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.

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 discussion.

So that's where we'll leave the topic for the time being. Ultimately, the big point here is if you're going to use AI, there are some legitimate uses for it, but it's not going to help you study philosophy effectively. It might help you as a complete beginner to get some starting points, much like Wikipedia has in the past, or reading secondary literature. But you really have to be on your guard against getting misled and thinking that you actually know things that you don't, that when you go to the text you'll unfortunately (or actually fortunately for you) find out that they got wrong, and you've had wrong because you trusted a source that prudence would have told you not to place such reliance upon.

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.

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.

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 subordinate virtues that each of those four cardinal virtues encompasses or includes, what we don't have is any one single Stoic text where you're going to get a comprehensive overview of that.

Instead, what we have is a set of different discussions spread throughout a whole bunch of different thinkers, a whole bunch of texts, many of which are actually by Stoics, some of which are by people like Cicero who are not themselves Stoics but know a lot about it, communicate a good bit about it, and find certain aspects of the Stoic point of view rather attractive.

What we have to do is take these many different discussions, which, by the way, are in two different languages, ancient Greek, Latin, right? And we have to do a lot of connecting the dots, correlating what one person says with what another person says, catching allusions that are being made, for example, in Epictetus, who talks about a number of these different subordinate virtues without mentioning the cardinal virtues by name. We have to piece together a fairly systematic doctrine.

And what we're doing there is what I for about 20 years or so have come to call “philosophical detective work”. That's my own phrase. Nobody else is required to use it. You're not going to be able to look it up in an online dictionary or a website and have people say, oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. It's just a useful term that I have been providing people with for a number of years, probably a little bit ambiguous, maybe misleading or inexact in what they make of it so that they can understand the kind of work that I and certain other philosophers do.

And I say certain other philosophers because there are other philosophers who I see doing this, particularly people working in the history of philosophy, but not restricted to that. But I also say certain other philosophers because we're probably in the minority when it comes to the contemporary philosophy world where other people are taking different approaches.

If you look at my academic writings and even some of my popular writings, you'll see me doing this in my own way with a lot of different thinkers. So, for example, when it comes to Aristotle, I’m somebody who delves into particular topics and reads across a number of different texts where Aristotle is discussing that.

On anger, for example, I will bring in the Rhetoric and the two Ethics, the Nicomachean and Eudamian, the Politics, and any other text that I think is particularly relevant for what it is that I'm discussing, which might be the Topics, might be the De Anima, might even be the Poetics for that matter.

When I'm working on Thomas Hobbes, okay, there I'm mostly using Leviathan, but I'm ranging throughout the first two books of the work and I'm connecting together discussions rather than saying, oh, I'm only going to look at this particular chapter. I am going to bring in all sorts of things to try to illuminate the topic that I'm interested in.

If I'm writing about Jeremy Bentham, well, I obviously will be engaging with his most important and most often excerpted work, which is the introduction to the principles of morality and legislation. But I'll also bring in things from other works by him as well, and I'll be ranging over the whole of that big, thick, and oftentimes boring, but also quite interesting book.

So when it comes to the Stoics on the virtues, I am looking at not just what Seneca and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, these three late Stoics, have to say, but also what we find in Cicero's works or in Musonius Rufus's lectures or in the summaries of Stoic doctrine that we have in Diogenes Laertes and in Arius Didymus and other texts as well, because what I'm going to be doing is putting together a comprehensive picture as best as I can of what it is that these people, these really deep and systematic thinkers, wanted to tell us about these interesting, complicated phenomena.

In this case, what we call the virtues, but I might also be looking at an emotion or something else, a philosophy of action, motivations that people have. And in order to do this kind of work, there is a important prerequisite that I think a lot of philosophers don't want to engage in and don't see the usefulness of — perhaps were never even introduced to as an important way of doing philosophy — and that is to read widely and attentively and note connections between things.

If, for example, you want to know what St. Anselm's ideas about something that he talks about are, you have to read not just the most famous book where there's a chapter on that. You actually have to read around history.in his works, and probably not just read particular treatises, but also look at his letters to other people if there's anything relevant in there, or at the life of St. Anselm, or even texts like the Dicta Anselmi, which hasn't even been translated into English,and you might find useful stuff even in his Prayers and Meditations.

It's when you do that, when you actually engage with a thinker and their body of work, not just in a very pragmatic way, saying I'm interested in Anselm's ontological argument, so I'm only going to read Proslogion 2,or maybe 2 to 4, and the response to Gaunillo. But you say I want to see what he makes of other arguments in his works. In particular, since the Prosologian is supposed to be kind of a condensation of the many arguments of the Monologion, maybe you got to read that. But you probably also have to read through his works looking for other instances of “that than which nothing greater can be thought”, which you will find as a catchphrase used in other works, if you actually go to them and you read them.

