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 share with you.

And I don't claim to be some sort of high-level Plato expert who's got all of the answers about this. There are definitely people I'm going to criticize, at least in their approaches, who can certainly claim a much higher status as far as Plato scholarship than I can, but maybe you'll find this interesting or helpful or even just provocative of thought.

So I think a lot of people lose sight of the fact that Plato did, in fact, write dialogues, and he did so by choice. We know that he also taught in his academy, and perhaps there's notes out there that we'll someday find or something along those lines. And there are some letters that scholars to some degree disagree about the authenticity of, but I'm not worried about that particularly myself.

We do have all of these dialogues. And there are some of those, by the way, where scholarship has gotten to the point where they say, I don't think this one is actually by Plato or it's dubious. And there's a lot of other stuff that we could go into. For example, which dialogues are early or middle or late? And that's that's a whole other topic that I'm not going to worry too much about at this point.

What I do want to say once again, however, is that they are dialogues for the most part. You could say, well, the Apology is more of a speech with a little bit of cross-examination dialogue built into it. Quite a few of the dialogues contain long passages where Socrates is advancing the discussion and and saying, doesn't it appear to you this way? And Glaucon will say, yes, indeed, Socrates, continue. But there's more than that to being dialogical.

One of the things that you're going to notice is that Socrates, or in many cases, other interlocutors in these dialogues, are not just putting forth their own point of view and saying, there you go, that's my account. They're challenging each other. Sometimes they're actually framing something like a dialogue within their own discourse that appears to be a monologue.

A great example of this is in the Crito, where Socrates brings in a character or rather set of characters who are not there, could be there, hypothetically, the laws of the city of Athens. And he stages a little bit of an argument back and forth between him and these laws that are going to accuse him of doing wrong to them. Or we might think as well about the Symposium where Socrates first engages in his typical back and forth with Agathon whose house he is a guest at and shows that Agathon's very nicely crafted speech doesn't reveal that Agathon actually understands love or virtue or the other topics that he's talking about, but then brings in another character and we're not even sure if she truly existed or not. Diotima, the wise woman from whom Socrates, according to himself, learned everything that he knows about love.

So dialogue is really, really central to this. And you might say, well, who cares? I mean, we have plays, we have other sorts of things that are dialogue, but this is philosophical dialogue. There's not an awful lot of action going on, but there's an awful lot of thinking, exchange of ideas, sparring back and forth, sometimes jokes, all sorts of those types of discourse.

There's a number of approaches that people have traditionally taken. And when I say traditionally, I mean, you know, not just back in ancient times, but also in the 20th century as well. Long enough that they've become established ways of looking at these things.

So one way of getting something out of Plato, but also making sure that you don't get much more than that, is to focus primarily on arguments. And this is typical of analytic philosophy. And that can be quite helpful at times to say, are these arguments that are being advanced any good? Where are their weak points? Where could we say that there's an assumption being made that could be questionable? Are they actually valid?

That's a nice approach. But if all you're doing is focusing on arguments, you're probably missing not only half, but I would say probably three quarters of what is actually happening in the dialogue. So it can be useful to focus in and say, what is the argument actually being advanced here by Socrates or by one of his other interlocutors? But we want more than that.

And another way of thinking about it is focusing in on what we could call doctrines, right? Or theses or things like that. What claims are being advanced and how should we understand those? And we may understand them in terms of the arguments that are being provided, but we may also understand them in terms of what we could call accounts.

And by the way, the term that's used in Greek, logos, which if you know anything about ancient Greek, you know, this is a pretty slippery, ambiguous term. It can mean argument. It can also mean account. It can mean a whole bunch of different things, a speech, a lie at some points in certain works. And so there's a lot of scope here for thinking about how what we do with words is actually helping us to understand ideas and reality.

So somebody might talk about Plato's doctrine of the forms, and they have some idea of what that is, and they may even read across multiple dialogues to get a sense of what the doctrine genuinely is that Plato is trying to convey. Bad news is, when it comes to a lot of his important doctrines, the dialogues don't always neatly map onto each other, and we have to do a good bit of thinking work in order to get out of them what it is that we want.

Now, some people have taken a very different tack and focused on what we call the dramatic elements of the dialogues, and that can be quite important. Oftentimes, along with that goes a sort of esotericism that myself, I find very unattractive because it involves people saying, I've got the hidden knowledge that all you dummies don't. And I'm pretty suspicious of people who make those sorts of claims.

But sometimes saying, well, what is actually going on here? That can be quite helpful. So that leads me into something that's a bit more positive. And I've got a few, we could say, not negative so much, pointers, but just a few things to keep in mind that might be helpful for you.

So characters matter, and character matters. A little bit of a pun there on my part. When we have a character like Thrasymachus or Callicles in the Republic or in the Gorgias, people who are advancing a certain kind of might makes right philosophy. It's reflected in the way that they talk. It's reflected in the stances they take and how they interact with say, Socrates or other people.

There are other characters in the dialogues who are also saying things and they're saying them not just in terms of the content, but the way that they're talking. And it's reflective of the kind of person who they are. And so I think that's important to be attentive to that.

Another thing is who's the main character in most of the dialogues, though not all of them, especially later ones, Socrates of course. And a lot of people approach the dialogues with an idea of Socrates already in mind, especially Socrates, the guy who knows that he knows nothing. And, you know, he does say that he's not sure that he has wisdom. He questions people, but he doesn't actually affirm that he knows absolutely nothing at all. And if he did, that would go against so many things that he actually does say in the dialogue.

So there's no substitute for reading the actual text and getting an idea of who the Socrates guy was by seeing how he interacts with people as well. He asks questions. He calls the person themselves as a witness rather than allowing them to push off the responsibility of justifying their points of view by quoting a poet or some other person or proverb or something like that.

And he's very interested not so much in hearing speeches, but in actual dialogue with people. And he'll model how Plato thinks we should engage in dialogue. And if we're paying close attention, if we're not even reading between the lines, but just being attentive, we will find out there's all sorts of things that Socrates actually knows.

And he will signify that to you sometimes by saying, well, don't we know that X, Y, Z? And then the interlocutor will say, yes, in fact, we do know that. Or we've at least attained this much in our discourse. We haven't actually managed to define what we're looking for. I think a lot of people, because their eyes are too much on the proverbial prize, they lose sight of all the other things that we learn along the way.

The other thing that I want to close with. If you do read platonic dialogues and you're paying close attention to them, you are going to notice that not only will some of the other characters make bad arguments and claims that can't really stand up and provide accounts that don't always completely make sense, but Socrates himself will sometimes do that as well.

And you could ask, why would Plato put words in the mouth of his friend, mentor, the person who is the emblem of philosophy itself? Why would he do that in his well-crafted dialogues? And there's a number of answers that we could give to this. I'm only going to suggest one here right now, but perhaps we'll explore this more in a future episode or in some some writings about this.

I think Plato wants you to realize when you see that that there's a problem there and for you to use your brain your mind to identify what's wrong with the reasoning And if you do that, you might not just say, oh, well, it's all bad. Throw it all away. You might say, I wonder how this could be qualified. I wonder how this account or argument could be improved. I wonder how this could be made more consistent. And doing that is actually thinking on your part, I'm convinced that that is part of what Plato calls dialectic, which is so absolutely irreplaceably important in the development, not only of you as an intellectual being, but also as a moral being.

So those are some reflections on Plato's dialogues. Perhaps they might be useful for you. Hopefully they are. If not, then maybe you'll like something else that I talk about with respect to Plato down the line.

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 school in order to take classes. And I also make them a good bit more affordable. Now, that's a totally different topic.

Where am I going with this? So I had something interesting come up in both a seminar that I was teaching this last weekend, specifically on Stoic philosophy, and it's something that is coming up pretty frequently in the two classes that I'm teaching this semester, one of which is focused directly on the emotion of anger and looking at it from avariety of different perspectives, many of which are drawn from ancient philosophy, and another class which is explicitly about what we call philosophy as a way of life.

And so what I'm going to talk about are what we call practices or spiritual exercises. There's a variety of different names for these. And I've talked about this a little bit before in the past. So what I want to bring up today is something that I ended up, I've been thinking about it for quite a while with respect to my academic classes. I brought up in a response to a question that I was asked in the Stoicism seminar.

So it had to do with, well, how do we actually apply this philosophical stuff if we don't already have practices outlined for us? Because, you know, when it comes to a lot of matters, the Stoics really stand out, at least with the literature that we have of them, in providing us with a lot of explicit practices.

