We’re again offering our 1-day workshop in the online Study With Sadler Academy, which focuses on helping people productively and confidently study philosophy on their own outside of the structures and confines of traditional academia. If you’re already interested in that, just reading those lines, you can jump right to the class site and enroll!

If you’d like to learn more about it, read on!

“Studying Philosophy Outside Traditional Academia” is a workshop that people have been asking to host for years. I’ve bundled together some of the concerns, issues, and topics most-commonly asked about from AMA sessions, other online classes, emails, tutorial sessions, even just people coming up to me after talks. On the one hand, there is a widespread hunger on the part of people of all walks of life for engagement with philosophy. And on the other hand, those people express worries and confusions about how to get started with that project, what resources to use, how to effectively study philosophy, or even how to tell whether one is making any progress.

So I decided it was time for me to put together workshops helping would-be learners out with those matters. I’ve been in the philosophy field, as a student, as a professor, as a content-producer, and as as practitioner for 35 years of my life now, and I’ve been helping people outside of academia study and apply philosophy for several decades at this point.

We’ll be meeting virtually together on Saturday, May 9, with this setup for the seminar:

• We meet by Zoom for three 90-minute sessions, with 30-minute breaks in between them (at 9 AM, 11 AM, and 1 PM Central Time).

• Enrollment in the seminar gets participants full access in advance to the class site, which includes links to a number of resources, including downloadable handouts I’ve developed for my students, lists of useful curated links, and focused discussion forums for conversations before and after each session

• We record each of the three seminar sessions, and I upload those within the class site as well, granting students lifetime access to those recordings

During each of the three sessions, I will be leading students through a number of topics you’ll find detailed below, through a combination of lecture, discussion, Q&A, examples, and clarifications (If you’ve ever watched videos of my class sessions or talks, you’ll have a sense of how engaging I am with learners).

This is a workshop students from all levels can get benefit from.

• If you’re just getting started with studying philosophy, or even just considering it, you’ll get helpful perspective and useful advice.

• If you’ve been studying philosophy on your own, or with others outside of academia, for a while, you’ll find out ways to “up your game”, so to speak, and get more out of your ongoing studies.

• If you’re a student enrolled in academic philosophy classes, but you’re not getting what you really were hoping for out of them, you’ll find out how to pursue further studies on your own.

Before I provide the schedule, I’ll just say one thing. I did go the traditional academic route in studying philosophy, earning a bachelors degree, then a masters, and finally a doctorate. But already early on, I realized that I wouldn’t get what I was hoping for just out of following the academic curriculum. So I began studying outside of my classes on my own, already back in college. By graduate school, we were organizing reading groups to study works and thinkers our professors weren’t interested in or covering. And I’ve continued my own lifelong learning throughout my own career, often to the benefit of my own students, viewers, or readers who otherwise might not get introduced to the topics, texts, and thinkers I myself have studied and researched on my own.

Here’s our schedule of topics for the workshop

9:00 AM CST - Part 1 of the Workshop

• What is philosophy?

• Motives and goals for studying philosophy

• Areas or subdisciplines of philosophy

• Approaches, traditions, schools, and movements in philosophy

• Connections between philosophy and other disciplines

• Whether and how reading lists are helpful

• Where to get philosophy literature free or cheaply

• Ambiguous terms needing clarification or qualification

11:00 AM CST - Part 2 of the Workshop

• Study as an iterative and cumulative process

• Starting/starting over points for studying philosophy

• Making and assessing progress

• Notetaking and annotation as practices

• Style, structure, and genre of philosophical works

• Finding, assessing, and using secondary sources

• Concerns about translations

• Distinguishing an author’s position from others

1:00 PM CST - Part 3 of the Workshop

• More about making progress

• How to apply philosophy to life

• Finding, managing, and using time

• How deep to go before moving on

• Comparing, contrasting, connecting philosophies

• Finding other interested interlocutors or communities

• Talking about philosophy with other people

• Other issues participants want to dig into and discuss

We’ll have lots of time set aside in each session for questions and answers and discussion. I hope that you’ll consider joining me and the students already enrolled in the seminar for this philosophical learning opportunity!

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

I’m very happy to announce that after a decade of occasional invited workshops, guest appearances, and interviews together, Andi Sciacca and I have now developed what we’ve long called “The Stoic Heart” into a full workshop series and online platform, which we are launching this month!

The Stoic Heart Substack will be going live for the public early this coming week, and on the weekend, Andi and I will be hosting our first monthly online workshop, “Three Stoic Shifts”!

