Sadler's Lectures

Divine Justice, Mercy, and Intercession- The Innovative Structure of Anselm’s Prayers by Lectures on classic and contemporary philosophical texts and thinkers by Gregory B. Sadler

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 20th Century rational egoist philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand's book, The Virtue Of Selfishness. It focuses specifically upon her views about values and their grounding in Life (which for humans means a distinctively human life, not merely survival).

To support my ongoing work, go to my Patreon site - www.patreon.com/sadler

If you'd like to make a direct contribution, you can do so here - www.paypal.me/ReasonIO - or at BuyMeACoffee - www.buymeacoffee.com/A4quYdWoM

You can find over 3500 philosophy videos in my main YouTube channel - www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler

Purchase Rand's The Virtue Of Selfishness - https://amzn.to/4oUuym3

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 20th century philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand's book The Virtue of Selfishness, in particular the chapter "The Objectivist Ethics"

This focuses specifically on her discussion of what she terms "non-rational" ethics, by way of contrast to her own rational egoist or "objectivist ethics". She examines what she calls the "mystic", "social", and "subjectivist" ethics, and criticizes what she views as the "false dichotomy of altruism".

To support my ongoing work, go to my Patreon site - www.patreon.com/sadler

If you'd like to make a direct contribution, you can do so here - www.paypal.me/ReasonIO - or at BuyMeACoffee - www.buymeacoffee.com/A4quYdWoM

You can find over 3500 philosophy videos in my main YouTube channel - www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler

Purchase Rand's The Virtue Of Selfishness - https://amzn.to/43pJmjU

This is the recording of my invited talk at the first Stoicon-X Brasil online conference. Due to technical issues, I provided a live presentation (translation provided by participants) to the conference. In this presentation, I briefly present the Stoic doctrine of the indifferents (adiaphoria), namely that Stoics view many things as neither good nor bad, but are indifferent. Some indifferents may be "preferred" or "rejected", which means that they have some positive or negative value, but not the sort of that makes us virtuous or vicious, happy or miserable.

The Stoics teach that we should not be entirely indifferent to the indifferents, for several important reasons. The use (khresis or usus) of indifferents is not something indifferent, and as Epictetus tells us, is something we ought to be careful about. The virtues, as Seneca and Cicero clarify, bear upon indifferents.

Texts mentioned in this talk:

Marcus Aurelius' Meditations - https://amzn.to/3osPFNF

Epictetus' Discourses and Enchiridion - https://amzn.to/37G6bE0

Seneca's Letters - https://amzn.to/3dZQrNk

Cicero's On The Ends - https://amzn.to/3mmgJMB

This is my relatively short talk given during the 2025 Plato's Academy multidisciplinary conference: The Philosophy and Psychology of Anger, during which I discuss some of the useful insights and practices early Christian thinkers (2nd-5th Century CE) can provide us. These don't require one to be committed to Christianity and can be applied by a wide range of people.

I begin with a passage from Pierre Hadot's book Philosophy As A Way Of Life: "[Christians] believed they recognized spiritual exercises, which they had learned through philosophy, in specific scriptural passages . . . The reason why Christian authors paid attention to these particular biblical passages, was that they were already familiar, from other sources, with the spiritual exercises of prosokhē, meditation on death, and examination of the conscience.”

What Hadot calls “spiritual exercises” gets called by a variety of other terms by other thinkers. Foucault’s "technologies of the self", Nussbaum’s "therapeutic arguments", as well as the more general "philosophical practices" many of us reference in our work and study.

What we can say about these early Christian thinkers is that many had a philosophical education, had opportunities to engage with pagan philosophical schools, some of which had pretty strong religious stances, with precursor and contemporary Jewish thought, and with a variety of other disciplines like rhetoric, medicine, literature, political theory, law, history, music, etc. There was already a strong interest in issues about anger already raised and debated in ancient philosophy including: vicious anger, can anger have useful role, dangers of indulging or excusing anger, anger and courage or justice, types or levels of anger, divine anger. Early Christian thinkers rely upon or incorporating broadly Platonic psychology, and ethical conceptions drawn from Platonist, Stoic, and Aristotelian schools, but within a framework Christianity provides.

