Mind & Desire

I think that at this point, a number of you have heard me talk at one point or another about Alasdair MacIntyre, the Scottish philosopher who wound up doing a lot of his work over here in the United States. And you may or may not know that about 20 years ago, I actually got to meet him because I participated in what was called the Erasmus Institute Faculty Fellowship in the summer of 2005, hosted by the Erasmus Institute at Notre Dame University. And that was kind of a big honor. I'll tell you a little bit about the story of how I got in there in just a moment.

But a little bit of lead up before I get into that. So as I was walking to the office today, I was thinking about MacIntyre. And I'm not exactly sure why this came up, perhaps because I was thinking about Gabriel Marcel, another important philosopher from France in the 20th century, somebody who I particularly like. Maybe down the line, I'll tell you a bit more about him and why I like his work and teach it and keep going back to it. And I was thinking about this conversation that I had with MacIntyre in his office at Notre Dame.

This was in the fall of months after the fellowship had finished up, and I was mentioning to him how his work engaged with a lot of the same themes that Gabriel Marcel's work did, but that I'd never seen him actually write about Marcel. And I was also thinking about how McIntyre reacted to that and what was going on in that meeting. So I'll come back to that in just a moment. I'll tell you first about this fellowship.

I was at that time three years out of graduate school. I had defended my dissertation on Maurice Blondel. I was doing some research work on this big project that eventually culminated in my first book, Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France. And so that tells you what that book was about.

And I was also teaching at Indiana State Prison. We had to cover the entire philosophy and religious studies curriculum because it was a four year bachelor's degree program. And I was one of two people in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies who taught there. The other guy who taught there, he was only there part time. I was there full time. So I was pretty busy, but still quite interested in the various fields that I was researching and writing in and pursuing, doing a lot of work also on Anselm of Canterbury, some work on Aristotle, some on Hobbes. So you can say I was spread out over a number of different places.

I had encountered Alasdair MacIntyre's work back in graduate school, in part because one of his books - it was either After Virtue or Whose Justice, Which Rationality - was in our value fields reading list for our preliminary examination. And I'd heard good things about his stuff, so I started reading him back then. I read both of those books as well as some other stuff as well. And I very much liked the approach to the history of ideas that he was sketching out. He seemed a rather down-to-earth sort of author, but I didn't know anything about the guy himself.

So I saw an advertisement to apply for this summer fellowship. And it was a really interesting one. The title of the fellowship was Practical Rationality: Rational Decision Theory, Aristotelian Thomism, and Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis. And I thought, whoa, that actually could be quite good. The opportunity to get to study for two intensive weeks at Notre Dame with Alasdair MacIntyre would have been attractive enough. But as it so happened, I had a background, as I read through the description, in all three of these areas.

Now, if you know MacIntyre, you know that he likes to set up triads of different, let's call them approaches, movements, he uses the word traditions, within moral or even epistemological theory and compare and contrast them with each other, try to bring them into dialogue with each other. So I thought wow this would be really great! I could see this guy at work and I would have something to contribute to the conversation.

So I wrote up the application and sent it off and then i got a letter back in the mail saying hey you're in You're one of 12 people. Here's the list of the other people. And it was very funny because as I was reading down this list, I realized that I was by far the most junior of scholars involved in this. And I was not at any sort of prestigious university like most of these people were. So I was really looking forward to it.

I think it happened either in June or July. I drove out to Notre Dame bringing my computer with me and some books and some other things as well. And I went to this seminar where we began the morning having breakfast together. MacIntyre wasn't at breakfast, but all the rest of us were. And then we would meet in a seminar room for an intensive three-hour session with him where he would do some lecturing. We'd do a lot of discussion and present some ideas, and then we would break for lunch, come back for the afternoon, have another intensive session. Then we would have dinner, and then we were on our own,

So I would spend a lot of my alone time over in the Hesburgh Library working on this project of mine, and I also got to present some of that project while I was there, because each one of us in the second week had to sort of present what we were doing. So I looked at the Christian philosophy debate and current Christian philosophy in terms of traditions in a Macintyrian way, and he actually surprised me giving me a manuscript afterwards of his own translation of one of the texts that I was translating and said that I could compare his translation with mine if I wanted to.