So when Epictetus will say: When you're in this kind of situation, have ready at hand these thoughts. That's a practice. Or when he says: “You're encountering this sort of problem, do this.” Or: “Think about this every once in a while.” And Seneca has a lot of these as well. So does Marcus Aurelius. And we could go on and on.

So what do we do when we're thinking about matters about which the philosophers have a lot to contribute, a lot of theory, a lot of exploration, but they don't actually advise us to do this or that as a practice. A prime example of this would be Aristotle and his predecessor Plato's discussions about the emotion of anger, which are kind of scattered across their texts.

With Plato, we get a good bit of discussion of this part of ourselves called thumos, which is the part that gets angry in Republic book four and in other parts of the Republic. Then we get a lot of other partial discussions of anger in other dialogues like the Gorgias or Protagoras or Euthyphro, and there's some really useful stuff in there

With Aristotle we get a more systematic, and we could even say scientific examination, of anger. But it's still scattered across multiple texts, so you have to do some correlating it if you want to say, well, here's the theory. And it's nice to have the theory, but we could easily say, sure, it's great to have a viewpoint on it. But what do I actually do with this?

And there's a very simple answer to that, namely that you take the ideas and then you have to exercise a little bit of thought on your own part about how could these actually be applied? And in some cases, it's pretty straightforward. It's very low hanging fruit, so to speak. So I'll give you a couple examples.

Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, he has this great line that you actually see used by other people who aren't Aristotelians, where he says it's easy to get angry. Anybody can do that. But getting angry with the right person for the right reason at the right time in the right way for the right amount of time, that is not easy and not everybody can do that. And there will be a couple other rights, or as one should in Greek dei is the terminology there, that we could bring up as well.

Now, that's great. You can say, aha, so we have a way of understanding whether anger felt by a particular person or exhibited by them is good or bad, virtuous or vicious. And that leads to making ethical judgments, but you could also use this for anger management. And how would you do that? Well, you would say to yourself or to somebody else, when you actually start getting irritated, am I or are you getting angry with the right person? You just think about that.

And merely turning your attention to that question and seriously asking yourself that question, not just giving yourself a pass. Obviously, I'm angry at the right person. I don't get angry at the wrong people. But, you know, actually questioning yourself. Maybe I am angry at the wrong person in this case. That can help you to manage your anger.

And you could go further with it. You could ask yourself, well, what is going on with me? That I'm transferring my anger from somebody who perhaps I should be angry with or the person who at least is making me angry to somebody else instead and maybe deflecting it or using them as a scapegoat or however you want to conceive of it. See, you've got a practice there and you could do this with all those other rights as well.

Am I expressing my anger in the right way? I know i'm angry, but should I be saying these sorts of things to these people? Or is this going to be damaging to the relationship that I claim to value with them? Or is anger leading me to do or say things that are morally dishonorable or shameful? Those are questions you can ask. And that's a philosophical practice.

I'll give you another example coming from Plato in the Euthyphro, he very very helpfully tells us that the matters about which human beings and gods, in their own relationships and communities, disagree about with each other, and as a result either hate or get angry with each other over, are not questions that can be easily resolved. Like matters of mathematics where you can get it wrong, and then say let's do the operation or sum again, and see who's got the right answer.

Instead they have to do with what we call moral values. In ancient Greek thought, something you see in Plato, and Aristotle, and the Stoics, and so many others, they distinguished between modalities like the good and the bad, or the just and the unjust, or the honorable and the shameful (also translatable as beautiful and ugly, or fair and foul), the useful and the harmful, and a number of other things as well.

These are the things that we often do disagree about, you know, what they are, how they apply. And when people get these wrong in our eyes, we often get angry with them and they get angry with us. So if we know that we're heading into a situation where we are going to have that sort of disagreement, disagreement about those kinds of matters, we can say to ourselves, aha, I've got to watch getting angry, because this is exactly the sort of thing that does tend to make people angry with each other.

So you notice what we've done there. This is some creative application of ideas that are taken from a philosopher. It doesn't take an awful lot to be able to extrapolate from the theory to the actual practice. And I think that in a lot of cases, this is exactly not just what we can do, but what we should do whenever we don't have a number of already outlined practices. So perhaps that's of some use to you.

I know that I do it a lot. People will often ask me, oh, what are your favorite stoic practices that you do every day? And I'll often say, I don't actually have a lot of them because I get myself into situations. And then I've been doing it so long that I think about, well, what is the stuff that I need to apply to here, and that works for me. Whereas other people might need things to be a lot more structured

If you actually do know the theory, turning it into practice is something that shouldn't be all that difficult. And if it is, well perhaps you want to look at why that's the case but if it isn't you can say aha i'm on the right track here and this is exactly what we should do with theories and practices.

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 know, the point there is, of course, humorous. There is no such thing as workahol, but we could think of that as something like a disposition, some part of ourselves that maybe we started out with not by genetics or anything like that, but definitely from our environment.

I certainly saw my father and my mother working quite hard, although they both knew how to enjoy themselves and take time off as well. And I saw this from childhood onward. I also grew up in a time when being productive and devoting yourself to things was often praised and rewarded. And I also realized that if you do want to get big projects done, you have to, as the expression goes, strike while the iron is hot. Oftentimes that means striking while you have the energy to do something.

So am I a workaholic? Well, by some estimates, I certainly could be considered to be so. But I also like to think that as time has gone on and I've slowed down a bit, as has my wife, who's around the same age as me, we're both in our 50s, as energy levels decline inevitably, as illnesses happen, I've learned how to back off a bit.

More importantly than that, the part that I think so many people find very challenging, it's not just about reducing your workload or deferring timelines and deadlines. It's about your mindset. You have to learn how to eventually become okay with things that you intended to do, that you may have even planned or committed to do, quite publicly, not getting done on the timeline that you want them done, and perhaps in some cases, not at all.

One prime example of that, and this was admittedly based in a bit of, I'm not even going to call it wishful thinking, because I don't know what I was thinking when I said that this would happen. The Half-Hour Hegel project that a lot of people know me for, it's a series of what ended up being 376 half-hour videos going through all of Hegel's Phenomenology, and it's been a useful thing for many people.

Somehow, I believed when I first started the project that it would only take me, you know, two, maybe three or four years to do. And I suppose if I'd kept at it assiduously and never took any time off and cranked out eight videos a month, maybe that could have happened. But as it turned out, you know, lots of things happen, illnesses, other projects, things that I needed to do with my wife or kids, the death of dogs and cats, and all of those sorts of matters. And so even when I was getting my quota of six videos done per month, which wasn't every single month, it ended up taking me nine years to see the entire project through. In that case, I can say I did in fact finish it up.

But there have been many cases where something just got stalled and I didn't finish the project that I had intended, or where I said I was going to do something and just never got around to it. A lot of the books that I have sitting, waiting to be reviewed in my Dr. Sadler's Honest Reviews series are like that. They date back to 2018, 2019, and And I've read them and I just haven't gotten around to creating the videos.

Now, how should we view that sort of thing? Do you beat yourself up about it and get down upon yourself and say, what a loser I am. I should have gotten this accomplished. Certainly that can be a motivator early on when you're not getting things done. But after you've had quite a few of these opposite of successes, which you can call failures if you want to — I would actually say running up on the shoals of life — after you've had enough of them, you come to realize that it's not sustainable to get on your own case and get down on yourself for each of these things that you didn't actually pull off. That you need to be a bit more forgiving while at the same time not forgiving, cutting yourself so much slack that you don't end up accomplishing things and you live, so to speak, just in a dream world where you daydream about what you might have accomplished.

So why is this on my mind? Well, for the last, now I would say three weeks or so, I have been dealing with a number of different symptoms. And so has my wife, some of which could be attributed to a flu, you know, sinus issues, headaches, fatigue, muscle pain, sometimes chills.

Eventually, we got to the point where we said, well, I think we're going to have to go in and see a doctor. So we drove in together to urgent care only to get checked out and then hear the verdict. Well, there's not much we can do for you. There's a lot of viruses going around. This doesn't appear to be bacterial, so no antibiotics would be helpful. We don't know what you've actually got, but clearly you can get some work done. So you can't be that badly off. Get some more rest. Make sure you stay very hydrated. Take some painkillers over the counter and eventually you'll be right as rain

So now i'm starting to feel better, but for you know about three weeks what I was finding is that I would get fatigued fairly quickly. So by around three or four o'clock in the afternoon I couldn't get much of anything done. I would come home, take a nap, get up, have some dinner, think that I was going to do some work that night, be too tiredm and either go to bed early or take a bath and go to bed and start again the next day. In the morning, I would not be feeling great, but I could be productive.And then my productivity level would decline as the day went on.