Here’s the page where you can enroll in that workshop. We also have a page where you can get a free download of one of the resources we’re providing participants in the workshop.

What is this workshop? When Andi and I were putting our heads together to think about what the best way to start a series applying Stoic philosophy to relationships, particularly (though not exclusively) partnered and romantic relationships, we realized that one area a lot of individuals and couples could use immediate help is in understanding, dealing with, and preventing the kinds of conflicts that typically arise within close relationships. A lot of strife, misunderstanding, resentment, and hurt doesn’t need to happen. We’ve found in our own relationship and working with many others that several key Stoic practices are really helpful for lessening or preventing conflict and dealing with negative feelings and dynamics that result from them.

There are a vast number of classic Stoic principles, practices, even passages that are useful for improving relationships, and we decided to select three that generally pay off quickly, once the person applying them understands them well. In the workshop, we’ll lead the participants into that understanding, addressing common concerns, answering questions people have. We’ll also provide them with useful handouts and worksheets they can then apply to their relationships and their own ongoing development.

All of this is designed to help participants

• identify conflict triggers and retrain first impulses and immediate responses in real time

• learn to navigate tense conversations with greater steadiness and precision

• reduce resentment, stop repetitive conflict loops, and respond from a place of harmony rather than frustration

That’s not everything a person or a couple need for developing, repairing, or maintaining a healthy, loving, solid relationship, of course! But think of it as a sort of emotion, habit, and cognitive triage. If you’re struggling with problems, learning how to do these regularly won’t make them go away, but it will certainly help!

The workshop is scheduled on Saturday, April 18, and will run roughly for two and a half hours. As always we’ve built in a good bit of time for question & answer, or exploring matters more through discussion.

Andi and I recently produced a short video discussing the workshop, which you might find interesting. For those of you who haven’t seen us together, you can also get a good sense of how we will be leading the workshop as a couple who not only have a solid background in Stoic philosophy, interpersonal dynamics, and helping people with relationships, but also people who have incorporated those very resources into our own married life together over the last decade and a half!

Here’s that video, if you’d like to check it out:

I hope you’ll consider joining us for this workshop. We’ll have many more coming up in the months ahead!

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

March was a pretty packed month, and April promises to be even more so on a number of fronts. We’ve got some big news to share, and I use that “we” not in the royal or editorial sense, but specifically for my wife Andi and I! We’ve been working behind the scenes for quite a while getting something ready that taps into our particular talents, skills, and experiences but also plays off the dynamic between us. We call it The Stoic Heart®, and that’s the first bit of news I’ll share with you here.

For many years, Andi and I have been providing conference workshops, giving interviews, going on shows, and developing resources together specifically focused on using Stoic philosophy, principles, and practices to improve personal relationships. We’ve now established an organization to carry out that work, with its own site, Substack, and workshop series. For those interested in working on their relationships more intensively, we will also be offering coaching. Our first online workshop will be on Saturday, April 18. If you’re interested, you can find out more about it, or sign up for the workshop. You can also check out and download our one-page Stoic Heart® Guide.

It’s a busy time in other respects as well. We’re about one month away from the end of the academic semester for the classes I’m teaching at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD). I also have two online classes currently running in the Study With Sadler academy, both of which are at their roughly halfway points. I’ve been assigned a summer online class at MIAD as well, which starts in early May, an Introduction to Philosophy class geared around thought experiments, so I’m already engaged in planning and resource development for that. One other bit of academic news of interest is that I’m now a fellow of the International Society For Philosophy As A Way Of Life.

My work as a volunteer and board member at Almost Home Cat Rescue kept me busy this last month, and promises to do so for the months ahead as well. We’re currently planning and doing a lot of behind the scene work for our biggest fundraising event of the year, Octopurrfest, and I’m on the committee for that. As vice president, I have a good bit of other work as well. I also do two volunteer shifts most weeks, and when we get transfers of cats and kittens from other shelters and organizations, I spend time with the new arrivals as a cat “sweetener”, helping them settle in, feel comfortable, and move past their initial timidity.

I have some good medical news to share. I’m now officially finished with physical therapy and was able to stop using my cane. The five-month recovery from my fall, shattered hip, and emergency hip replacement surgery is officially finished, and I’m being encouraged to walk as much and as far as I’d like, and to resume other types of exercise as well. So quite a lot going on!

Online Events Coming Up

We have a number of online events coming up, starting this coming Saturday:

Saturday, April 4, Noon Central Time: AMA (Ask Me Anything Session) - This is a YouTube live event in my channel. Do you any questions you’d like to ask me? Fire away and I’ll do my best to answer them during the session. You can find it in my YouTube channel, livestreaming the day of the event.