If you don't do that, then unless you are fortunate enough to read somebody else who is doing that kind of work and they put it down in their own books or articles, you won't even suspect what you're missing. And that is where I think the vast majority of people who study education and teach and talk about and produce resources on philosophy actually are.

By contrast, if you really want to know a thinker well, you need to read a lot of the stuff that they've written. So it's not enough to understand Rene Descartes. just to read his Discourse on Method and the Meditations. You probably also want to read the Objections and Replies to the Meditations, but you also want to read letters that the guy wrote and some of his other works, and then you get a much fuller sense of what his project is and what he's doing and what positions he actually develops and holds and defends on particular matters.

I don't actually know how I wound up doing this other than being interested in reading as much as I could of particular authors and then seeing the interconnections between ideas and arguments and distinctions and other elements of philosophy spread across their works. But early on in my development as, I would say, a graduate student and then as a young professor, that's what I was tending to do in my academic articles and book chapters. And I think I even did some of that with my students in my classes and with colleagues, for example, at conferences saying, you know if you check out this, this person is also saying this about the topic.

And that has become one of my main approaches to understanding philosophical thinkers and movements over time. I imagine that many of my peers find what I do differently, either confusing or frustrating. They don't understand why there's so many allusions to other works when it seems like we could make things a lot simpler. But I'm not interested in simplifying.

I'm interested in doing justice to the complexity and depth and richness of the thought that we're lucky enough to have access to under the names of these interesting thinkers. And so that's what I call philosophical detective work. I'm not saying that anybody else necessarily has to do it. or that it's even the best way to study philosophy or teach it or talk about it. But I think it's a viable way of working at it, and it's one that is rather respectful of the great thinkers who so generously contributed their works to us.

And so those are some reflections for today. I don't really know what you ought to make of them, but I thought I would share it with you and you can tell me what your own views or experiences are when it comes to this approach.

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 grab bag. But that's a conversation for another time.)

So this person was commenting on a post that I made, where I was linking to the piece that I wrote last night about Alasdair MacIntyre and some of my memories of interactions with him that, to me, revealed a kind of character that I've talked about before in this podcast, specifically with MacIntyre. So I don't need to go over any of that again.

The person probably expressed themselves poorly because what they were asking for is something that I'm asked for an awful lot in comments and emails and AMAs. Which is: tell me what works of a philosopher are most important or essential for me to begin with.

But what this person added to it that kind of set me thinking in a certain line (perhaps wrongly) was: “I don't want to waste time or effort.” And I thought, you know, there's a couple things wrong with this.

One is that if you're just beginning in philosophy or really in any field, you don't know enough to be able to say where you're wasting time or effort. As a matter of fact, this is something that MacIntyre has drawn upon an awful lot in his work as an analogy for moral theory, to learning how to play an instrument, or learning how to work with a crew on a fishing boat, or learning how to do some sort of handicraft like pottery, and anything along those lines,

You don't know enough at the start, even though you may feel that you do, to be able to say what's a waste of your time or effort and what isn't. It's up to people who know a bit better than you, if you're lucky enough to have them there personally. who can say: Well, here's what you need to do. I understand that you don't really like playing scales and doing these drills on the flute or the piano or whatever it is, but you really do need to do this if you want to progress.

If you want to be able to fish with us, first you've got to learn how to stand on a boat and not fall over when the waves hit, and then you've got to learn how to work with the netting, and how to tell certain signs about the water, and we could go on and on and on. You get the point. I don't need to belabor that any further.

So there's that part going on, the you don't know enough to know what you don't know, which I may talk about somewhere else, because I think that's actually very important. People get themselves into all sorts of trouble and predicaments and emotional conundrums because they're working off of insufficient information. And they draw conclusions from it about what they ought to do.

And this is where you actually do waste time and effort going down blind alleys, so to speak, or getting yourself stuck in a cul-de-sac somewhere. And then you got to come out and redo it.

The other thing that I was perhaps wrongly reading into it, because I said to the person, you know, that's not the sort of attitude that you want to bring to philosophical works, is this notion that you can divide works up into those that are actually worth your time and effort and those which are a waste of it.

Now, there are definitely some books out there that either in general for most people or for a particular person, given where they currently are, would be kind of a waste of their time and effort relative to something else. I don't suggest that people dive right away in the beginning of their philosophical studies into Hegel's Phenomenology or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or Spinoza's Ethics or any of these other texts that people take as kind of pinnacles and must-reads. Again, another topic for another time.

And it would be kind of a waste of time, relatively speaking again, to say: Well, I'm going to plow my way through Kant's first critique, and I'll just do that rather than reading other things where you might make a little bit more progress. I can certainly understand that notion.