It was a wonderful experience. There was a lot of really interesting discussion going on. And then it came to an end. One of the things that all of the other people were doing at that time, and I didn't do at that time, because I lived only an hour and a half from Notre Dame, so I could basically go there anytime I wanted to, was to have a one-on-one session with MacIntyre over in his office talking through some of these ideas that they wanted to propose. And so I said, well, I'll just meet with you down the line. And later on we emailed and that was how this came about.

So in, I want to say, October, because it was already starting to get kind of cool, I drove out to Notre Dame and I parked and walked over to his office and he met me there and he said, let's go up and have a chat and then we'll go to lunch. And if you want, you can come to one of my classes and see how that goes.So we did exactly that. And the chat was very interesting because, as it turned out, I found out how I actually got into this rather prestigious fellowship program.

A significant part of it was the fact that he was interested in my prison teaching and wanted to talk about what that's like, what the prisoners were like, what they were interested in, how scholarship could inform prison teaching. And he also wanted to know about this guy who he hadn't read, Maurice Blondel, who I'd done my dissertation on, and whether there was anything in his works that might be worthwhile for MacIntyre himself to engage with.

Now, remember, too, that MacIntyre, at the time that we were meeting up like this, would have been probably in his late 70s and certainly could have retired if he wanted to, was not in the best of health, but he was still very, very committed to doing the kind of work that he had been doing for decades, a really intensive philosophical dialogue and engagement with other ways of thinking to see what you can take from them for whatever became in his work an Aristotelian-Thomist framework.

So when I brought up Gabriel Marcel, MacIntyre knew who he was, but admitted to me that he really hadn't read him. And I think what that meant is he probably had, but decades back and then had forgotten about it. And I said, well, you know, there's a lot of similar ideas in in your work and his work, and I think it would be, in fact, quite productive for you to …

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

And I only had a few takers, but one of them is particularly good. It was from Andrew Parker, who said: “Kindness. Kindness in our interpersonal interactions, educating through kindness, proliferation of kindness through social media.”

So I'm not going to do exactly that, but the topic here will in fact be kindness, and it's connected to some things that I am often thinking about, both in terms of Stoic philosophy and ancient philosophy more generally, and the class that I'm teaching on friendship in ancient philosophy, but also in my ethics classes more broadly.

Because this is indeed a topic that ordinary people would say, well, this is important for ethics. We should be kind, at least in certain circumstances, and there's something wrong if we're not. And then there's some ethicists who will say, well, no, kindness isn't really that important. It's something else instead.

And I also think about reasons why myself personally and other people might hold themselves back from exhibiting kindness in some circumstances where they have the opportunity to do so. What are the obstacles for that?

So the first thing that I want to say, coming back to ancient philosophy, is that people sometimes say: Oh you know - wisdom, justice, temperance, courage - these cardinal virtues not just for the Stoics but also for the Platonists, for the Epicureans. . . I don't understand why you left kindness or some other synonyms for that off the list. This seems kind of an oversight. Is ancient ethics not about being good to other people or only being good in certain ways?

And the answer is: Well no. You actually have to look at what they say in their texts, and you see that they are very interested in kindness. And I'll give you a couple book recommendations.

One of them is by this guy, Seneca, a Stoic philosopher, who's willing to draw on a lot of people. He's got an entire book called On Benefits. And benefits are things that you do for another person, something good that you do to or for them. He wrote an entire work on this in which he stressed how important of a portion of life this is, that our lives would be kind of lacking without other people giving it to us and without us giving it to them.

I'll also mention Marcus Tullius Cicero, who I think all of you know I'm a huge fan of. He has a book called On Duties where he is providing his own interpretation of Stoic ethics. And in the very first book, very early on, he talks about our nature and how the virtues come out of that.