Saturday, April 11, Noon Central Time: - Worlds of Speculative Fiction: Session 101 - This month, we return to Dan Butcher’s Dresden Files supernatural detective series, looking at books 9-12, the ongoing worldbuilding taking place in those novels, philosophical themes that arise, and some of the really interesting developments of plot, characters, and factions in them. I’ll post the link once I

Saturday, April, Noon Central Time: The Stoic Heart Workshop - This one is titled Stop Reactive Conflict: Build Real Connection In Real Time. Andi and I will be leading participants through three key Stoic principles and how they can be applied in practice to improve one’s personal relationships. You can find out more or sign up for the workshop here.

Sunday, March 15, Noon Central Time: Classic Metal Class session 46 - Scott Tarulli and I will be hosting a deep dive into metal music history looking at musicians and bands that had rivalries and even longstanding beefs with each other, some of which we real, others of which were manufactured drama. We’ll be analyzing reasons why these conflicts arose, persisted, or were resolved - click here to enroll in the free online class

Sarurday, March 28, Noon Central Time: Self-Directed Study Video Premiere: Augustine Of Hippo - I’m going to resume the series providing specific advice for carrying out self-directed study in philosophy, focused on particular thinkers and movements, with a new video on a major early medieval thinker, Augustine of Hippo. We’ll premiere it with live chat, so viewers can ask questions while it airs. I’ll provide a link once the video has been produced and uploaded.

Online Classes In Study With Sadler Academy

Right now we have two online classes currently underway, so there aren’t any new ones starting in April.

I do have a special one-day seminar coming up early on in May that some readers might be quite interested in. It is a repeat of a workshop that I offered in January, which filled to capacity, Studying Philosophy Outside Traditional Academia. It is designed to help self-directed learners who want to study philosophy largely on their own understand the field and literature, set up courses of study, deal with common issues and concerns that arise, determine how and whether they are making progress, and a number of other matters. I’m holding the workshop on Saturday, May 9, starting at 9 AM Central Time. You can find out more about it, or enroll in the seminar here.

I’m developing a number of other standalone online courses, which learners can enroll in and then study on their own, at their own pace. I’m hoping to have one of those, “Four Platonic Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo”, ready for learners sometime later this month, and you’ll see announcements about it once it opens for enrollment.

I'm also getting some additional online classes set up for later on this spring and summer. Right now, here’s the schedule I’m looking at:

• Philip K Dick’s Philosophical Novels (10 week class), starting May 23

• Ancient Philosophers On Friendship (12 week class), starting June 11

• Plato’s Republic (10 week class), starting August 1

I’ll have class sites built and announcements out about these later on in the year, as they become available for enrollment.

Video And Podcast Production

Last month, I produced two Mind & Desire podcast episodes and two Exclusive Videos, and released them to paid subscribers here in Substack. I’m planning on doing the same this coming month.

In my Sadler’s Lectures podcast, I’m producing and releasing episodes on:

• a talk I gave years back, “Thumos In Platonic And Aristotelian Moral Psychology”

• another talk, “It’s Not Just Consequences: Jeremy Bentham’s Philosophy of Action”

• Peter Wessel Zapffe’s essay, The Last Messiah

• Lev Shestov’s book, All Things Are Possible

I have plans to produce a number of videos in my main YouTube channel, this month:

• additional Sadler’s Honest Book Reviews videos

• more Ideas That Matter interview videos

• some new Sadler Telling Stories videos

I also plan to produce and release a number of other videos

• Core Concept videos on Aristotle’s On Interpretation

• Core Concept videos on various philosophical thought experiments

• a new Self-Directed Study video

• a Fake Quotes video

I hope you will join me in some of the online events, and that you will find the videos, podcasts, and posts here useful for your own enrichment. I hope as well that this coming month proves a good one for all of us!

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

February was a packed month, and a short one to boot. March is equally packed, but having a few extra days somehow makes the pace feel a bit more relaxed. We’ve got a lot of big things lined up, which I’ll write about in more detail below, but for the moment I’ll just highlight three of the biggest:

• Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue 8 week online class

• Worlds Of Speculative Fiction special session number 100

• The Stoic Heart kickoff online workshop and platform

The academic semester continues on with my two classes at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, which I’ll be turning in midterm grades for fairly soon. We’re also now in week 4 of the 16-week Existentialist Philosophy and Literature class I’m teaching in the Study With Sadler Academy. I also found out what my academic class assignments are for summer and fall at MIAD.