But the idea that philosophical texts in general, particularly with somebody like MacIntyre, where his writing is pretty accessible, deliberately so, and he touches on many interesting and important topics, weaving them together well, there really isn't anything that would be a waste of your time to read or to study or to reread and go back to.

And I think we can say that for a lot of philosophers, even if you're reading something that's very challenging and makes reference to a lot of other thinkers that you haven't probably studied before, like say Aristotle's Metaphysics, it's not a waste of your time for you to be reading that, particularly given all the other things that we do that, at least in comparison to reading philosophy, do turn out to be kind of wastes of time.

You know, scrolling on our phones, watching television shows that we probably won't remember a year from now, composing emails about all sorts of topics to people who probably aren't going to read them. You know, we could compare those things and say, yeah, that's kind of a waste of time. You know, maybe not. Again, who's to say what actually constitutes a waste of time? It's always going to be in comparison to something else that you could be spending your time upon.

So as we went back and forth in conversation, it emerged that this person was probably underrating their own capacities for reading and understanding and study, which is a very common set of ideas that people impose on themselves and labor under when it comes to philosophy and not just philosophy, but other fields as well.

They say, oh, I'm just not very good at this. I'm not intellectual. I'm not very smart. And, you know, if you approach things with that attitude, you create could then say: Well, I don't want to waste my time studying something that's far beyond me that I'm just not ready for. And that would actually make some sense.

But again, with McIntyre, I don't think there's an awful lot where a decently educated and well-motivated person who does want to understand what he's saying would pick up a book and just not be able to make any sense of it whatsoever, and wouldn't be able to make some progress, any more than I think that's the case with reading Plato's dialogues (granted some are much more difficult than others, and you might be a little confused at first with all the variety of perspectives going on). But it's worth plowing away at

And so here is the broader general point. I'm not saying that nobody ever wastes their time or effort studying particular works of philosophy, but I will say, and here's a claim that I'm making, that for nearly all of us, our default should not be heading in with this attitude of, “I don't want to waste my time and effort.”

It should be rather, well, I've got some time and effort to spare, and I could be wasting it on things that are very trivial, but I'm choosing to devote it to something that I think is going to have a better yield, a better payoff. a better return on investment. And I don't really know that that's the case, but I've seen that it has been the case for other people.

And not just in the last five years, like some fly-by-night personal development program. “If it worked for me, it can work for you. Sign up for my coaching package” kind of nonsense. It's been working for people studying philosophy for thousands of years with some of these texts.

Now, granted, MacIntyre's stuff is much more recent, since the guy just finished up with his life last week. But when hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of people have read somebody and said, Hey, there's something here worth studying. Maybe that can be a sign that, since you're talking not just about bestseller lists or beach reading or things that make it on to daytime talk shows, but actual intellectual work that you can take that as an index. There's really something there, that if you don't hold yourself back and act as if it's up to the text to show to you that it's worth your time and effort, but you actually invest the time and effort, you will likely (not guaranteed, but likely) see it pay off.

And so I think that this worried attitude that some people bring to their studies, what am I going to get out of this? That's the wrong question early on. First, you actually have to do the “out of this”. Well, you've got to go in first, and then you can figure out what is going to happen when you come out.

So those are a few reflections about an interesting exchange that perhaps I misinterpreted, but I certainly got some mileage out of thinking about it. Maybe it's helpful for you to hear these words yourself, and if it steers anybody away from a counterproductive attitude towards studying philosophical text, then it did a decent job at what it was supposed to do.

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 could say blind spots or things that can be criticized.

There's all sorts of stuff like that that we can bring up. And I think a lot of people take them as basically all the same thing and having the same implication. If there's a flaw, well, then there's something wrong with Stoicism. And some things that might appear to be flaws at first could actually turn out either not to be flaws, to be based on mistaken assumptions, or they're the sorts of things where you can say, well yeah, this is a flaw in a sense, but it's not one we really care about that much. It doesn't shake the system, so to speak.

And so there's a number of different ways of criticism that I want to put out there for you and have you see the differences between them.

So I want to begin by talking about criticisms that can be made and the fact that a lot of the criticisms that people will make in the present are are actually criticisms that people have made of the Stoics either around their own time or a little bit later or later on in the modern period or perhaps even in the 19th, 20th, and 21st century. So a lot of people effectively reinvent wheels by coming up with what they think to be new, unique criticisms, but maybe they were actually made already by Plutarch, who has a whole book called On Stoic Self-Contradictions, or by Friedrich Nietzsche, who has a lot to say about the Stoics, much of which is not particularly well-focused as it turns out. Or you know, we could pick whoever else we want.