So this is something that's really important for ancient philosophers, and that runs through the Middle Ages, that runs through early modern philosophy, and you just got to know where to look.

So I mentioned there are synonyms being used, and this might help you wrap your head around it a little bit more. So beneficence, when you see people talking about that, or generosity, that's another key thing that's connected to it. Sometimes generosity, by the way, there's an older translation, liberality. If you're reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, older translations will talk about being “liberal”. What that means is actually giving things to other people when they need it, when it's a good thing to do, what we call generosity.

And, you know, we could talk about affection for other people. We could talk about all sorts of other things. Goodwill. These are all, you could say, not exactly the same thing, but like a bundle of closely related dispositions that are connected with actions that we exhibit to other people.

So, Andrew brought up two interesting things, the idea of educating through kindness, and then proliferation of kindness. I do want to say a little bit about both of those. So, we do educate through kindness, and as typically happens when we're educating, we're not just educating about one thing, we're also educating often on a higher level. Saying: this is important. This is something that you should pay attention to. This is something that you should incorporate into your mindset, your life, your character.

So when we are kind to other people and we're doing it to them, we are showing them that we care about them, that we're willing to treat them as a person. We're viewing them as worthy of kindness. And maybe they don't even know that, right? If they've been treated badly by other people, sometimes doing kindness, people could be suspicious. Why are you being so nice to me?

And we also educate ourselves, and maybe we could say more about that some other time. But I think even more importantly, we educate the people who are looking on that: Hey, this is the way to behave. This is how human beings treat each other. And likewise when we're showing, coldness, cruelty, unkindness to other people, we're sending a message to other people as well. It's okay to treat people like this. So I think that's an important aspect.

And then the proliferation of kindness. I don't really see it as connected with social media, although you certainly could try to do that. A lot of people view social media as a realm of unkindness, but I think kindness can proliferate. When you are good to people, that creates a kind of situation of possible openness for them, where maybe they can be more receptive. They can take a chance and be good to other people. Sometimes they pay it forward, as we say. So I think that's an important topic, too.

There's a lot of things that also can get in the way of us being kind. They can make us reluctant or afraid, or there could be other emotions that we feel as well. It's hard to be kind, for example, when we're angry. But there's four that I think a lot of people run into. And some of these can be framed in terms of philosophy.

I mentioned earlier that some ethicists later on in the 20th century, for example, they've actually said: Well, you can't expect people to be kind. Ethics is really about the rules or principles that we can impose on everybody universally. And you can't make people feel a certain thing, because if they don't feel it then you're saying they're a bad person.

Or they'll say: Listen, doing the right thing or justice, following through on moral obligations that's all you can actually expect of people. Kindness is something, as they'll say, supererogatory. Now that's a nice fancy term for, you could say, going above and beyond what is required or expected. But then, a lot of other people have rightly said: Well no, we want a world in which people are kind.

Even Immanuel Kant in his groundwork for the metaphysics of morals says, well, you don't have to be benevolent to other people, but would you actually want to live in a world where nobody's good to anybody else? No, you can't even consistently will that. And we could go on and on from there.

So I think that one of the big obstacles is this: Justice is all you can demand of me. And I think a proper response to that is: Well yeah, you should be just. And there may be some cases where justice is all you can do, but that doesn't rule out being kind, generous, beneficent, caring towards other people, does it? No, they're not contradictory to each other.

And If you want to say that kindness is supererogatory, it goes above and beyond: Well, fine. What's wrong with that? Do you just want to do the bare minimum for people? Or would you like to be the kind of person who does, in fact, go beyond that?

And then a second issue that arises, I think a big concern with people, and I actually saw this come up in my ancient philosophers on friendship class. Well, if we're supposed to be good to other people, won't I be exhausted? You know, I'm a limited being. I have this like obligation to be good to everybody. Ho…

I spent a good bit of my time today and yesterday, and probably will spend a good bit of tomorrow as well, putting together my notes and a handout for a presentation that I'll be giving in an online conference coming up, which has to do with anger from psychological and philosophical and other perspectives.