February was also a busy month for me and many of the other volunteers at Almost Home Cat Rescue. I did a number of open house shifts, when we’re open to the public, some of whom are potentially interested in adopting the cats and kittens at the rescue, others are just coming in to get their “cat fix”. I also helped out with one cat transfer from another shelter we partner with. There’s me and one other volunteer who have a kind of talent for settling in new arrivals, calming and comforting them, getting shy or scared cats to unwind a bit on their first day in a new place.

We’re still in mid-winter here in Milwaukee, but we’ve had some unseasonably warm patches. The Milwaukee and Menominee rivers thaw and freeze over again. Gulls, ducks, geese, and chickadees, even the occasional crows, shift where they flock. I’ve gotten out for some longer walks. I’m still currently using the cane, but building more stamina, strength, and stability, and hoping that I can be cleared to put it away for good soon.

Online Events Coming Up

We have a number of different online events coming up this month, kicking off this coming Saturday:

Saturday, March 7, Noon Central Time: AMA (Ask Me Anything Session) - This is a YouTube live event in my channel. Do you any questions you’d like to ask me? Fire away and I’ll do my best to answer them during the session. You can find it in my YouTube channel, livestreaming the day of the event.

Saturday, March 14, Noon Central Time: - Worlds of Speculative Fiction: Special Session 100 - We’ve reached a significant milestone in the series, and I’ll be celebrating with a livestream session in which I’ll be discussing the series, the nature and scope of speculative fiction, worldbuilding, and philosophical thematics, and engaging in conversation via live chat with participants attending the session. Here’s the link.

Sunday, March 15, Noon Central Time: Classic Metal Class session 45 - Scott Tarulli and I will be hosting the class session with live chat, using Streamyard videoconferencing for students enrolled in the free class (they get the link in the class site). The topic this time around will be “Losses, Grief, and Metalhead Identity,” and we’ll be bringing on a special guest, Andrew Robinson for the discussion - click here to enroll

Saturday, March 21, Noon Central Time: The Stoic Heart Kickoff Event - The Stoic Heart is a platform and set of workshops, talks, and resources that my wife and partner, Andi Sciacca, and I have been developing to help people in relationships (or who would like to be in them) use Stoic philosophy and practices to improve them and live well together. We will be providing a link for enrolling in the workshop in the near future. If you’re interested and would like get on our mailing list, here’s where you can do so

Sarurday, March 28, Noon Central Time: Self-Directed Study Video Premiere: Augustine Of Hippo - I’m going to resume the series providing specific advice for carrying out self-directed study in philosophy, focused on particular thinkers and movements, with a new video on a major early medieval thinker, Augustine of Hippo. We’ll premiere it with live chat, so viewers can ask questions while it airs. I’ll provide a link once the video has been produced and uploaded.

Online Classes In Study With Sadler Academy

We have one online class in the academy already running, the Existentialist Philosophy and Literature class. Another online class is currently enrolling and starting soon.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue - meeting Saturdays, 9 AM Central Time for 8 weeks, starting February 28. In this class, we will be working our way through the entirety of the late Alasdair MacIntyre’s most famous and influential work, chapter by chapter, focusing on each of the key concepts and arguments developed in it. Here is the class site, where you can check out the curriculum and enroll in the class, if you’d like to.

I’m currently developing a number of other standalone online courses, which learners can enroll in and then study on their own, at their own pace. I’m hoping to have one of those, “Four Platonic Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo”, ready for learners sometime in March, and you’ll see announcements about it when it it opens for enrollment.

We’ve got more online classes lined up for later in the year. Here’s the courses I’m projecting at present:

• Philip K Dick’s Philosophical Novels (6 week class)

• Rene Descartes’ Meditations, Objections, and Replies (10 week class)

• Plato’s Republic (10 week class)

• Ancient Philosophers On Friendship (12 week class)

• Stoicism and the Cardinal Virtues (10 week class)

I’ll have class sites built and announcements out about these later on in the year, as they become available.

Video And Podcast Production

Last month, I produced several Mind & Desire podcast and Exclusive Videos, and released them to paid subscribers. I’m planning to keep up a tempo two of each of those this month as well.