And one thing that we should be aware of is that for a lot of the criticisms that people do have of the Stoics, there's already responses to those in the Stoic texts that we are fortunate enough to have. We don't even have to defer them and say, oh well, that was covered in Chrysippus' book that we don't have. No, in the Epictetus, the Seneca, the Musonius Rufus, Arius Didymus, Marcus Aurelius, these different thinkers, we can often find things where we're like, yeah I mean, people say this, and here's what Epictetus actually says about this very case, or Seneca says in response to this very case.

So we don't expect everybody to have read everything, but quite a few criticisms are not good criticisms if they've already been satisfactorily addressed by the Stoics. Now, it might well turn out that somebody diagnoses a flaw and makes a criticism of something that's genuinely new that hasn't been said before. I think that can happen. And I don't think necessarily that the Stoics did get everything right. We'll come back to that in just a bit.

Another common criticism that gets made is that the Stoic body of work is not available to us in its entirety. And as a of what was originally available. You know, we don't have any full writings from the early and middle Stoics. And we don't even have all of what Arian wrote down of Epictetus's teachings. The Discourses was supposedly eight books. We only have four of them. And then, you know, the stuff that's in the Enchiridion and possibly the fragments, because some of those are kind of sketchy. So yeah, that's a real issue.

And when it comes to Stoic physics and Stoic logic, so their cosmology, their religious views, their logic, their epistemology, we've lost a lot. We do have a lot of Stoic ethics, probably enough, I would say, although it'd always be nice to have more, wouldn't it? And can you really fault the Stoics for not having somehow preserved their own works? I mean, we can say this about a lot of ancient schools of philosophy, some of which we have nothing by except secondhand in other people's works. So I don't think that's really a valid criticism or pointing out a flaw.

But there is something that's kind of connected to that that we could say might be kind of a flaw. And this would be the Stoics not having responses to later and very different perspectives. You know, what if an Existentialist wanted to criticize a Stoic?Well, assuming that the Existentialist actually got the Stoics right, which is a big assumption, well perhaps there could be something to that. Maybe they do expose flaws or gaps or blind spots in Stoic doctrines.

I don't think that the worries about the Stoics not knowing enough about 20th century and 21st century culture, like for example, the existence of the internet and mobile technology and cell phones and dating apps and stuff like that, that doesn't strike me as a very valid criticism because what we can find in the Stoic texts, they don't obviously speak about those things directly because Seneca doesn't know about cell phones. Epictetus doesn't know about dating. But the things that they say understood rightly are applicable to those matters. That's why we do workshops on that and write articles about that.

Another common thing that has to do with the Stoics being stuck in the past is the criticism that their worldview and assumptions on a moral level are actually deficient because, for example, they accepted the institution of slavery, which we all know is bad. And you know, I'm willing to say that slavery is bad. I'm also willing to point out that every single civilization that we see in ancient times that proceeded past a certain level of development had something like slavery, and that it didn't completely go away. We still have some places in the world where slavery is being practiced and defended.

So it doesn't strike me as a really valid criticism, particularly when we go to the texts and we see that Epictetus and Seneca have an awful lot to say about how you ought to be as a free person treating slaves. And you should reflect on the fact that you could be in their situation so easily if some things had just gone a slightly bit different or that the slave is a rational being like yourself. So you should treat them not as a slave, but as an employee or a family member. And we could go on and on and on with similar sorts of examples

Another thing that people sometimes will view as a flaw, and here we're not looking at the past, we're looking at the present, is they look at current proponents or practitioners of Stoicism and they say: Wow you don't live up to what it is that you say you're all about. You are inconsistent. There's contradictions. You fail. And interestingly, guess who already addressed this?

Seneca in, if I'm remembering right, On the Happy Life. He says, and he's not just talking about the Stoics. He's actually talking about Socrates and Aristotle and Plato. He talks about people in his own time who say, Oh these philosophers, they don't actually live up fully to their own doctrine. So therefore, none of it's any good.

And he says, listen, all you need to be worried about at your current pretty bad state is whether they've gotten further along the path to virtue than you. You don't need to be criticizing them for not being legendary sages. You just need to quit being less of a screw up yourself. And these people have given you some tools that are helpful for that. And I think that's a perfectly valid response in the present.

So I don't see those as really flaws myself. It just means that people fail and they often don't live up to their values or their plans and intentions. And we see that in every aspect of life, not just in applying philosophy. Does this mean that I have now successfully defended the Stoics from every one of their possible critics? No, not at all.

And as a matter of fact, I don't agree with the Stoics entirely myself on every point. If I did, then I would be a Stoic and not an eclectic, which is what I tell everybody that I am, drawing on multiple and sometimes incompatible, at least on certain points, philosophical traditions that I hopefully understand fairly well, well enough to bring them together in a life that's not completely screwed up. So there's some things where I don't buy the Stoic line, and I'm willing to say that there could be flaws in Stoicism.