And I've been allotted 15 minutes to talk about the topic that I have, you could say, signed up for, and that is early Christian thinkers on anger. This is something that I have talked about quite a bit and presented about in a variety of formats in the past, but never with this sort of brevity. The closest that I've come to it was a guest sermon that I was invited to give at a Unitarian Universalist church many years ago. And I think I got around 20 minutes for that.

And it's a somewhat different question. You could say that I'll be presenting to here, which includes fellow philosophers, psychotherapists and people who aren't necessarily sold on the usefulness of looking at religious thinkers. So I've got to set it up in a rather different way. I have to skip over an awful lot because when we say early Christian thinkers, I mean people from the second century all the way well into the fifth century. And as it turns out, there's a lot of them to begin with.

And there's a lot that they have to say about the emotion of anger. Some of them even have entire chapters of treatises or homilies or letters that are all about anger. And you might say, well, why is that the case? So this leads me into the topic that I really want to talk about. All of that was basically pretext.

Some of you may know that in the past, one of my big areas of research, and I actually published an entire book about it, was the topic of Christian philosophy, the book that I published 14 years ago at this point was about a particular debate that took place in the 1930s, largely between French-speaking philosophers, but it touched on the long, long history of the interactions between Christianity and philosophy broadly construed in a number of different thinkers.

So we talked about some of the ancient texts, philosophers who thought that there was something to this new religion, some of them were actually converts to it, but who had a philosophical background as well. At the time that I was working on that book, Pierre Hadot and his explicit phrase “philosophy as a way of life” weren't really that much on my horizon. I'd heard about him. There were other people who were talking about him, but I hadn't read him at the time. Subsequently, I have read quite a few of his works, including Philosophy as a Way of Life.

And interestingly, he has an entire chapter of that book devoted to, here's the chapter title, “Spiritual Exercises and Christian Philosophy.” And he is not a Christian himself, I think, but he's certainly attracted to all modes of thought in which you have what he calls “spiritual exercises”. We often call these “philosophical practices”. Michel Foucault called these “technologies of the self”. Other people have called them by different names, but they're all basically the same thing.

And one of the things that I'm going to talk about in my presentation that I think is really, really fascinating (so this is what I want to share with you today) is Hadot points out that philosophies were around as ways of intentional living for hundreds of years before Christianity emerges on the scene, and develops into a community and cultural force within the ancient world.

And so a lot of these early Christian writers are pretty conversant with Platonic, Stoic, Aristotelian, Skeptic, Epicurean, Cynic philosophy, as well as others, and they know about philosophical practices because they actually advocate them and discuss them. One of the things that Hadot thinks is particularly distinctive to this new movement of thought, Christianity, is that there are a number of passages from their religious texts, from the scriptures.

And by the way, as a side note, what we think of as the Bible was not formed as such as at the time that a lot of these people are writing, ta biblia is plural and means the books. And it wasn't completely agreed upon until the late 4th century, which books were in, which books were out. And books generally didn't mean something bound together in one single volume, but actually a bunch of books that you carried around with you, often in the form of scrolls. So a very, very different conception of what you would read and reference.

And they would do a lot of reading, but they'd also do a lot of memorizing and meditating upon passages. So here's what Hadot says. There are certain passages that that they took as being really, really important, whether from the earlier Hebrew scriptures that Christians will then call the Old Testament, or from the newer scriptures, the Gospels, the letters of Paul, the Book of Acts, and actually even things that are no longer within the canon, like some of the letters of the very early bishops.

They would connect together spiritual exercises or philosophical practices with particular scriptural passages, and the goal was to bring them into a sort of fruitful connection to each other. How does this bear out in terms of anger?