The thinkers I reference and discuss in this presentation include:

2nd-4th Century CE: Clement of Alexandria 150 – c. 215 AD, Tertullian 155 – c. 220, Origen 185 – c. 253, Lactantius 250 – c. 325

4th 5th century CE: Basil of Caesarea 330 – 379, Gregory of Nyssa 335, Evagrius Ponticus 345–399 AD, John Chrysostom 347-407, Ambrose 339-397, Jerome 342–347-420, Prudentius 348-413?, John Cassian 360 – 435, Augustine of Hippo 354-430

Some of the key scriptural passages they tend to engage most heavily with include:

A number of discussions of anger in Pre-Christian Jewish scriptures, particularly in the Psalms, Proverbs, and Sirach

The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, Paul’s Letter To Ephesians, and the Letter of James

There is a stress on identifying and dealing with vices that involve anger, but also on developing virtues of Patience, Humility, Mercy, and Forgiveness. They also adopt, develop, and discuss a number of useful practices for lessening, understanding, or dealing with anger.

This is a talk I was invited to provide to the inaugural 2021 Stoicon-X Military conference, held online. I chose as my topic the scope of genuine courage, a topic of considerable importance but also frequent misunderstandings within professions like that of the military.

In this talk I discuss what courage is and what it is for, the scope of courage, including its constituent virtues, and finally the relationship between courage and the other virtues.

This is the recording of my short presentation and the Q&A at the second Conversations With Modern Stoicism event, hosted in July 2023 by Phil Yanov. Asked to give a short and provocative presentation about an issue that arises in the everyday applications of Stoicism, I chose to focus on a common mistake and distortion of Stoic philosophy and practice.

Quite a few people think that Stoicism means that a person shouldn't exhibit or feel care, concern, or compassion for others who experience something that they view and react to as "bad". There are indeed some passages from Stoic authors that one can take out of context to justify such a stance. But when Stoicism is rightly understood, and when we look at other, equally authoritative passages, we see that the authentic Stoic position is to be compassionate and concerned with others.

This is a podcast of a guest sermon, given by invitation to the Unitarian Universalist Community of the Catskills.

A guest sermon invited by the Unitarian Universalist Community of the Catskills, Aug 9, 2015. In it, I discuss Rainer Maria Rilke's conception of "solitude" (Einsamkeit), and its relevance to our contemporary lives. Explaining how the two dimensions of slowing down temporally and making space spatially figure into the development of solitude as Rilke describes it, I suggest that in our own era, time has become the more scarce resource.

You can read a transcript of the sermon here: https://www.academia.edu/14942470/Solitude_Slowing_Down_and_Clearing_Space

This lecture discusses key ideas from the medieval Christian philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, 1st part, question 27, "The Causes Of Love", and examines his discussions in article 2, which centers on whether and how knowledge can be a cause of love.

To support my ongoing work, go to my Patreon site - www.patreon.com/sadler

If you'd like to make a direct contribution, you can do so here - www.paypal.me/ReasonIO - or at BuyMeACoffee - www.buymeacoffee.com/A4quYdWoM

You can find over 3500 philosophy videos in my main YouTube channel - www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler

Purchase Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae - amzn.to/2ITcKYQ

This is a podcast of a guest sermon, given by invitation to the Unitarian Universalist Community of Rock Tavern. In it, I discuss anger as a common problem not only of our own times, but of all times.

Christian teachings on anger present us with some "hard sayings," and several 4th century thinkers -- John Cassian, Augustine of Hippo, and John Chrysostom -- are very helpful for understanding how to live with and live out these difficult requirements.

A transcript of the sermon is available here: https://www.academia.edu/14942379/_And_Whoever_is_Angry_With_His_Brother_Early_Christian_Insights_A