And I found myself getting further and further behind, which if you've experienced that, it can be quite frustrating, especially when you know that people are expecting things from you, perhaps even depending on you to get things done. That's the case if you're teaching. That's the case if you've got important projects going on. That's the case when you've made commitments to clients and colleagues that certain things were going to happen.

So it requires a kind of mental shift. And I'm fortunate in that I have a partner in Andi, my wife, who is similarly driven, but also has similar challenges and who can say to me, hey you've done enough for the day. Your productivity shouldn't come before your health or whatever else it's going to be. Take it easy. Because I know that she won't tell me to take it easy too often. And I do the same for her. So this is a form of mutual support, you could say.

But what ends up happening is that some things have to be put on hold. And prioritization becomes very important. One of the temptations that I tend to face is sticking with things that are easier and more attractive to me as projects and deferring the things that I really should do, but I'd prefer not to. When I run out of energy, then those things go onto the back burner. They wind up on the to-do list for the next day. And that's not a good thing because eventually your to-do list gets longer and longer and it has a higher proportion of the things that you weren't really that happy to do, at least at the time, which then can affect your mood as well.

Sometimes the answer to that is just to wipe the slate clean altogether. Other times, maybe you have to do the, as one of my colleagues and friends calls it, eat your broccoli first and then you get your steak and dessert. I actually like broccoli, so that metaphor doesn't work for me as well, but apparently he's not so interested in vegetables, but really does like steak and dessert. So you rearrange your schedule so that you're getting to the tasks that you didn't originally want to do.

Now, I'm not offering some sort of here's the program to make sense out of your life and rearrange everything to your benefit here in this podcast. I'm more setting out an experience, and a problem, and hints of a solution that I'm reflecting upon here as I tell you about the this. But I think this is actually something that can be quite helpful for a lot of people, and here's where I'll end this.

A lot of people look at what I'm doing from the outside, and they say wow you're so productive. You get so much done. How do you do it? And my answer is two parts. Ine of them is I don't have a system as such, but I do have a number of habits that I've built up over the years that are helpful for me. I'm pretty good at prioritizing and also at making myself do things that I don't particularly want to do at the moment.

But the other part of it is from the outside, it looks like I'm very productive, like I manage my time extraordinarily well and get a lot done. But that is an outside view and it isn't the complete reality of what is happening on the inside. My house, if we want to use this as a sort of metaphor is just as messy and cluttered as is yours. You're just not seeing it because my yard looks very clean and orderly, and there's a lot of things in it waiting for other people to come and take, but if you were to step inside you might be a little bit surprised. Now, not a hoarder situation, not super gross or messy, but certainly not what you would necessarily expect. And I think saying that might be helpful for some people to hear.

I think I'll probably talk about this elsewhere because there's a lot to be said. But the most we can do is trying our best. And at some points in our life, our best isn't going to be the same best as it was in an earlier time. Now that may change as well. Sometimes things are cumulative. So our best could be even better than it was before.

But part of the process of aging, and right now I'm solidly in middle age, is to begin to recognize where you have to accept limitations. So I will end with that, and I look forward to seeing what people have to say about that.

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 could call my origin story as a public philosopher on YouTube.

So if you've been following me for a very long time or you've heard me in interviews, you know that I originally got started uploading videos not in my own channel, but in an institutional channel at the place that I was teaching called Fayetteville State University down in North Carolina. And they were from my last semester teaching there in 2011.

I was teaching four sections of critical thinking, which was a typical load for that place. We didn't have a philosophy program, and critical thinking was a required class for all students in the university, so we taught a lot of sections.

And I thought that I would start video recording using a flip cam, and what you call a spider tripod, a little tripod that you can arrange things. I would put it down on a desk and just start it at the beginning of class, turn it off at the end of class. Occasionally it would get bumped by a student and you would see students walking past it. But for the most part, it would take in the entire desk, chalkboard, and me giving a lecture. And it would pick up the sound from students asking questions or making comments quite well.

I've told the story a number of times how my then fiancée, now wife Andi was absolutely instrumental in getting me to try it out and she said what do you have to lose you can record the lectures could be a useful resource for your students. And if you don't like them, you can always get rid of them later on.

So I was originally - as I found out, I'd totally forgotten about this - I was originally planning on taking the video recordings and uploading the files into the course management system, which was called Blackboard. It's still around today. And I found that Blackboard at that time, at least, it might be able to now just could not handle long video files. You couldn't upload them into it effectively. So there wouldn't be any useful playback for my students.

So we started having to think, OK, where can they actually go? I thought about uploading them into a personal YouTube channel. But back then, YouTube first was only allowing you to upload videos that were 10 minutes long and then 15 minutes and then 20 minutes. So if you look at old videos from about 15 years, even 13 years back, quite often what you would see is that they're broken up into chunks.

The exception was if you had an institutional account. So Fayetteville State University had an institutional account, and that's where those critical thinking videos actually live. It's kind of a fluke because I don't think that I would have thought to upload them as a resource for the general public who is interested in critical thinking, let alone my class and the way that I work.

This was very fortuitous because what ends up happening, again, you may know this from me talking about it elsewhere, when I first started putting videos out, these critical thinking videos, and then later when I moved to Marist College and I was teaching Introduction to Philosophy and Ethics every semester and then occasionally some other classes like Religion in American Culture or Worldviews and Values.

With all of these classes and all of the videos that were recorded in them using lecture capture. Very low production. The sound quality isn't good. The lighting is not optimal. There's all sorts of weird interruptions, pauses. It's not scripted or anything like that. People really liked it.

There were a lot of responses that I got in comments that were, for me, quite telling and rather affirming of what it was that I was doing. It gave me the idea that maybe this is actually a good thing to do because I thought, nah, nobody's going to watch my stuff. I'm, you know, kind of an unknown, a nobody teaching at these places, not very well-known high-tier institutions.

And there were videos out from, for example, Shelley Kagan teaching his course about death at Yale University, if I remember right. And those were getting lots and lots of views. And I was like, ah, people aren't going to watch my stuff. But people did. And they said a lot of interesting things.

The number one thing that motivated me was people who were thanking me and saying, I'm in a critical thinking class, or later on I'm in an intro class or an ethics class or something, and this video that you recorded is really helpful for me because my instructor doesn't explain things, or isn't a very good teacher and you know refuses to help us out with understanding the concepts, the material, the arguments. And so you saved my grade or you've allowed me to understand things.

And I thought, yeah, that's actually quite helpful. That's wonderful that somebody who is not getting what they're paying for and should be getting from their instructor is at least getting it somewhere from somebody else.

Another kind of comment that I got that was, again, very, I'll use the word affirming, were from people who said, I really like watching these videos because it is like being in a classroom again, and I had to drop out of college. Or I wasn't able to go to college because I have to work for a living, or my life situation doesn't allow it. Or I went to college, did graduate. I'm now working somewhere and I miss it. So, you know, that was kind of a cool thing.

And video of that sort, just like videos of people, I suppose, whitewater rafting. You've done it before. You watch somebody else doing it and you're like, oh man, that's really cool. I remember when I did that or sledding or knitting or whatever it might be, right? So that was another good sort of comment.

And over time, I got a lot of other types of comments as well. People asking questions, wanting to go a little bit further into depth, requesting videos of different sorts that led me down other paths. But when I think about where it all got started, the initial impulse did in fact come from my wife who was pushing me to just try it out. Because I can be a bit conservative and curmudgeonly when it comes to trying out new things, maybe less so now than I was when I was 40 years old.

Isn't that funny to think about that? That 14 years has made such a profound difference when it comes to openness and willingness to experiment. So she was the one who got me to actually start recording. But then we had this bottleneck, this problem. How do you actually put it out there?

And I didn't intend to try to acquire an audience online. I was thinking just in terms of my students and the fact that the course management system that we had, which probably should have been better and would have accommodated me if it had been, and then I might have left those videos in there, and never reached anyone outside of the places where I was teaching unless somebody convinced me to actually put them on YouTube.

If that had been the case, then I think my career would be very different. YouTube allowed me to reach a worldwide audience. My videos have been viewed millions of times by people of all different ages, with all sorts of different motivations, sharing them with each other.