As a matter of fact even people who were attracted to it in ancient times like Cicero, look at how he begins his Stoic paradoxes. He says you guys have got some good ethical philosophy but man are you bad at presenting it, because you don't pay adequate attention to rhetoric like the Aristotelians do. Let me show you how it's done, buddies! And that's what he does in his Stoic Paradoxes.

So I think we can say that there's flaws, but there's fewer flaws than many people take there to be. Or we'll simply say this. There are fewer things that hold up to scrutiny when we actually look at them carefully and the assumptions behind them, and we go to the Stoic texts to see if there's any answers to them.

There's fewer of those that turn out to be genuine flaws than one might at first imagine. And I think that's often going to be the case for any philosophical thinker or perspective or school that people have been reading and talking about for quite a long time. People caricature René Descartes. A lot of the answers or addresses of their criticisms are right there just in other parts of Descartes that they didn't read and similarly for many other thinkers.

So that's all that I have to say about this. Hopefully this is a useful set of reflections for you.

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.

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 false, or perhaps even not knowing which it is, then since we do have multiple theoretical perspectives on truth articulated in the history of philosophy, many of which are not known to quite a few people, including those who write about theories of truth.

Since this is the case, we need to talk in the plural, because there isn't just one conception of truth out there that everybody knows. buys into, accepts, uses references. And I think one natural place to begin is with the sort of thing that you'll find if you go online and look up truth in encyclopedias of philosophy, or on various websites, or you might find in an Intro to Philosophy textbook, or when you Google it and videos or podcasts come up where somebody claims that they're providing you with the three basic theories or five basic theories or something like that.

So usually there are three that show up over and over again, and sometimes they're well explained and sometimes they're not one of them is called the correspondence theory of truth another is usually called the coherence theory of truth and then the other one is usually also called the pragmatic theory of truth but you can find some outliers in the use of the language.

And the idea behind the correspondence theory of truth is that what we're looking for is correspondence, or to use Thomas Aquinas' term from earlier on, adequation between how things are in reality or in being, and our mental representations of those or our thoughts about them, or our linguistic you could say representations or expressions of those things.

I think this is actually a useful idea. It does cover a lot of ground. We can say when I give you a proposition which happens to be true right now such as I am holding a full cup of coffee, which is indeed the case, and you're thinking about it or you're hearing it, well, that's a true statement. It'll stop being a true statement once I've drank the coffee, or if I spill it or whatever else changes that condition.

And, you know, this works for quite a few things.: This is what we mean by true or false. If I tell you I have a million dollars in the bank that I will be happy to send you if you just find forward me a little bit of money, say $2,000, so that I can access this money and then get it to you, and I will do so out of gratitude.

I think many of you recognize the internet scams that set things up that way. Those are probably all false statements, right? We can say, what makes them false? Well, I'm not describing things as they really are.

So then we have the coherence theory of truth. And the idea there, this is often associated with people like Hegel or the Hegelians, is that what makes propositions true or thoughts true is not just corresponding to isolated bits of reality, but rather how they all cohere together in something like a system. There are no contradictions between them, or at least no important contradictions. And this can actually be quite useful as sort of a supplement, you could say, to the correspondence theory of truth.

And then another one that often gets talked about is the pragmatic theory of truth. I would say that, you know, this has been around longer than the term pragmatism has, although pragmatic is an earlier term. You see, for example, Kant actually using it. So the idea is typically associated with people like William James or John Dewey, people that we call pragmatists.

And it's often boiled down to truth is what works for a person. So, you know, you could see a lot of possibility for abuse in this. And it's not an adequate representation of, say, William James's position as he articulates it. But it's good enough for now, right?

So we can talk about other theories that are out there that have been recently named, you know, a semantic theory of truth, deflationary. But those are basically just things that philosophers, mostly analytic philosophers, think in terms of.

But there's actually a much richer and earlier history that I would like to mention. And this is what I told my client. And this is what I think is. You might be interested in as well there are conceptions of truth that are not adequately captured or expressed by these other named theories and they're associated with pretty important philosophers throughout philosophies history

So I'm not going to begin at the beginning. Instead, I'm going to start with somebody who this client and I have talked about quite a bit, and I think this may have been motivating the discussion and his question from the start.

So Kierkegaard has this notion of truth as subjectivity. Now, he's not saying that all truth is subjective or anything like that, but there are some important truths that we can only grasp subjectively and through commitment, perhaps even through passion, maybe the highest passion of faith, right?

So this is a different notion of of truth at play there. And it doesn't mean that we have to throw everything out and say, this is the only one that matters, because that's not what Kierkegaard is doing.