I will just give you one really, really prime example that almost all of the heavy hitters in this early movement of Christian thought are going to reference, and that is a particular set of passages from what we nowadays call the Sermon on the Mount, which is found in the Gospel of Matthew. This is really important stuff for early Christians because this is conveying teachings from the guy himself, Jesus, the Christ or anointed one who they come to see as God incarnate.

And what does Jesus teach? Well, a bunch of different things in the Sermon on the Mount. It's a very rich text, but there is a very important set of passages discussing anger, where Jesus is going to say to them, “the law says to you, you shall not kill, but I say to you,” and then he's going to give three sort of injunctions.

The person who is angry with his brother - and some of the manuscripts say without cause, and others don't - is going to get into one level of trouble, you could say. It's being condemned as something bad.

And then there's this second one, anyone who says “Rache” to their brother, and that's a bad thing to say, is going to have a higher level of condemnation and punishment. And then finally, anyone who says “you fool” is going to be threatened with hellfire.

And this was an important passage. You could say it was a puzzling, enigmatic passage that drew people in and made them say, well, what is actually going on here? So they were drawn into thinking about and explaining things. What is meant by this? What the significance of it is. And you know, there's an increasing level of seriousness. And the idea there is that somehow by engaging in this emotion and the actions that come out of it, you are doing something that is bad for yourself but also bad for the other person. You're not literally murdering them, but you're doing something similar.

And there are some follow-up verses as well when it talks about not bringing a gift to the altar and expecting it to be accepted. if your brother or sister has something against you, you've got to go get reconciled with them and you should try to settle things with other people.

So, this ties in with all sorts of conceptions that are coming from philosophy, but being used to explain this set of verses that early Christians thought were quite revelatory and important. There are many others as well that you can find throughout, you know, he book of Proverbs or Sirach (sometimes also called Ecclesiastes). And even in the Psalms, we have letters from Paul, you know, James as well, where there are verses about anger.

And what they did, these early Christian thinkers, is they used those not in the way that people do these days as proof texts where they say: “Well see, here's the answer. It's in the Bible.” Now we …

I had an interesting, you might say, joking exchange, but only partly tongue-in-cheek with somebody on Twitter today, and it's very emblematic of a sort of mindset that I see quite a few people slip into.

And the exchange was about the current state of academia and how everybody in it has abandoned truth and justice as values. And now they're all schemers or grifters or pick whatever else you want. And this is a kind of common complaint that you see about institutions or societies and their capacities to corrupt and co-opt us when it comes to our values and the formation of our character and moral action.

I've seen analogous statements made over decades by a lot of people who say things like, well, if you're living under capitalism, you're always living off of somebody's misery, so none of the actions that you do can ever truly be good. And I've always been suspicious of these totalizing, what should we call them, accusations laments general criticisms that we see being made because in point of fact something that is a very common even ubiquitous aspect of our experience if we're paying attention is that at least some of the things that we do seem to matter.

And I'm not saying that they matter in the long run in the sense of having lasting effects that can't be in some way undone or undermined or exploited or even turned against us in some way. I'll acknowledge that that's all true. Anything that we do can go bad in some way or at least just be neutralized but the mistaken line of reasoning that a lot of people fall into which then I think you can say leads to mistaken feelings or affects or moods is this notion that if you can show that there's a vulnerability, a contingency to things that seem good not being so in the long run, that maybe the consequences of our actions that we intend, they don't pay out, or pick any other way of conceptualizing this that you want.

Basically, the idea is that we're within a bad institution or a bad system where people don't have the right mindset, where there are perverse incentives, where the good that you do could be harnessed for bad in some way that you really can't do anything good. And again, I think this goes against the experience that many of us do have in our lives, something that we should trust, but not 100%, that we do see that the things that we choose, that we advocate for, that we make possible, do bear some fruit at some time of goodness.