And, you know, not everybody likes them, I suppose, but it seems like at least most of the people who do watch them find them of some value and recommend them to other people. And if it hadn't been for that one circumstance, perhaps none of that would have happened.

So it's a great example of what we call contingency in life, or as the ancients like to call it, the role of fortune or chance. And I'm going to close here by bringing up something that perhaps I'll talk about a little bit more in another podcast, because it is a topic that deserves a lot more attention.

Recently, I've been rereading Cicero's work on the ends for a variety of different projects, and I teach portions of it. And there's a lot of discussions in there about the degree to which we have control over the kind of life that we live.

Is it going to be a good life? Well, how do we conceive of the good life? What is the goal or the end of human existence? And there's a lot of different candidates out there. You may be familiar with the genre of literature that says, let's survey everybody's viewpoints on this. For example, in Cicero's work, but also in Augustine's City of God, and Boethius we find similar discussions happening where people want to survey it.

Theophrastus who was a both friend and follower of Aristotle, and who is you know pretty consistently Aristotelian in the books that we have of him, he's sort of following in his footsteps. He appears to have thought that fortune plays a more significant role in our happiness than do a lot of other ancient philosophers. And I'm not going to say that he's actually completely correct about that.

But I will say that I've developed a much stronger appreciation for the many different ways in which factors have to come together in order for things that matter to our lives to really work out.

And I could give you the example as well of how Andi and I wound up being together, connecting through Facebook, or rather reconnecting after not being in contact for time decades, because you know that we met in high school, but we didn't date in high school. She actually dated my archrival and then we lost track of each other. And then we crossed paths again in the mid 1990s and lost track of each other.

And then in 2009, at the very end of the year,I sent a Facebook request because now she was being suggested because we had that old boyfriend of hers as a mutual friend in common on Facebook. And she accepted. And within a couple months through writing to each other, we fell in love and decided that we wanted to get married. All of that is a matter of chance or fortune.

You could also look at it if you want to as providential. If you think that there is some mind who's organizing things behind the scenes, which certainly could be the case. But so many things in our lives turn out to be rather fortuitous, contingent. And we probably should develop a healthy appreciation for the fact that it is so possible in so many ways for things to go quite differently than the story that we actually know and remember.

So here's where I'll stop with these reflections. Perhaps I'll follow these out a little bit more in some subsequent podcast episodes.

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 with students that way. But I think that online education, if it's done well, can be just as effective as face to face. And I've been doing it now for a while. This will be my 13th year teaching online. So you get pretty good at it after a while.

In the first week of class in the contemporary educational setting in American academia, what you end up getting - and this is part of what I'm going to be talking about today, and trying to take a fairly non-complaining, non-criticizing, positive attitude towards, but also one that you might say holds the line where it has to - is what we can call student accommodations.

Now, if you're not familiar with that, the general idea is that different students are better or worse equipped for studying at the college level. And a good bit of this may, in fact, stem from various disadvantages that they'vehad or learning disabilities or psychological problems that they're struggling with.

And I think it's actually a good thing that we try as best as we can these days to understand students' situations and not to just say, “well, sink or swim, kid”, but try to make things more fair in certain ways, even out the field, give certain people the compensations and advantages that they need in order to do well, that we support them, that we make them feel welcome in the class.

But it can also go a bit too far, and that's what I'm going to talk about today. So what ends up happening, and it's kind of done in a heavy handed cookie-cutter way, is whatever school I'm teaching at, there will be some sort of office of student support. It'll be called a million different things at different places. But their function is to take students who may be struggling and figure out what they need help with what sort of accommodations might be useful for them so that they can do well in classes, and then to send out what are called accommodation letters.

And accommodation letters will say, this person has a verified issue or problem or challenge, and here are the various accommodations that are needed in order for them to have a chance at succeeding in their classes.

And it's interesting, as a side note, when you read through all these different accommodations that are being expected. Sometimes there are things like the student needs instructions for assignments to be given to them in written form, or they need to be allowed to leave the classroom if they're suffering from anxiety or perhaps some physical health issue.

Or they need, in some cases, for example, I had a blind student, they need all of the video things to be given proper transcripts so that they can use those to help them out. There's lots and lots of different things, but a lot of them, you read it and you're like, well, who isn't doing this in their classes?

I mean, do you actually have assignments that you're giving to your students and you're not writing down somewhere in the course website what the requirements for the assignments are? I mean, that's just common sense good practices, and it makes life a lot easier for you as an instructor. Same thing with using grading rubrics or... matters along those lines.

And if a student wants to leave the classroom, are you really going to say, where's your hall pass or something like that? This isn't elementary or high school. This is college. So it makes you wonder what is actually going on with a lot of the fellow instructors that they need to be told this.

The students are also generally told that, and so they email me, they need to try to arrange a meeting with me to discuss their accommodations and how they are going to be implemented into the class and how they can succeed. And when I get that email, I almost always write them back and I say, we can have a meeting if you want to, but it's basically going to be me ticking down the list of the accommodations for the class and saying, I've already set up my class in such a way to accommodate this.

So, for example, a student may need extensions on their assignments, which means that they get extra time to complete them. And I'll say, I don't give extensions. You know why? Because I already have a super generous late work policy. I take work from students all the way to the end of the semester, and I won't even take points off if you have some reasonable excuse for why you're turning in work late. I just want you to get the work done.

And so in general, almost every accommodation that somebody needs, I've already met it in the way that my classes are designed and conducted. There are some, however, that really can't work, at least not for a philosophy class, and I suspect also for a lot of other classes in the humanities.

So I had two students recently who are saying that they have a difficult time with reading texts. And I think, you know, if you know anything about philosophy, immediately your antenna are going to go up and say, well, wait a second. That's what you do in studying philosophy.

You can't really learn about Plato without reading Plato's dialogues. And it's not something that you can replace by watching videos or listening to podcasts or reading Sparknotes summaries or any of those sorts of things. At some point, you actually are going to have to read the text and the text aren't going to get any easier than they already are.

I mean, we can try to find translations that are more contemporary English. We can break the text into chunks. But if you're going to read Plato's Apology, you really do need to read and probably reread the whole thing. There's no way around this

So I had two students who emailed me about their accommodations, and both of them were saying listen I've got a learning disability. I have a difficult time reading these sorts of texts one of them was actually asking for the text not to be large blocks of text but rather to be put in bullet points.

And when I get requests like this, I do push back against it and say, listen, the class has been set up in such a way as to support your learning in a lot of different manners. You know, there are lecture videos and podcasts and lesson pages and links to outside resources and handouts on the materials. But you cannot not read the class text. You must read the text. All of these resources are there to help you do that.

And so, you know, I don't throw students into the deep end and just say, well, hope you swim. I give them all sorts of resources, but I'm also telling them there is a line here that we can't go past. You cannot substitute these resources for actually engaging with the text, and you'd be shortchanging yourself to do that as a human being.

And I suspect that when it comes down to it, all of these students are really capable of reading the text. It's less a matter of an on-off switch of capacity or incapacity, and it's more like a dimmer switch. It may be more difficult for them, but Plato is difficult for everybody. We all struggle with reading him, or Nietzsche, or Mary Wollstonecraft, or Simone de Beauvoir. That's the nature of intellectual writing done by people who really have a lot on the ball and are worth studying.

And so I pushed back and with both of these students and said, listen, you're being supported, but there is no way that I am going to take these texts and put them into bullet point form for you. And even if I did, you wouldn't be reading the text.

Now, there is a student support services.(And I may be getting the name wrong because all of these various offices are called by different things in different schools.) And if they want to take the text from the class, this is actually what I wrote the student who is asking for this. If they want to take those texts and put them into bullet point form, well, more power to them. They can certainly do that work. I don't have the time to do that. And I think it would be bad pedagogy to, in fact, just substitute that for really reading an original text.

Plus, there's already resources out there, I think, doing that sort of thing. Back in n my day, when I was a student, we obviously didn't have a very well-developed internet, but what we did have were these books that you could buy at bookstores anywhere called Cliff Notes. And when I was in middle school and high school, and even in college, a lot of my fellow students would do that. Instead of actually reading a play by Shakespeare, they'd get the Cliff Notes. And the Cliff Notes would have all of these nice broken down sections, essentially bullet pointing things for them.