This client is quite interested in existentialist thought. So if you know your existentialism and you are used to talking in terms of truth, then Heidegger's truth as alētheia, which is a Greek term meaning something like unconcealing or uncovering. But it is the standard term for truth, and used as a noun, as an adjective. So Heidegger has a conception that doesn't fit in well with these standard theories either. But I think it's actually communicating something quite useful to us

Now going backwards in time, somebody who I do a lot of work on is Anselm of Canterbury, and he actually has quite a few thoughts about the nature of truth, veritas in Latin. And he's got a whole dialogue on it which is really important but very infrequently read by the people who want to talk about truth. Because in it not only does he discuss what's clearly a correspondence theory of truth with respect to our thoughts and our words and the realities that they're supposed to express, but he also talks about truth in the will and truth in everything.

So this is a differing conception. He will also discuss truth in the being of things and God as truth. So here we have a much more robust conception of truth than what we're typically getting. And I'd like to throw us even further back. And I'm just kind of picking a bunch of people. This is not a survey of every single philosopher and what they've had to say about truth.

But if you think about Aristotle, if you've ever read the Nicomachean Ethics, book six, where he's talking about what we often call the intellectual virtues, these are states or habits, hexeis, that allow us to attain truth in different kinds of matters. And Aristotle will talk about practical truth, truth that has to do with actions, somewhat like what Anselm was talking about, probably along the lines of what Kierkegaard is also implying, and our desires are right. The way in which he defines practical truth is not just having intellectual matters right but also having the right, rightly oriented let's say desires, a desire in the very broadest sense orexis

So I brought up these four as examples of important philosophical figures who really thought a lot about the nature of truth and have a lot to contribute that the let's call it standard fair literature often shows an ignorance of or a disengagement with that I think is quite important.

And what's the upshot of this? There is no one single conception of truth that is truly the only one. We actually need these to form a sort of composite picture of what it means to be true. And we need to use different conceptions or criteria of of truth in different kinds of situations. And I don't think that there is one single overarching perspective that we can draw all of these into.

But I also don't think that it makes everything up for grabs either. We don't have to be pessimists about that. So this is something that I was leading my client through. I thought it could be interesting for those of you who listen to this to learn about and reflect upon. And so there you go.

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.

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 also useful practices, or as Martha Nussbaum calls them (and I'm bringing this up because this really is the best term in this case) therapeutic arguments. And that's what Plutarch is providing in On Tranquility of Mind, and to a lesser extent in his work How A Person Can Become Consciousness of Their Progress in virtue.

So today I shot several videos on his work On Tranquility of Mind, and one particular line of reasoning that I think might be really interesting to not just talk about and explore. But think about how it applies to our own life, and mindsets and the outcome of our thinking about matters has to do with.

So here's the term that I actually used for the title of the video, desiring or trying to do everything. Nobody can do everything. There's that old saying, you can't have it all. And by have it all, they mean that you not only can't have possession of everything, but you can't apply yourself to do everything at a very high level in life.

As a matter of fact, if you think about it, there's probably far more things that you cannot do at any given point in time, or even over the course of your entire life, than the things that you can do. So you always kind of have to make some choices, decide priorities. But that doesn't mean that we can't feel like or desire to do it all, especially if we've been getting wrongheaded ideas about this from other people, which would include the people we grow up with and we're surrounded with or our friend group.

But I would say that social media has probably contributed to this problem because we have a much greater possibility of comparing ourselves to the at least superficial appearance of the lives of others. And we also get exposed to a much wider variety of possible things to think we ought to be involved with. So I think this is a really helpful discussion.

He gives you examples like he says, not only do people demand to be at the same time rich, and learned, and physically strong, and convivial spirits, and pleasant company, and friends of kings, and rulers of cities. So that's seven different things right there that you're probably never going to combine in one person.But adding to that, unless they shall also have dogs and horses and quails and roosters that can win prizes, they are disconsolate.

And he brings up an example of Dionysus, who was one of the greatest tyrants of his age in Syracuse and Sicily, but he couldn't sing verses better than a poet named Philixenus, and he couldn't get the better of Plato in dialectic, so he was very angry about this. He felt like somehow life is letting him down, and he actually sent Philoxenos into the stone quarries basically to die,and he sold Plato off into slavery. And that's the wrong way to go about things.

So how do we get into this problem? Well, he starts out by saying that it's a matter of having expectations that are too high and aiming at things that are too great. Then when we fail, we blame our destiny and our fortune instead of our own foolishness. And what's the root of this?

Well, he says that it is self-love, which is philautia in Greek. And this makes people desirous of being the first all the time. So that's philoprotos, desiring being number one, we would say, and to be victorious or to be successful in everything. And this is a term philonikos that the Greeks use quite a bit. They took philonikia, this desire for winnings, for superiority, for surpassing others, as a fairly basic human desire. And I think they're probably right about that. People really do enjoy feeling like they've won in some sort of way.