In my Sadler’s Lectures podcast, I’ll be producing and releasing episodes on:

• Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics Of Ambiguity

• a talk I gave years back, “Thumos In Platonic And Aristotelian Moral Psychology”

• another talk, “Gabriel Marcel And Jean-Paul Sartre: Polemical Interlocutors”

• (perhaps) Jorge Luis Borges’ philosophical essays and short stories

I have plans to produce quite a few different sorts of videos in my main YouTube channel, this month:

• Sadler’s Honest Book Reviews videos

• Ideas That Matter interview videos

• a video on Philosophical “Detective Work”

I also plan to produce and release a number of other videos

• more Speculative Fiction Studies videos on Jorge Luis Borges’ works

• Core Concept videos on Lev Shestov’s All Things Are Possible

• Core Concept videos on Aristotle’s On Interpretation

• Sadler Telling Stories videos

I hope you can join me in some of the online events, and that you will find the videos, podcasts, and posts here interesting and helpful. And I hope as well that this coming month proves to be a good one for all of us!

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

I’m very excited to announce our next online course offering in the Study With Sadler Academy. It is an 8-week class, meeting on Saturdays at 9 AM Central Time starting on March 7. We will be focusing primarily, though not exclusively on a work that the late, great Alasdair MacIntyre is best known for, his book After Virtue, first published in 1981, and since then gone through two further editions.

People have been asking me if I would consider teaching this class for quite some time, for a variety of reasons. There’s always been a lot of interest in After Virtue since it first came on the scene, but more so recently, given MacIntyre’s death last year at the ripe age of 96. There are many important contributions to virtue ethics by authors in the 20th century, but After Virtue probably eclipses the others in most people’s minds, perhaps deservedly so.

Those who follow me know that MacIntyre has exercised a significant influence on my own work, and that I regularly teach some of his ideas in some of my classes. Some know that I had the good fortune to get to study and interact with him early on in my career as a professor, and I suppose expect that if I were to teach After Virtue, I might bring something from that personal connection into the class. On that note, I will say that, in my experience, when it came to MacIntyre and virtue ethics, he was the real deal, as you can read about here.

Now back to the class! We will be going through the entirety of After Virtue over the course of 8 weeks, chapter by chapter, as you can see in the schedule below. We will also be reading some of MacIntyre’s shorter works that dovetail nicely with key themes and arguments from After Virtue, and we will look at selected criticisms of MacIntyre’s work and his responses to his critics. One work in particular I’d like to mention in that respect is Anthony Long’s excellent (and much needed) article “Greek Ethics After MacIntyre and The Stoic Community of Reason”.

MacIntyre develops one overarching argument about moral theory and moral inquiry, namely that the most adequate approach that we can take in the present will require something like a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, a recovery and reconstitution of a tradition-based mode of inquiry, involving practices, communities, and even institutions.

The narrative involves examining a number of other approaches to ethics, some ancient, some medieval, some early modern and Enlightenment, and a number of them post-Enlightenment. MacIntyre provides some rather in-depth critical analyses of a variety of virtue ethics, utilitarian, egoist, deontological, emotivist, natural law, and other approaches to moral theory, development, and decision-making. He is also developing a narrative in which these theories are embedded within larger complex societies, political communities, and institutions.

Here’s the schedule for the class:

• Saturday, March 7, 9:00-10:30 Central Time - Session 1: The Present Day Situation. After Virtue, chapters 1-3

• Saturday, March 14, 9:00-10:30 Central Time - Session 2: The Enlightenment Project. After Virtue, chapters 4-6

• Saturday, March 21, 9:00-10:30 Central Time - Session 3: Limits Of The Social Sciences. After Virtue, chapters 7-8

• Saturday, March 28, 9:00-10:30 Central Time - Session 4: A Choice, Homeric Society, and Plato. After Virtue, chapters 9-11

• Saturday, April 4, 9:00-10:30 Central Time - Session 5: Aristotle and the Middle Ages. After Virtue, chapters 12-13

• Saturday, April 11, 9:00-10:30 Central Time - Session 6: Virtues, Traditions, Institutions. After Virtue, chapters 14-15

• Saturday, April 18, 9:00-10:30 Central Time - Session 7: From Virtue To After Virtue. After Virtue chapters 16-18

• Saturday, April 25, 9:00-10:30 Central Time - Session 8: Considerations and Criticisms. After Virtue, preface and chapter 19

This is a fully online, synchronous, open-enrollment class. “Online” means that all the resources and activities a student will use for the class are provided in the course site. “Synchronous” means that we will meet at regularly scheduled times for class sessions. And “open enrollment” means that the class is not-for-credit and open for anyone who wants to learn about the subject.