Now we have Spark notes and all sorts of other places that you can go online if that's the sort of thing that you're looking for. But of course, if you do that, you're not really getting much of an education. It would be as if you decided just to read Wikipedia articles about Aristotle rather than actually reading Aristotle. Or instead of taking the chance that it might be difficult for you to read Seneca and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and Musonius Rufus and other Stoic authors, you decided to read Stoicism for Dummies or some sort of substitute like that.

You certainly can do that. And it's better than not doing anything. And some learning will take place, but it's below the threshold of what it is that we're trying to promote and produce in a real philosophy class.

So, you know, I don't want to sound like a curmudgeon here who's saying, oh, these kids these days are so lazy or any nonsense like that, because I don't believe that. I think that there are a lot of students in every generation who are kind of lazy and want to cut corners. And there's a lot of them who are dedicated and motivated and really interested. And there's quite a few in between. And I don't think that it changes from generation to generation.

I do my best to provide as much possible support for the students in a variety of different modalities, let's say, video, podcast, writing, meeting with them, all these sorts of things. I do as much as I can of that because I want them to succeed.

But I also want them to succeed at what it is that we're trying to do in the class, which is to read and think about and discuss and apply and actual primary texts of philosophical literature so those are my reflections on this process i thought i would give you a little bit of insight into what contemporary academia looks like again. I'm not saying that this is something radically new and these kids these days or anything like that

But I do think that there can be kind of a culture which is fostered by these various essentially educational bureaucrats who want to understandably make things easier for the students so that they can learn things.

But in the process, they're going too far and demanding that things be, and I'll just use the word, dumbed down, watered down, made far easier than they should be. And it's not about whether it's easy or hard. It's really about whether you're getting the real thing that you're paying for, which is a genuine education, reading primary texts and being able to get something out of that experience.

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 ground running. So I've been spending about the last week slowly putting the classes together that I'm going to teach.

And actually, as far as academic classes go, this is a fairly light semester for me. I'm not teaching for Marquette University as I do sometimes. I'm only teaching for Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. I'm teaching two online courses, one of which is a class that I've taught before called Philosophy, Mindfulness, and Life. (And they put the mindfulness in there because it was a trendy topic).

We do look at a little bit of contemporary mindfulness stuff, but we're mostly focused on looking at ancient philosophy and whatever you want to call them “spiritual exercises” (that's Pierre Hadot's term), or “philosophical practices”, or even, to use Foucault's term, “technologies of the self”.

And the students learn a bit about a number of different important philosophical traditions. They read some texts, and then they, over the course of weeks, apply philosophy practices daily within their life and they keep track of that. And then they write some reports on it and they share their experiences with others. So it's very much a practical, transformative philosophy class.

And that is, as I mentioned, a class I've taught before for my I think this will be the fourth time around. It is an asynchronous class, which means that it doesn't meet for any class sessions. The students are working together as a class, but entirely on their own. They engage each other through discussion forums, and that's where they compare notes and talk about what they're doing and experiencing.

The other class is a new class for MIAD, but not a completely new class to me. I've taught it before three times for Marquette University, and it is my Anger and Justice class, which you might know something about. I've produced a number of resources, particularly lecture videos, and then converted those into podcast episodes on various works dealing with anger over the last several years.

So that class will be meeting for regular class sessions only once a week. And I try not to overtax my students by making them meet for the full two and a half hours that it's allotted for. Instead, I have them meet for an hour and a half. We discuss the course texts. We talk about exercises, applications, ideas, that sort of stuff and their own experiences with what we're looking at and talking about. And then I let them go and I hold online office hours for that Anger and Justice class and for the other Philosophy, Mindfulness and Life class.

So I have been getting ready to teach those two courses and you might be interested to know what does that mean for me as a professor? Can I just take whatever I did in the past and recycle it? And the answer to that is, well, I could do that, but that would not be good teaching.

When you're actually setting up a class, particularly an online class, a lot of thought and preparation needs to go into it if it's going to be a good class. And you can't really, as we sometimes say, fake the funk or just cut and paste from one semester to the next. You really have to go back over your stuff. And you can't do that either in a mechanical way, just ticking off a bunch of boxes. You have to put thought into it. And so that's part of what I wanted to talk about with you today because it might be interesting for you to know what sort of thinking is. goes into preparing for new classes.

So the first thing that I'm going to tell you about is what we often these days call “backwards design”. That is an educational designer sort of jargony way of talking about something else that we've been doing for a very, very long time but calling by different names. And I'm going to give you another jargony way of talking about it that comes essentially from Aristotle onward and I like to just call it what it is, “teleological”.

So the Greek word telos means “end” or “goal or “purpose”. And when you're thinking about ends, and the means that you need to select from in order to achieve those ends, and perhaps not screwing up all of your other means and ends, you are engaging in teleological thinking about things. You notice that this goes throughout the entire history of philosophy. It's a major issue in ethics and it's also quite important in designing anything.

You think about, well, what is it that I want to achieve or attain or produce? And what is it going to take for that to happen? And you might do this in a bunch of iterative steps. So you might begin with, you know, let's take an example that's not class related.

I want to be happy. Now you've got to figure out what happiness actually means to you. And then once you've done that, let's say you've decided on Aristotle's idea of happiness. So virtuous activity along with sufficient means and some important relationships that are probably going to be along the lines of friendship.

Then you got to say, OK, I know where I want to go. How do I get there? What do I need to do? So if you want to have virtuous activity, well, you've got to develop virtue, right? So what does it take to actually develop virtue? What does it take to have some financial monetary property means that will allow you to live the kind of life that you want to, not being super rich, but at least having some security and being able to use your wealth in virtuous ways.

And then you've got to think, too, are there ways in which I could get to A which are going to keep me from getting to B? So if the pursuit of wealth is going to get in the way of Well, that may be a problem. You may have to rethink how it is you're going about getting wealth. So I think you get the idea, right? Teleological thinking.

Now, how does this apply to classes? You might say, well, the whole purpose of a class is just for the students to learn some stuff. You really have to be able to explain to yourself and perhaps even to other people, what is it that you want the students to learn? And I think this is a great thing to do. I actually include this not only in my syllabus where it's supposed to be (which the students probably won't read or won't read closely, quite frankly, even if we go over it in class), but I include it in the course site and in each of the weekly modules.

Here's what I want us to do because the goal is for you to come away with this, this sort of change in yourself or this sort of knowledge that you can do or a skill that you can now apply within your life. And then I have to think about, OK, so what is going to foster that?

And you really have to think hard about this. You can't just say, well, I want them to learn some Platonic philosophy, so I'm just going to have them read some text by Plato, and that'll be good enough. Maybe we'll talk about it in the class session.No, no, no! You really have to think more than that you have to think about where can things go wrong.

What kind of text do you need? What sort of translations? What do you need to explain to these students so that they can take these texts that were written a long time ago (and in the case of my classes I give them public domain translations which are a little old fashioned and Oxfordy)? How can I explain this stuff to get it across to them? And what other kinds of resources are they going to need in order to be able to make this work?

A lot of people need examples. I find that very helpful myself. I produce a lot of handouts and worksheets, and I do that as well because I find that sort of stuff useful, and so in my view, students are probably gonna find that useful as well.

I also, for these online classes, produce a lot of short lecture videos, which I call core concept videos, and I load those into the course site, and the students watch them, and find them quite helpful. I also turn them into podcast episodes so they can listen to them and download them and take them wherever they would like to.

I sometimes write lesson pages for them as well, where I'm putting things into kind of a summary textual form for the students, which, again, they often tell me, hey, this is really helpful stuff.

And big surprise, having resources in a variety of different formats on the rather difficult material that we're studying, to give them an introduction, to lead them in, to explain difficult ideas or concepts or terminology turns out to be very helpful.

And it also winds up making them feel good in a certain way, making them feel supported, making them feel that I (which is a true thing) care about their education. And that generates a really nice, positive feedback loop where it's more likely that they'll put in the work to be good students because somebody is showing that they care about their education and about the obstacles and difficulties and misunderstandings that they're likely to encounter.

So I have to think about for each class, each semester, what do my students actually need? And I'll give you an example of something interesting that I do for one of my classes that I don't do in most of my other classes. So for this Philosophy, Mindfulness, and Life class, one of the things that I saw a friend and colleague, Donald Robertson, doing (it's got to be over a decade ago. Yeah, actually, it is over a decade ago), for Stoic Week, he created, I want to say, seven sound files.

And it was him and his Scottish dialect leading people through practices, philosophical practices taken from Stoicism, like a morning meditation and an evening meditation and the view from above and other. a bunch of other things as well. And I thought, wow, that is a great idea. And actually I used his guided meditations for earlier versions of my class, at least on the Stoicism part.