And by not managing this well and being realistic about it, we get ourselves into all sorts of trouble. And Plutarch points out, well, he's got a lot of considerations, but the one that I think is actually the best here is even among the gods, the different gods have different powers, different functions, different domains. But if we think about human beings, no human being can actually combine all these things in one person.

And he brings up, interestingly, the legendary Stoic sage who supposedly could do this. And he says, this is liable to discourage people, including people who are attracted to Stoicism, because they look at this ideal and they're like, oh man, I fall short of that. My life sucks. So this is a real recipe for making your life unhappy by having wrongheaded ideas.

Not only is it impossible to Just to have it all. But there's another deeper reason why that's the case. And it's quite simple. Some of the things that you're trying to combine in one person's life are actually incompatible with each other. They rule each other out.

So he uses a couple interesting examples. If you're going to do training in rhetoric or mathematics, or for that matter, philosophy, that requires a fairly quiet life and some free time. But if you want to be involved in political or the active life, the social life, and attain the friendship of important people, you can't do that without hard work and full occupation of your time.

Likewise, if you want to spend a lot of time on your body, making it really strong and vigorous, you're probably going to make the soul work. And so you can't do everything all at once. They interfere with each other. He also talks about making money. If you want to devote your life to making lots of money, well, that's really cool. That increases your wealth. But if you want to make progress in philosophy, you probably need to make making money a pretty low priority.

So if you're going to try to combine these ways of life with each other, you're not actually going to be successful because they're not compatible with each other. It's going to go on and give some additional advice along these lines and lots of examples. You can go to the text and read it. As a matter of fact, I highly encourage you to do that.

He's going to finish up by talking about something really interesting. So there's this line that in English translation, it's a great line by itself, but I think if you can read it in the Greek, it's got a lot of other resonances to it. So he tells us that when we're trying to actually have it all, what we end up doing is slandering ourselves. We wind up being displeased and we despise ourselves as living an incomplete and trivial life.

So slandering ourselves is a translation of the Greek term soukophantomen. And it's the word that we get sycophant from, basically a butt kisser, somebody who is kissing up to other people. But it also has a really important meaning. Second meaning in ancient Greek, a sycophant was also somebody who would report other people to the authorities to try to get in good with the authorities or maybe even make some money from them. So a narc, a snitch, as we call them in American English.

Why is this interesting to note? Well, you're snitching on yourself when you are being that kind of sycophant. So you're telling somebody, yourself, I guess, the world, other people, that your life isn't a good life.

Being displeased, that's a decent enough translation of akharistomen. And another way you could translate that, because it's coming from a Greek term that means both joy and gratitude, is being ungrateful about the life that you live.

And then this despising, that's kataphronumen. And that is also translatable as have contempt, look down upon. Literally, it combines the terms for downward and for thinking about. And so we look at our own life and we despise it as being needy, missing something, endeus. And a telos so what's being translated as trivial there a better way of translating it would be not having a proper goal to it and thereby being trivial so that's what happens to us if we let these unrealistic ideas about being able to have it all or that we should try to have it all.

And I think that we're probably at greater risk in our current society, perhaps, than they were in ancient times for cultivating these desires because we hear these messages coming from all sorts of directions and we see people being presented as if they actually do have it all when they don't. If we looked closely at their lives, we would see that they're not the perfect combinations of everything good, that their social media account or their publicists or whoever else is presenting them as.

So I think this is a really great passage. I think it would be good for us to keep this in mind when we feel down about not being good at something or not succeeding in some area of our life. We can look at what we actually are good at or successful in to whatever measure we have that and say, that's probably as good as it's going to get for me. And that is good enough, not just for me as a person, but for me as a human being who can't possibly do it all. And if we do that, we're going to have a much more content and happy and tranquil life.

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 intro to philosophy. And that wasn't very good at all. And the other was actually a Sacraments class, but it was taught by a guy who decided to teach us philosophy and to teach in a philosophical way. And that was very, very good.

You may have heard me talking about them in other places as well, because sometimes people ask me in interviews and video channels or podcasts or stuff like that. How did you get started in philosophy? Did you have it in high school? And I tell the story.

So I posted yesterday or rather reposted the piece that I'd written. And I included a little bit of a call to action as I was putting it in social media saying, you know, I never was able to track down this person who was a substitute teacher just for one semester, came from Seattle. I don't know where he went after that. His name was Mr. Lorenzo, but I don't know his first name.

And I never had any success in talking to people from my high school, who he was, where he went to, whether he was still around, because they didn't keep records about that sort of thing, not from what was happening in the 1980s. And so anyway, I put it out there.

And one of the people who I know from high school who has now become a friend, but was actually like my bitterest rival back in high school (there's a whole story that could be told there), he wrote me in LinkedIn and he said Oh I know that guy. I didn't even realize that this now friend was in the class, but I guess he was and it probably happened during our junior year.