This particular class meets for 90-minute class sessions that will take place over 8 weeks, from 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM Central Time. If you’re in a different time zone, you will want to check what the local time would be for you. During these class sessions, I will be leading all of the students through the materials we are studying that week. So there will be some lecturing, some discussion, some consideration of helpful examples, and lots of opportunities for students to ask questions or seek clarifications.

All of the class sessions will be recorded, and those videos are embedded in the class site as resources for students who can’t make class sessions or who would like to go back over the sessions. I’ll also be providing students with downloadable handouts developed for my academic students, and some new handouts developed just for this particular course.

Tuition for the 8-week class is $349.00. Enrollment in the class gives students participation in the class sessions and discussion forums, as well as lifetime access to the class site and to all of the resources hosted there. We like to keep class sizes for these interactive courses fairly small so that discussions allow everyone ample opportunities to participate, so we are capping the class at 25 students total.

So if you’d like to study one of the most central and robust works of 20th century virtue ethics with an expert guide, consider enrolling in our class, and joining us on our trek through the entirety of After Virtue!

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

It might seem a bit late in the month for my usual newsletter about the month ahead, if not for the reminders about what you might have missed in the month that’s past us. But as it turns out, due to a quirk of the calendar, all of February’s events, classes, and other matters are yet to come (admittedly, some of them quite soon). You might be wondering why I delayed so long, and the answer is pretty simple. I’ve just been sick, fighting a sinus infection that left me not just somewhat miserable but bone-weary fatigued while I still tried to get at least some work done. I’m not entirely well, but am feeling a good bit better. So let’s get on with it!

The academic semester kicked off again in January, and I’m currently teaching two classes for Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, an in-person Introduction to Humanities for first-year students, and an online Ethics for Artists And Designers. I also offered two special 1-day seminars in my online Study with Sadler Academy, both of which were well-attended and, judging from participants’ feedback, proved to be excellent learning experiences. I’m also back to regular shifts at the cat shelter I volunteer with, Almost Home Cat Rescue.

One particularly cool event last month was that I headed out to Oregon to provide an invited inaugural lecture for the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas by Mount Angel Abbey and Seminary. It was titled “Thomas Aquinas, Multiple Thomisms, and Christian Philosophy” You can watch or listen to the full lecture along with the response and the question and answer session, if you’d like to.

Online Events Coming Up

There’s a lot going on this month, including some events that didn’t make it into my monthly update video, since they weren’t even on the calendar at the time I recorded it. Here’s what we’ve got lined up.

Saturday, February 7, Noon Central Time: AMA (Ask Me Anything Session) - This is a YouTube live event in my channel. Do you any questions you’d like to ask me? Fire away and I’ll do my best to answer them during the session. You can find it in my YouTube channel, livestreaming the day of the event.https://www.youtube.com/live/7Cf6EJ5P-fc?si=y7O4AGRUyDW7Ka3A

Wednesday, 6 PM Central Time: - Philosophers In The Midst Of History Session 31: Philo Of Alexandria - this is a local event, hosted at the Frank Weyenberg Library in Mequon, where I’ll be starting year 11 of this quarterly invited talk series, this time discussing the Jewish Platonist philosopher Philo of Alexandria in his historical and intellectual context.

Saturday, February 14, 9 AM Central Time: Conversations with Modern Stoicism: Stoic Teachings on Love, Loneliness, and Connection - my wife Andi Sciacca and I will be joining Modern Stoicism for a Valentine’s Day conversation about what Stoicism has to tell us about relationships - click here to sign up

Sunday, February 15, Noon Central Time: Classic Metal Class session 43 - Scott Tarulli and I will be hosting the class session with live chat, using Streamyard videoconferencing for students enrolled in the free class (they get the link in the class site). The topic this time around will be “Uplifting Heavy Metal” - click here to enroll

Saturday, February 21, Noon Central Time: - Worlds of Speculative Fiction: Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book Of The Fallen (books 9 and 10) - We continue this monthly series by returning to the massive 10-book series, focusing this time on the final two books of the series. We start with a video premiere and live chat, and then continue the conversation in a Zoom session. You don’t have to have read Erikson’s works to participate. You can find the link to the video once I’ve produced it, in my YouTube channel.

Online Classes In Study With Sadler Academy

After offering a number of classes last year, and then taking a bit of a break for the holidays and then to hold the one-day seminars, we’re now kicking off the new year of classes in the Study With Sadler Academy. Here’s what we have lined up to start this month.