And then I started thinking to myself, man, what if somebody did that for Epicurean or Cynic or Platonic philosophy? These different schools' traditions, because they're also very practically oriented, and we talk about them in the class. What if somebody took the Epicurean Tetrapharmakos and explained it and led people through a guided meditation, nice and slow, so that they could listen to this and it could slowly have an impact or effect upon their consciousness.

So that's part of what I'm going to be doing for this new iteration of the class. It's something I wanted to do in the past and never got around to it. I think it would be helpful for my students, beneficial for them. I mean we'll see, it's kind of an experiment. Maybe none of them will find it useful, or maybe none of them really want to listen to it because it is a optional sort of resource. Maybe I'll make them available down the line to Substack subscribers or other people who are supporting me in other ways, but that's what I'm doing for the time being.

So circling back, there's a lot of thinking things out that goes into designing the syllabus, thinking about what we're going to study, building out the course website, and then developing all of these resources for my students.

And the good thing is, and this is what I'll close with, it doesn't all have to be done at once. The students are not going to be looking at the week 12 resources until around week 11. Actually, some of them may look at it in week 13! So I don't have to have everything done before the semester begins. But the more I have done, the less stressful it is for me and for my go-getter students who want to see the resources there, the more helpful it is for me to get these things done in advance. There's a lot of lead time, prep time before we even begin the class, at least for the kinds of classes that I teach.

And so I've peeled back the curtain a little bit for you and you get some insight into what it looks like when a professor who actually cares about his students learning is taking on interesting classes like this.

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 good tragedy, in order to be a proper representative of that genre.

And I promised that I would come back to the topic, so that is what I'm going to do here, but I want to broaden it a little bit. So it's interesting, if you go and you look at what people have to say about it, the most common way that people talk about it in the present seems to be telling us about Aristotle's theory of tragedy.

And it's kind of a funny term to use, given that Aristotle does in fact use the Greek verb that we end up getting theory from, theorein, which means essentially to contemplate. And it's particularly used for the spectators at a tragedy, or we would call them today, the audience, the people literally looking at or watching the drama being depicted, the mimesis that Aristotle is particularly interested in.

And a lot of people will write about this in ways that reflect a kind of rigidification of Aristotle's text. You might even, if we want to use another term, say ossification. And this comes from the word os, from bone. It's making Aristotle very bony. It's giving you something like a skeleton that doesn't have the mobility of Aristotle's thought as we actually see it right there in the text.

So when you see somebody telling you about the theory of a particular philosopher, I'm not saying that every time that happens, alarm bells should go off or a red flag should go up in your head, but you might want to be a bit suspicious, particularly if the philosopher, him or herself, didn't say, “this is my theory”, right?

If they didn't present it in that way, because what you're always getting there is a sort of reconstruction, and it could be a reconstruction that is also, we could say, a not only rigidification, but a reduction, making it less than it actually is.

And when you think about these great authors and classic texts, why do we read them? Not because we're looking for a cookie cutter or recipe or schema that we can cram everything into. We're looking for thought that remains alive, that can provoke our own reflection and meditation and widening our own range of thinking and and even perception when it comes to these matters.

So when you read through Aristotle's poetics, you can't apply it very easily to every single genre of drama that we have in the present, whether it's literary, whether it's presented on a stage, whether it is in a streaming television show or movie, but it should help you at least see some things in a different and deeper light.mThat's the power of Aristotle's text.

And sometimes it's going to help you see it, not so much by saying, aha, I know exactly what's going on, but by helping you to better be puzzled, better be astounded, better be challenged, and better ask questions or muse upon things. That's the function of classic texts like Aristotle's Poetics.

And so I want to say another thing as well to widen the scope here and take us to some of Aristotle's other works. So you'll often see people saying things like Aristotle's doctrine of this or that. So for example, Aristotle's doctrine of the unity of the virtues, this would be in book six of the Nicomachean Ethics. Or sometimes you'll even see argument being used as well, like Aristotle's function argument.

And I'm not going to say that all of that should be automatically rejected. I mean, if it helps you to wrap your head around what is going on in Aristotle's admittedly ambiguous at times argument, difficult at times, tricky, and sometimes confusing text, that's great. Just don't mistake, as we often say, the map for the territory, where the territory is Aristotle's actual text and the thought lying behind it, and the map, or tiny little portion of the map, maybe just a route, is what it is that the commentator or even just website has to say about what Aristotle's really doing.

Because you're not getting the fullness of what Aristotle's doing when somebody talks about the function argument or Aristotle's theory of tragedy or anything along those lines. His thought is more complex, more richly interconnected, more ambiguous in its language, and more, you could say, questing. Aristotle is often showing us his process of thinking about things, and that's part of why it is so messy when we try to reconstruct it.

And maybe we need to get out of the habit of thinking that everything should be made nice and easy and quick to apply, set in bullet point form. Maybe that's a habit of mind that we actually need to break, to identify within ourselves, and then to slowly disentangle from our approach to things.

So coming back to Aristotle, coming back especially to the Poetics, I will say that Aristotle does provide us with an effective definition of tragedy as a particular artistic memetic medium, a kind of poesis, a kind of poetry and production. But there's much more to the picture. And I'm just going to give you one example to drive this home.

So everybody who knows anything about tragedy knows that it involves, according to Aristotle, purification of two emotions in particular, fear and pain. Well, that's true. Aristotle does actually say that in his definition, and he does talk about that. But are those really the only emotions that we would possibly want to focus on?

He also mentions anger in the Poetics and I think that we could quite easily, using our brains and applying them somewhat to this, say perhaps sometimes if there is catharsis (purification is often how we translate that), if there is catharsis of emotion why couldn't it also be that of anger. He also talks about another interesting emotional state within there that often doesn't get remarked upon that we could translate as human feeling, philanthropia, a term that gets used a lot in later authors, but which Aristotle is using there.

We might think about other emotions as well, like that of sadness, which he doesn't actually mention in this work, but does talk about in other places, certainly under the aspect of grief, which he mentions in the Nicomachean Ethics. So when we look at it that way, when we don't simply say, well, as we all know, Aristotle only thinks, because Aristotle only talks about two emotions there, that catharsis in good tragedy involves purification of the audience's feeling of fear and pity, or we might say sympathy or compassion, as a translation of Greek, by the way in which we read it and the assumptions that we bring to it.

Sometimes, unfortunately, and this has often been the case for me as a younger person, the book that we're reading is not as great a book as other people are encountering. And maybe we have to mature a bit. Maybe we have to learn to not simply rely upon secondhand interpretations and go into the text ourselves and linger with, really spend time with it if we want to get entirely what is available to us as readers, as thinkers, as collaborators in the thought, if we want that to become available to us.

So those are a few musings that hopefully discharge the obligation I incurred by promising to talk more about Aristotle's poetics. I'll probably return to it later on down the line because there's plenty of other interesting aspects of this text to talk about, but that's enough for right now.

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 because I am finishing up a series that I'll be releasing pretty soon about Aristotle's poetics, which is a really great, I would say, underrated text, well worth reading if you're interested in Aristotle's philosophy, not just for literary criticism or his remarks on tragedy, but also for thinking about ethics and a bunch of other topics.

Now, coming back to what I was saying originally, so why am I shooting videos, actually a set of seven, on Aristotle's Poetics? Well, because earlier on, I want to say last year, I shot a whole series on Aristotle's Poetics, but only covered the portions of the text that my students enrolled in an Introduction to Humanities class actually wrote. at the time.

One of the required texts for that class, which I teach every so often, is Sophocles' play Antigone, which is really a great, great play. And Aristotle is one of the classic theorists who talks about the nature of tragedy. We talk about him in class. I have them read the Poetics, or at least selections of it that are relevant to Sophocles' tragedy. And so I thought it might be a nice resource for my students to have me going over and delving into all of the discussions that bear directly on tragedy.

But what we find, if you look at Aristotle's Poetics, that is, I think, what most people go to it to read about. But he's also going to talk about the nature of mimesis and that is imitation, which is going to lead into all the different art forms that we engage in, including the dramatic arts, but other types of poetry as well. He's going to talk a good bit about epic poetry, particularly that of Homer. He'll tell you a little bit about comedy. Unfortunately, as many of you know, we have lost the second book of it in which he is reputed to have talked about comedy at great length.

