Mind & Desire

I had an interesting, you might say, joking exchange, but only partly tongue-in-cheek with somebody on Twitter today, and it's very emblematic of a sort of mindset that I see quite a few people slip into. And the exchange was about the current state of academia and how everybody in it has abandoned truth and justice as values. And now they're all schemers or grifters or pick whatever else you want...

I am planning on teaching a class on Plato's dialogues, at least certain of them, before too long. And so I've kind of got Plato on the brain, you might say. And I've been thinking for quite a long time about how to productively read platonic dialogues, whether you're doing so for a class or just your own edification and personal development and study. And I've got a few ideas that I'd like to sha...

As many of you listeners know, I teach classes both in traditional academic settings, in institutions that, you know, have a kind of formalized approach to education, and I do those face-to-face and online. And I also teach, in the Study with Sadler Academy, online classes and seminars to a much wider variety of people, in part because I open it up. You don't have to be enrolled in a particular sc...

If you follow me on social media, you no doubt saw me posting a kind of funny meme about a workaholic. It actually shows a guy in heavy plate armor, and I suppose this is from some video game setting, as some people have pointed out. The caption of it is the part that we're really interested in, and it shows him with his head in his arms saying “workaholics when they run out of workahol”. And, you...

After I've gotten up in the morning, one of the things that I typically do is check for memories in my Facebook account, because I've been posting things in there since 2009 when I got on Facebook. Quite often the memories are interesting or telling or they bring up something that I'd entirely forgotten about. And that was kind of the case for a memory from yesterday, which has to do with what we...

This is the first week of the new academic semester for me, and I'm just teaching at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. The two classes that I have, both of which are very focused on practical philosophy, taking philosophical ideas and applying them within the scope of one's life, both of them are online courses. classes, which is kind of nice. I do like being in the classroom and engaging wit...

We are quite early into the new year of 2025, and for an academic, even a part-timer like me, that means getting syllabi and course sites and a number of other related things ready for the classes that are coming up. And generally, the semester doesn't begin right at New Year's, or even in the first week of January. We get a little bit of lead time, a little bit of a respite. But then we hit the g...

In a previous episode where I was talking about my work completing a video series on what we possess of Aristotle's Poetics, I had brought up the fact that there were rather rigid interpretations and applications of Aristotle's text to dramas, particularly in the 17th century, where Aristotle was interpreted as providing us with definitive rules for how a tragedy has to be written in order to be a...

One of the kind of projects, or rather sets of projects that I've been working on probably a good portion of this last year, and I'll be continuing to do it this coming year, is you might say finishing up things that I started. And by that, I mean video series, which then will turn into podcast series down the line, core concept videos primarily. And I'm thinking about this in particular right now...

A friend of mine recently asked me to provide him with some information about myself. And the reason is because he's doing something quite nice and it might say even a little overdue for me. So nice on his part, overdue on my part, not on his. And that is to create a Wikipedia entry page about me as a person, as I suppose a public-facing philosopher, somebody whose work gets used and referenced by...

I expect that many of you are familiar with the series that I have been writing on Stoicism and grief, which is a topic that I've been thinking about for quite some time, and I had the opportunity to present some of my thoughts, largely drawn from the classic Stoic authors, about how we can look at the emotion of grief and and the activities of grieving back when I went to stoic camp and was an in...

I plan for this to be the last post (at least for a while) discussing my reflections about various matter stemming from our big move earlier this Fall, during which we left behind our two-story loft apartment in the Westown neighborhood of Milwaukee, and moved into a smaller living space in the Third Ward, and took up an office space in the Walkers Point neighborhood. That had the interesting and...

Following up on my previous episode discussing the big move that we recently made to a new living space and a new office space, splitting functions we previously did in our loft apartment in the downtown of Milwaukee, I gave some thought to a problem related to and revealed by the move that my wife and I have given a good bit of thought to. We have moved several times now. When you move, you pack...

There’s a good reason why I’ve been a bit radio-silent on the podcast front as of late. Earlier this month, we finished a big move from our old apartment to a new living space and a new office. Previously, we had been both living and working in the same place, and now they are separated by about 4/10 of a mile (and funny enough, in two different zip codes). Since I recorded and edited this new Min...

There is a passage in the first section of David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that, every time I read the work, makes me pause and reflect. It has to do with assessments of which past thinkers or writers are read in the present and will be read in the future. Some of Hume’s choices and predictions strike us in the present as rather quaint. But perhaps there’s a lesson for us there...

How much time do you need to give to a philosophical text in order to adequately understand it? That is a question I get asked, both in general and with respect to specific texts and authors, very often. There isn’t any good precise answer to a question like that. It depends on so many different factors. How complex and difficult is the text or the thought of that author? How well-equipped is the...

I’m currently teaching an online class on Rene Descartes’ Meditations , as well as on the Objections other philosophers and theologians provided about his work, and Descartes’ own replies to those objections. One of the points I emphasize to my students is that this willingness to see our feedback from other thinkers is something important not just for Descartes himself but for doing philosophy we...

It can be easy to get mistaken impressions or even erroneous entire accounts about what it is that a philosopher actually says in their writings, what their position on key topics are, what they thought and stood for. A prime example of that, one that has been on my mind, is Rene Descartes. He is often referenced as a person who buys into what we call mind-body dualism, which is indeed part of his...

I’m currently teaching on 8-week online course on Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, so his philosophy is often on my mind. This goes especially for some of the key passages of the work that created an impression upon me during one reading or another. Among them is his answer to a question raised in the second Meditation. He has determined that, even if there is an evil demon who tur...

Plato’s Crito is a short and dramatic dialogue. It starts out with just two interlocutors, Socrates and the Crito who the dialogue is named after. Socrates’ execution had been postponed due to a religious ritual, but now is slated to happen, and Crito has bribed the guards in preparation for spiriting Socrates away to a different Greek city. And then Socrates says: let’s think this through. . . ....

While I was out at Wyoming Stoic Camp last month, in the course of one of our daily group activities, a younger participant expressed a worry that many of my academic students come in to classes with. “Aren’t we judging?” he asked. Now why is that a problem? Somewhere this college student had gotten not just introduced, but likely inundated with a counterproductive and oversimplistic moral norm al...

I’ll be resuming examination of some of the key ideas in Plato’s dialogue the Crito here in the Mind and Desire podcast down the line. This coming week, however, I will be somewhere else, specifically Wyoming, where I am one of the guest speakers at the Wyoming Stoic Camp.l So I thought I’d take a little break and tell you a bit about what I expect I’ll be doing, the travel I’ll be undertaking the...

One of the aspects of Platonic dialogues (which you might have noticed already, or this may be a bit new to you), one that I find very rewarding and even fascinating is the fact that there is so much being said. I won't even say between the lines, because it's right there in the lines, but typically the ones that we're not paying adequate attention to, because we think that they're just sort of th...

One common tool that many of us in the field of philosophy make a lot of use out of, sometimes not acknowledging that we're doing so, is what you could call analogy or metaphor, or to use a term that I particularly like for it, similitude , which comes from the Latin simulitudo , meaning something like “likeness” or “likening,” showing how things are connected with each other, how they resemble ea...

In this fourth episode, I discuss a key insight coming from Aristotle, discussed in his Nicomachean Ethics book 6, chapter 2, where he says that “choice may be called either thought related to desire or desire related to thought.” The term we translate as choice is prohairesis, and that denotes something much more complicated than just the term "choice" would seem to signify. This is a public epis...