So I want to come back to academia. And I will say that it's not as if there was ever a wonderful golden age the way that some people want to portray it, where everybody in the academy was all about truth and justice and the furthering of their discipline and expanding of human knowledge. The schools have been beset by all sorts of other motivations on the part of people who partake in them for as long as I've ever been involved in them. And if we look at literature, we can see that that's the case as well.

You see people who are essentially driven by careerism, looking to step up the next rung of the ladder, writing books that don't need to be written, blocking other people so that they can be the important person, whether it's as an administrator or as a scholar or as a teacher, whatever it is that you've got.

Even people involved in creating new institutions within the institutions or engaging in advocacy work, right? There's a lot of turf warrior mindsets going on and people could want to be the sage on the stage and have everybody thinking they're smart and cool. You could also, I suppose, be in it for the money in most academic institutions in the United States.

That may have been a good bet at one time. It sure as hell hasn't been from the time that I was in graduate school in the 1990s onward, when the job markets were already getting pretty bad and salaries were going down and academic work became more and more precarious to where we are today. So people can have all sorts of motivations.

And, you know, the idea of the college or university should be run like a business that's been around since I was a student that is corrosive, just as much as when hospitals that are supposed to have the ends of taking care of their patients and alleviating pain and helping people to practice good preventative care get worse. absorbed into hospital groups, which then are bought out by companies that are primarily interested in shareholder value and not in the ends that it's supposed to serve, we could come up with all sorts of other analogous cases.

But none of that means that while you have your own range of freedom within these institutions, that you can't actually do the right thing. Now, you may have somebody looking over your shoulder. You may have policies put in place that seem dehumanizing, that are exploitative of students or patients or customers or whatever it's going to be. But that doesn't take away your own capacity to choose.

And I see a lot of people who give in to a kind of despair unnecessarily where they say, well, there's nothing that I can do. So I hate it, but I need to make a living.I need to hold on to my position. And if I were to leave, maybe somebody even worse would take over somebody who isn't bothered by this sort of thing.

None of that is entirely illegitimate, but it doesn't have to be the mindset that decides what you're going to do. You can adopt a number of other possible ways of doing things. You could be like Socrates, for example. who recounts the story of when his city had been taken over by the oligarchs, and he was told that he needed to go get somebody who, you know, after he brought them in, would probably be executed unjustly by these 30 tyrants. Socrates just didn't say anything, and he went home. He didn't find the guy. He was like, well, I guess if they're going to kill me, they're going to kill me, but I will do what I'm going to do. That's an option. right?

You just keep doing the things that you think you ought to do and you might get fired. You might get attacked in various ways, but you can also like just not make a explicit stand and do the things that nobody's actually told you you can't do and keep on doing those good things. And you can still appeal to whatever better instincts people have. You can sometimes embarrass the people who are in charge.

If you're getting a lot of heat from administrators about how you're supposed to be doing things to your students that you don't really want to do and your students don't like, you could shame them. in certain ways and you can drag your heels and not do them well so I don't buy this notion that unless you can produce lasting change at the top none of the things that we do down at our low level where the proverbial rubber hits the road really matter or accomplish any good and I will say this to bring it to a close.

We don't actually know most of the time what lasting good we're doing by the work that we do with other people or with material items or with animals or anything like that. And it's a mistake, I would say, to assume that we have something like a God's eye view where we know when we do something precisely what its long-term effect is going to be. We just try to do our best.

And I think that, you know, some people will not do their best and they'll say that they're doing their best, but most of us are trying our best, even if we're not giving 100% all the time, even if we're just giving 80%, I think that's great. That's better than 0%. And we should just keep on with what it is that we're doing, even if we feel like it's unsuccessful or futile or counterproductive, because in most cases we don't actually know.

Now that would be very different if you were, I don't know, designing some piece of technology and you know that it's going to be used for terrible evil that's that's a different kind of case than what we're talking about in academia, or if you're working in a hospital group, or you're working for an insurance company, or you're working in a government position, or any…

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…

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 …

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…

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 topi…

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…

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, p…