And he said Yeah that was Perry Lorenzo. And I've thought about him a lot. And by the way, here is an article about him. He was pretty important out there in Seattle, and he died in 2009. And he was involved with all sorts of matters. He taught at a high school. He also taught in a college or a university. He was involved with the opera and all sorts of other interesting things about him. But he died only 51 years old in 2009.

And it looks like from the story that he came out to spend that semester with us and told us about Seattle at the time. He had had this Augustinian conversion, as he called it, which was part of why he was teaching us about St. Augustine. And in order to teach us about Augustine, he had to also teach us about Aristotle and Plato and Manichaeism and some psychology stuff as well.

So, it looks like he went back to Seattle after that one semester with us and went on to have a really great teaching career. Apparently he was quite gifted. He was very devoted to the life of the mind, to the Catholic and classical intellectual traditions. He was heavily involved in the arts and apparently an all-around great guy.

So it's very interesting me to read this because I got to know him, at least to the degree that a teenager who's bright but troubled and in somebody's class with somebody who's probably only 10 years older than him and is engaging in discussion within the classroom can get to actually know somebody.

I got to know him as somebody who was a genuinely well-motivated teacher, and not all the teachers were like that. As a matter of fact I would say less than half of them at my high school were people who I would say had that sort of mindset. I think a lot of them saw us as pains in their rear to process and get through and they wanted to not be bothered with things.

But this guy was genuinely interested in ideas. And if it wasn't for him, there's a good likelihood that maybe I would not have followed along the career trajectory that I did because I'd had an Intro to Philosophy class. It was pretty bad. It was dry, boring, dull. The teacher wasn't very good. Or maybe I wasn't up for it, but I think actually he wasn't very good!

And then the next year I had this guy, Perry Lorenzo, and he taught the class in an eminently philosophical way. He was like...Listen, we're getting rid of this textbook. I'm going to put stuff up on the board. We're going to discuss things. Don't worry about what's on the test. I'll just give you some essay tests and make you write some papers. The other students groaned and complained because they were all college prep kids who wanted to have, what do I need to do to get an A in this class? And they weren't very interested in learning, I would say.

But I found it fascinating. And that was my real introduction to the field of philosophy being done by somebody who clearly embodied philosophy, but philosophy in a broad sense, not in a narrow academic sense. Philosophy as what we nowadays call philosophy as a way of life. He made a big mark on me, on my soul because of that. So then later on, when I went to college and actually had the opportunity to study philosophy, looking down the list of possible majors, I saw it and I was like, well, this is pretty cool stuff. So maybe I should study this.

And, you know, I've thought about him a lot over the years. I'm Kind of saddened to discover, first of all, that he died so young. I'm now older. I'm 54 years old. He died at only 51 years old of cancer. So a life really cut short. I find that to be a source of sadness. And it looks like his community and his partner lost somebody whose life was vibrant and dynamic and rich and was contributing to many other people. So a great loss to him, a great loss to his community.

And had I been more on the ball, maybe I could have been in touch with him years and years ago and actually told him, Hey, you made a big difference. You made an impact in my life, and I'd like to thank you for that. And that opportunity is gone. I mean, I can certainly think of him as having a soul that has survived death and think good thoughts about him and say prayers for him and all those sorts of things.

But it's not the same as being able to at least send a letter that somebody is going to read or look them in the eyes or talk to them on the phone and say, You don't realize this, but you did something really good for me. And because of that, for other people as well who are affected by my work in philosophy for some sort of good.

So I've got kind of mixed feelings. There's a sense of joy in finding out who this person was and what a good life in so many different ways he not only had, but chose and built for himself and not just for himself, but many other people whose lives were positively affected by him. And there's sadness for the lost opportunities and the fact that he's gone.

I think I took it for granted that he was probably still out there somewhere and there could be time to track him down, although I had no idea how I might actually do that. It's also surprising that somebody who I've known for all these years had all that information right there at his fingertips. I'm guessing many of myother classmates did as well and could have perhaps clued me into it

So I'm going to do some writing about this in the near future, and I wanted to use this as an opportunity to maybe talk about it and in the process, clarify my thoughts while they're still fresh in my mind and my heart. And to share a little bit with those of you who listen to this.

Maybe there's a warning there. Reach out to people. Get the information about them while you have the opportunity. It could be a good idea. But it might also not be directly applicable to your own life. You might look at it as I'm giving you a little bit of a glimpse into a person who was important for me becoming a philosopher and maybe even the kind of philosopher I've become.

And if you're positively impacted by that, and odds are if you're listening to this, you probably are one of those people, then you can think of him as somebody who played a role in that. So that's probably enough for me to say about this at this point. And I'll just post this and see what people make of it. I'm going to continue thinking about what I want to say in a written form later on this week or weekend.