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 Pheno...

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...

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...

Today I was doing a little bit of writing about a class that I'm going to be teaching for the second time, which is called Stoicism and the Cardinal Virtues. And one of the things that I was mentioning as I was writing about this class, trying to get people interested in signing up for it and taking it along with me, is the fact that when it comes to virtue, the four cardinal virtues, the subordin...

I had an interesting but short conversation today in Facebook that I'm going to use as sort of a launching point for thinking about some bigger picture issues having to do with how you study philosophy, particularly if you're doing it on your own, if you're somebody who can't do it full time in a school with the guidance of professors (which, by the way, is probably a bit overrated. It's kind of a...

I saw a very interesting discussion in Stoicism Reddit today, and it was titled, “What Do You Think Are the Flaws of Stoicism?” It drew a lot of discussion, much of which I think was fairly decent. And I got to thinking about this, and I realized that what we have here is a topic where we probably want to make some distinctions and explore things a good bit because we use this term flaws or we cou...

Today in a tutorial session, I had a client ask me about the criterion of truth and about different perspectives or theories on what makes something true or false. And at the start, I said, well, we probably probably want to think in the plural. Because if we're understanding criterion in the singular, to be what it is that we can use as an index for something being true or the opposite being fals...

Over roughly the last week, I've been producing a set of new core concept videos on two main works of Plutarch, and I've been doing that as resources for my academic students enrolled at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in a class that's called Philosophy, Mindfulness, and Life, which is exploring philosophies as ways of life. So we look at texts that not only give you sort of frameworks, but...

Today I'm in the middle of processing some thoughts and feelings about somebody who died quite a long time ago, and I only found out about it yesterday. So you may have seen the piece that I published a little over a year ago, A Tale of Two Philosophy Teachers , which was about two of the people that I had in high school who taught philosophy classes. One was called a philosophy class. It was intr...

I think that at this point, a number of you have heard me talk at one point or another about Alasdair MacIntyre, the Scottish philosopher who wound up doing a lot of his work over here in the United States. And you may or may not know that about 20 years ago, I actually got to meet him because I participated in what was called the Erasmus Institute Faculty Fellowship in the summer of 2005, hosted...

This is episode number 30 of the Mind & Desire podcast, and since you know it's kind of a nice round number, perhaps a bit of a milestone, I put a chat for my Substack subscribers to participate in saying: Hey! What topics do you think would be good for a episode that commemorates the getting to a certain point in the podcast? And I only had a few takers, but one of them is particularly good. It w...

I spent a good bit of my time today and yesterday, and probably will spend a good bit of tomorrow as well, putting together my notes and a handout for a presentation that I'll be giving in an online conference coming up, which has to do with anger from psychological and philosophical and other perspectives. And I've been allotted 15 minutes to talk about the topic that I have, you could say, signe...