Existentialist Philosophy And Literature - meeting Thursdays, 9 AM Central Time for 16 weeks, starting February 12. This is an open access version of a class I’ve taught in academic institutions for a number of years. We’ll be working our way through representative texts of fourteen major Existentialist thinkers. At this point, it is still open for enrollment. Here’s the class site.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue - meeting Saturdays, 9 AM Central Time for 8 weeks, starting February 28. In this class, we will be working our way through the entirety of the late Alasdair MacIntyre’s most famous and influential work, chapter by chapter, focusing on each of the key concepts and arguments developed in it. I’ll have the class site available for enrollment next week, so look for it here and in my social media.

What other classes do we have coming up later on in the year? Here’s those I’m projecting at present:

• Philip K Dick’s Philosophical Novels (6 week class)

• Rene Descartes’ Meditations, Objections, and Replies (10 week class)

• Plato’s Republic (10 week class)

• Ancient Philosophers On Friendship (12 week class)

• Stoicism and the Cardinal Virtues (10 week class)

I’ll have class sites built and announcements out about these later on in the year.

Video And Podcast Production

Last month, I got some Mind & Desire podcast and Exclusive Videos production accomplished, though a bit less than I’d hoped. I’m planning to get two of each done for paid subscribers this month.

In my Sadler’s Lectures podcast, I’ll be producing and releasing episodes on:

• Jeremy Bentham’s “Offenses Against Oneself”

• Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit

• Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics Of Ambiguity

• additional past talks and lectures I’ve given

I have plans to produce quite a few different sorts of videos in my main YouTube channel, this month:

• Sadler’s Honest Book Reviews videos

• Ideas That Matter interview videos

• another “Fake Quotes” video

• another “Key Thinkers in Philosophical Movements” video

I also plan to produce and release a number of other videos

• more Core Concept videos on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics Of Ambiguity

• Core Concept videos on Lev Shestov’s All Things Are Possible

• Core Concept videos on Aristotle’s On Interpretation

• Sadler Telling Stories videos

I hope you can join me in some of the online events, and that you will find the videos, podcasts, and posts here interesting and helpful. And I hope as well that this coming month proves to be a good one for all of us!

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

We have a new online open-access course offering in the Study With Sadler Academy that I’d like to share with you! This is a version of a class I have taught a number of times for students at several academic institutions. In this version on the course, anyone interested in studying and discussing the selected texts and thinkers with me can do so over the 16 weeks we’ll be devoting to them. If you’d like to go straight to the course site, where you can see the curriculum and even enroll, here’s the link. It starts officially on February 12, but will remain open for enrollment up to and throughout its first week.

Existentialism is a very broad and vital movement in 19th and 20th century philosophy, one which, by contrast to certain other philosophical movements, can’t be characterized by a strict definition or clear boundaries (despite one of its later representatives, Jean-Paul Sartre, making an attempt to provide or imposed some sort of definition). It includes an array of philosophers, novelists, playwrights, poets, theologians, psychologists, and artists doing their work in a variety of places, contexts, and languages over the course of more than a century.

Any curriculum for an Existentialism class will be somewhat reflective of the interests and ideas of the person designing the class. I first began studying Existentialist writers as a college student back in the early 1990s, and I can say that the list of authors I currently teach overlaps to some extent with the people I studied in classes or read on my own back then 30 years ago, but also differs at important points as well. I’ve widened my own scope of study over the years, and also deepened my own engagement with the thinkers I was so excited by as a student.

I’ve assembled and previously taught this group of fourteen key thinkers as a decently representative survey of what the Existentialist movement has to offer. Many of the later thinkers we encounter in the study are influenced by and reference the ones we read and discuss earlier on. We have a good mix of philosophers, religious thinkers, poets, short story writers, and novelists in the mix, writing originally in Danish, Russian, German, Spanish, French, and Japanese. By the end of the course, students will have a solid foundation for going on to study additional Existentialist thinkers, and to expand their study to more texts by those authors they found particularly compelling in the class.

At this point, you might be getting a bit impatient with me talking in general about the class without naming precisely which authors we’ll be studying. Come on, Sadler! Quit beating around the bush! Who made the list? Here’s the schedule for the class:

• Week 1: What Is Existentialism?