But he also tells us about a number of other interesting things,some of which connect up with matters that are discussed elsewhere, like the nature of diction or lexis or style in the rhetoric. Also, the importance of emotions, another topic discussed in both the rhetoric and the two Ethics, and I would say even in the Politics, the nature of character and choices and motivations, very much a matter of the Ethics but also found in the Rhetoric, and then metaphor.

So I wanted to go back and finish up the series so I could say, here you go. If you want to study this text, you can check out all of these videos. Later on, I'll convert them into podcast episodes. And now you've got these resources. And then I could actually take them and turn them into an online course that people could use for their own edification and self-directed education as well.

And as it turns out, there are a lot of texts where I've done precisely this over the years. I would start creating content to cover what I thought was the most productive pressing needs.

So let's talk about this stuff and then we'll come back to it later on sometime in the future. Things I would almost like triage, figuring out what the most immediate needs of my students were and dealing with those by producing content on that. And then down the line, I think to myself, well, wouldn't it be nice to have the completed set?

So I've done this with a number of other works. You know, I've shot videos on the entirety of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. At one point, there were videos on various Platonic dialogues where I shot some of them first and then shot the rest of them first. Later, there's a number of Stoic texts where I've produced content on some of the text, but not the entirety of it and need to go back and produce more. And, you know, this goes on and on and on.

So I've got plans down the line to shoot some content on John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, which I've got quite a few videos on, but not covering all of the text. Or St. Augustine's Confessions. Again, similar thing. I produced a number of videos on it, but not all of them that I should have or would like to have. Friedrich Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals is another example. And so I'll probably be doing that.

You know, I said for the next year, but I'll probably be doing that if we're honest about it for at least a couple of years to come, because I think it's important to complete these matters. Now, why is that the case? Well, is it just that we have a tendency to like things brought to their fruition, to be finished, we could say?

And, you know, this goes back to Aristotle and ancient Greek. They have this term telos that you've probably heard of, which we translate as end or goal, and that gets turned into a all sorts of other constructions a verb that is used for completing but also translated as perfecting bringing to fruition adjectives that are derived from that verb all of which trace back to this original conception of like reaching the end reaching the goal bringing things to the point where you can say “ah, that's it, I have actually done enough.”

And I will point out this, when you see that term translated as perfection, I think that in our modern mindset and language, we often interpret that in too maximal of a way. We think that something is perfect if every single thing has been totally fixed, there are no mistakes, nothing possibly wrong or unfinished with it.

And that's not exactly what they meant at the time in using this term. They were not perfectionists, so to speak. But they thought that it was important to work things through, to get them to a point where you can stand back and say, “yeah, that's good. That is good enough.”

And you might think about it in terms of like writing a book. So I've got some experience with that. And I can tell you that whether it's writing a short thing like a blog post or a newspaper article or writing something longer and more involved and rigorous like an academic article or actually writing an entire book, there are always going to be flaws.

There are always going to be some mistakes. There are always going to be errors that you hope somebody would have caught but somehow sneak through. And it doesn't mean that the work isn't finished. or that it hasn't been brought to its fruition, or that in an older sense of it, it hasn't been perfected. It's just not perfect in its entirety.

And now shifting back to Aristotle's Poetics as I wrap this up, one of the things that I'll probably talk about a bit more later on that I think is really interesting about this work, particularly as I'm rereading it and thinking about it more, is that it has been interpreted by people in the past, particularly in the 17th century, when Aristotle's Poetics was, you might say, interpreted in a very rigid way by playwrights and critics and philosophers, particularly in France, as if he was providing us with not a set of guidelines, but a set of strict rules for how tragedies have to be written.

And now, if you know anything about that time period, you know that it was a time of great, fruitful, French playwriting, the 17th and 18th centuries, I think you can say. And you can take Aristotle's remarks about what makes for a good tragedy and what makes tragedy particularly effective as a kind of canon, a kind of set of guidelines for how you ought to carry out this art form that we call tragedy.

That's certainly an option you can do it that way but you don't have to and it kind of goes against Aristotle's own way of looking at things he clearly thinks that tragedy has developed and improved and figured things out kind of by experimentation or trial and error in which the audience is involved and critics are involved.

And critics and audience are not something radically distinct from each other. Krites means judge and the audience does judge things. And Aristotle's trying to figure out what makes some tragedies really work well and what makes some not so good. Also epics and comedies and other poetic forms as well. And so when he's saying that, you know, this is the way a tragedy ought to go.

He's not laying down some rule for all time that applies to every single thing that you want to call tragedy. He's saying this is actually what works well. This is what gets you closer to the end, to the fruition. And so we got an interesting little dovetailing here of what it is that Aristotle's doing in this work and what it is that I'm trying to do with my own thinking, research, video production, having to do with series that I started at one point and then didn't get all the way through as I was trying to provide helpful commentary on philosophical or other works.

So that's a good place, now that we've brought these together, to wrap up these reflections, and I'll probably talk a little bit more about this notion of Aristotle as a rigid rulemaker versus the Aristotle that I see revealed in this text, and how you can, as you're reading the text, get in touch with one of them, namely the author, one who's a bit more flexible and realistic, and divest yourself of an imaginary Aristotle conjured up by all of these interpreters who made him into a rather doctrinaire disciplinarian of drama.

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 a number of different people.

So today I have been compiling something that could be used as raw material for a Wikipedia entry. And he asked me for just a blurb and a few things, but I thought, well, why not take the sorts of things that I typically see with authors or musicians or other people that I am interested in on Wikipedia, and provide that sort of information and categories?

And it's been an interesting exercise to do for a number of reasons. And one of them is that it winds up being a lot of work to go back and think about all of these different matters that people might want to know about and to put them into a document. I think that that to most people who know anything about me - and it's the reason why on occasion I'll have people come up to me and start talking to me because they recognize me - it's because of my YouTube channel. That is I would expect about 85 percent (and I'm just pulling this number out of the air) of the people who know me and then come up and interact with me, that's where they're getting it from originally.

I mean, I do also have a couple podcasts, including this podcast. I have been writing public-facing philosophy in blogs and podcasts. Participating in interviews on podcasts and shows. And I have a radio show that I co-host with a friend of mine for quite some time. So it's not as if it's only the YouTube channel. But I think that is probably where most people know me from. That's my claim to fame if I have any such thing.

And it's interesting, so this is a little bit of a digression, but I've had much more massive of an impact with the public-facing philosophy, particularly the YouTube videos than I am likely to ever have with the one academic book and dozens of articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries that I've written through the years,really going back more than 20 years now at this point, more than 25 if I'm actually thinking all the way back to my first article that ever came out. I've had much more impact with those sorts of media than I have with traditional academic publishing.

And that's most likely, unless I really shift gears and spend a lot more time on academic publishing, that's what I'm going to be known for, I suppose, through the rest of my lifetime. And if I'm remembered beyond that, other than on personal notes, it'll be for those sorts of reasons.

So today I've been engaging in a process of trying to remember, of arranging and organizing, thinking about what I would want to see if somebody were to actually produce a Wikipedia entry about me. What sorts of categories belong in there? What parts of my history or personal life do I want narrated, put out there for people to know about?

And because it's Wikipedia, there's one other key thing in mind.Anything that goes in there, as far as I understand it, needs to be able to be documented in one way or another. And fortunately, when it comes to video work or blogging or stuff like that, the evidence is already out there for people to find.

And it's kind of a good practice to engage in every once in a while to think back and consider your own biography, whether it's personal or professional, academic or public facing, whatever it's going to be. It doesn't hurt every once in a while to think about how you could explain what it is that you do, and what you've done, to somebody who doesn't know anything about you.

What would you put out there first? What would you prioritize? What would you leave in? And what would you leave out?What would you describe in detail? And what would you just talk about in outline or perhaps even gloss over? And so this is where I think that it might be useful, not just for me, to engage in this sort of thing.

But you, the listener, you could think about if you were put on the spot, if somebody said, hey, I want to write a Wikipedia entry about you, or I want to write a blog post about this aspect of your life or that aspect of your life. Or if you had a biographer that said, I would like to write an article or a book about your life, because I think that you're interesting, what would you actually tell them?

Is it only the stuff that you're currently focused on interested in? Well our lives reach back decades and decades, and we've often forgotten a number of the things that used to be quite important for us and may have shaped us and created the opportunities that we are currently exploring, perhaps even enjoying in the present, but we left the other stuff behind.

So, for example, in my case, I had to think about, well, when did I actually get started giving lectures to the non-academic general public? And the answer to that was way back in the early 2000s, 2000s when I started getting invited by various places to come in and give talks. And I don't think I was particularly good at it at that point in time.

Or where did you get your interests from? Where did those arise from? I had to think about the fact that, and I think many of you know this, I never intended to become a college professor. That was just not on the horizon for me when I was in high school or even in college. It was only later on when I decided to go to graduate school that that became a viable option for me to even envision. When I was in high school I didn't even plan to go to college. I just thought i was going to go into the military and perhaps be a lifer, or even - and this shows you just how much our mindsets can change over time - perhaps a mercenary. A bit of a pipe dream that, of course, didn't come to pass.

So I think it can be a useful exercise, and it may be one that a person person would actually want to do through writing or perhaps other alternative forms of putting something down. It could be talking to yourself with a recording, or it could be video recording yourself, but something that's more than just going off and thinking by yourself, delving into yourmemories and reflecting in your solitude.

I think it would be useful for all of us every once in a while to do this, maybe not with the entirety of our life, but to ask this question, how did I get here? What was I doing today? Earlier on? Five years ago? 10 years ago? 20 years ago? That got me to this place where I currently am, that got me to the person that I currently exist as.

And so this could be an interesting kind of exercise to carry out, you know. I'm telling you about this as the year is coming to a close, and we'll soon be talking about new years and what lies ahead of us. But perhaps we want to also from time to time take that time to look behind us and find the self who no longer exists as such, except in our own memories or the apparatus by which we have preserved those.

And in some respects I may be better off than most other people because as an academic I have a curriculum vitae which I've had to keep current over the years. And I can go back to earlier ones and see the things that I thought were important back then, and perhaps have left off of more recent versions. I also have a lot of writings that I've done, and podcast episodes and videos, and things like that.

But we could think about all sorts of other ways and in which we preserve stuff that we used to have, opening up a book and seeing what you underlined or what notes you took. Going into the garage or the attic or the basement and seeing what you've put in boxes from the last time that you moved, or when you needed to store things, and thinking about what those things are and why you held on to them and why they could be important to you.

So I don't have any really grand philosophical reflections, but I was struck by this process of writing. And I thought it could be interesting, perhaps even useful, to reflect on it a little bit here in ways that perhaps you could apply within the scope of your own life, however long it has been up till this point.

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 invited speaker there. And subsequently, I've given a few talks, and I've been writing a series of posts, trying to expand on that.

It gives me the opportunity to go back to the texts and dig in a bit deeper. I have the freedom to write as much as I'd like since I'm not writing for a press. There's no editor looking over my shoulder who has a certain word count in mind. And I get to go back to these great thinkers, particularly Cicero, who has a lot to say about it, Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, among others.

At the stage that I am currently at in the series, I am looking in particular at one work by Cicero, which is called The Tusculan Disputations. It's a really excellent, long, dense work that is not only engages Stoic philosophy, but a number of other philosophical schools of antiquity as well, including the Platonists, the Aristotelians, the Epicureans, also some of the schools that we consider to be kind of minor, like the Cynics and the Cyrenaics. He also talks about the Skeptics, and he brings up examples from a number of other, we could call them one-off or standalone philosophers who are not part of a major school or tradition.

And he also will bring up quite a few poets, including playwrights and people that we would nowadays actually call poets who had a philosophical experience. And he's interested in examining their points of view and sifting out what he thinks would be most valuable.

I've talked elsewhere about Ciceronian eclecticism, which is the stance of teaching, taking in what is valuable from a variety of philosophical perspectives, methods, traditions, schools, and trying to assimilate or integrate what they have to provide into a coherent position of one's own. And I think that arguably is what Cicero is doing in that work among others. And I'm particularly drawn to that as well, so I like going along for the ride with Cicero. And that's exactly what he's doing in Book 3, particularly when it comes to the issue of consolation.

So consolation or comforting is what you do when somebody has experienced a loss. And it can be as simple as going to the funeral and going up to them while they're in the receiving line and you've dressed in some somber clothing. You go up and say, I'm so sorry for your loss. If there's anything that I can do, let me know. And you know, that probably doesn't have a huge effect on their mood, but it shows that you care, and that by itself can be something quite important.

I'll mention, as somebody who has been in those receiving lines at funerals quite a lot, including for my mother and my grandparents and a that sometimes the things that people have to say are not particularly helpful. It's much more about them getting to say something that they think is helpful for you but isn't, or is really there to help them out in one way or another. And so not every attempt at consolation, however well-intentioned, it may be, or at least is imagined to be, is going to be on point.

But Cicero thinks that philosophers can actually give us some helpful advice about how we ought to console other people. And he's going to look at a number of different positions, including those of the Epicureans and the Cyrenaics, several different Stoic positions, the Peripatetics or Aristotelians, among others. And he's going to give you a critical assessment of what's right about those and what is probably off base about those.

Human nature and even human interactions in society have not changed so radically since Cicero's time that these have become useless, although we can certainly say that we've learned some additional lessons. And there are other philosophical and perhaps religious perspectives or even literary perspectives that could be useful that, of course, Cicero didn't have the opportunity to bring in. But I think that the Tusculan Disputations is really quite helpful when it comes to this.

And there's two things that I want to say to sort of bring this to a close. And the first is that when you look at a work like the Tusculan Disputations, You could say that it is existentialist in a very, very broad sense. Obviously, Cicero is writing a long, long time before existentialism as a philosophical movement is arising in the 19th and 20th centuries. But we often talk about proto-existentialists, and people will often include figures such as Augustine of Hippo, or Blaise Pascal, or Marcus Aurelius, or even Socrates among them.

I think you could make a good argument that Cicero is very, very interested in and concerned with existential matters, the things that are characteristic of existential philosophy. He's interested in how philosophy interpenetrates our lives that we're actually living. He thinks that we don't have to go to Athens in order to philosophize. We can engage in it and we should engage in it wherever we happen to be within the world and he thinks that it can in fact apply to the day-to-day matters of our lives. As a matter of fact Cicero is somebody who it's not as if he disrespects theoretical philosophy or speculative philosophy he thinks that that's important. But he always wants to bring it back to the practical and to real life, we could say, and show how philosophy can helpfully inform that.

The other point that I want to linger on a bit is that Cicero is not just sitting back and saying: ‘hey, when you run into grief, I'm going to tell you how to get out of it. I'm the sage on the stage. I'm the super smart guy who has all the answers.” He is writing from a position of common experience, and we could even say common suffering.

Cicero himself wrote a book that we no longer possess called the Consolatio, or Consolation. And why did he write it? Well, somebody very important, very close to him, very beloved by him, died. His daughter, Tulia, who appears to have been a really incredible person and somebody who he could see as sort of a peer intellectually and practically. And she dies before him. As a matter of fact, the wife, who's not her mother, who he's married to at the time, in Cicero's view, doesn't sufficiently grieve for Tullia. She might have been a little bit jealous of the affection that Cicero had for his daughter, and he will divorce her afterwards as a result.

But coming back to Cicero himself, he feels the loss very deeply, and he goes looking for helpful philosophical works, which unfortunately no longer exist, but we know about through references, for example, Crantor the Platonist's work on grief. And Cicero finds them lacking so he decides to write a work himself now why is this in a way existentialist because he's not just telling other people how they ought to deal with this emotion this experience that he himself has gone through but now is above it all.

Instead, he is seeking for words of advice that he can give himself in a kind of inner dialogue, an interior exhortation that can help him navigate these difficult waters of grief and grieving. And in the process like so many other people who do similar projects he writes something that could be useful for others, indeed likely was quite useful for others

Again we've lost the work, the Consolatio, but we do possess the Tusculan Disputations. And I would say, as somebody who deals with grief himself, that reading through the Tusculan Disputations, and thinking about some of the things that Cicero tells us that other philosophers or other schools have had to say and have suggested as practices or insights bearing upon grief, that we can take that and apply it to our own lives very productively and perhaps lessen our own emotion of grief or restrain it, rein it in, not to banish it entirely.

I'd actually don't agree with him on the desirability of that myself, but to keep it within certain reasonable bounds that might make our grief something more reflective of not just our moral values, but the relationship that we have to the person who we have lost and whose loss we are feeling when we grieve.

So I think Cicero provides us with a really interesting example that we might follow or at least sit back and admire, when it comes to this particular work and his larger overall project ,and the way that he lived a philosophical life as we see it playing out in particular, at least for me today, in book three of that work.