• Week 2: Soren Kierkegaard - “The Crowd Is Untruth”, The Present Age, Fear And Trembling (selections)

• Week 3: Fyodor Dostoevsky - Notes From The Underground part 1, The Brothers Karamazov (selections)

• Week 4: Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra, book 1, The Genealogy Of Morals (selections)

• Week 5: Lev Shestov - All Things Are Possible

• Week 6: Rainer Maria Rilke - Letters To A Young Poet, selected poems

• Week 7: Miguel De Unamuno - Tragic Sense Of Life (selections)

• Week 8: Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis, “Inside The Penal Colony”, "On Parables"

• Week 9: Martin Heidegger - “What Is Metaphysics?”, Being And Time (selections)

• Week 10: Gabriel Marcel - "Concrete Approaches To The Ontological Mystery"

• Week 11: Jean-Paul Sartre - "Existentialism Is A Humanism", No Exit

• Week 12: Simone De Beauvoir - The Ethics of Ambiguity

• Week 13: Albert Camus - The Myth Of Sisyphus

• Week 14: Frantz Fanon - Black Skin White Masks (selections)

• Week 15: Keiji Nishitani - The Self-Overcoming Of Nihilism (selections)

• Week 16: Wrapping Up and General Discussion

This is a fully online, synchronous, open-enrollment class. “Online” means that all the resources and activities a student will use for the class are provided in the course site. “Synchronous” means that we will meet at regularly scheduled times for class sessions. And “open enrollment” means that the class is not-for-credit and open for anyone who wants to learn about the subject.

This particular class has 90-minute class sessions that will take place for 16 weeks, from 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM Central Time. If you’re in a different time zone, you will want to check what the local time would be for you. During these class sessions, I will be leading all of the students through the materials we are studying that week. So there will be some lecturing, some discussion, some consideration of helpful examples, and lots of opportunities for students to ask questions or seek clarifications.

All of the class sessions will be recorded, and those videos will be embedded in the class site as resources for students who can’t make class sessions or who would like to go back over the sessions. I’ll also be providing students with downloadable handouts developed for my academic students, and some new handouts developed just for this particular course.

Tuition for the 16-week class is $697.00. Enrollment in the class gives students participation in the class sessions and discussion forums, as well as lifetime access to the class site and to all of the resources hosted there. We like to keep class sizes for these interactive courses fairly small so that discussions allow everyone ample opportunities to participate, so we are capping the class at 20 students total.

This is the start of my 27th year of teaching philosophy classes, and my 14th year designing and teaching high-quality online courses. My students have included not just traditional-age college students, but also working professionals looking to improve their skills, lifelong learners engaging in personal development and intellectual enrichment, inmates working towards college degrees in three different state prison systems, and other people from all walks of life.

Whether you have previously read and reflected upon some of the Existentialist authors w’ll be studying, or you haven’t previously engaged with them, but have an interest in encountering what they have to offer, this class will afford an excellent opportunity to widen and deepen your learning! If you’d like to enroll or just to find out more, you can click here and go right to the course page in the Study With Sadler Academy.

We’re offering a new 1-day workshop in the online Study With Sadler Academy, focused specifically on helping people productively and confidently study philosophy on their own outside of the structures and confines of traditional academia. If you’re already interested in that, just reading those lines, you can jump right to the class site and enroll!

But if you’d like to know more about it, read on! “Studying Philosophy Outside Traditional Academia” is a workshop that people have been asking me for in a number of ways for years. I’m bundling together some of the concerns, issues, and topics most-commonly asked about from AMA sessions, other online classes, emails, tutorial sessions, even just people coming up to me after talks. There’s, on the one hand, a widespread hunger on the part of people of all walks of life for engagement with philosophy. And on the other hand, those people express worries and confusions about how to get started with that project, what resources to use, how to effectively study philosophy, or even how to tell whether one is making any progress.

So I decided it was time for me to put together a workshop that would help would-be learners out with those matters. I’ve been in the philosophy field, as a student, as a professor, as a content-producer, and as as practitioner for 35 years of my life now, and I’ve been helping people outside of academia study and apply philosophy for several decades at this point.

We’ll be meeting virtually together on Saturday, January 31, with this sort of setup for the seminar:

• We meet by Zoom for three 90-minute sessions, with 30-minute breaks in between them (at 9 AM, 11 AM, and 1 PM Central Time).

• Enrollment in the seminar gets participants full access in advance to the class site, which includes links to a number of resources, including downloadable handouts I’ve developed for my students, lists of useful curated links, and focused discussion forums for conversations before and after each session

• We record each of the three seminar sessions, and I upload those within the class site as well, granting students lifetime access to those recordings

During each of the three sessions, I will be leading students through a number of topics you’ll find detailed below, through a combination of lecture, discussion, Q&A, examples, and clarifications (If you’ve ever watched videos of my class sessions or talks, you’ll have a sense of how engaging I am with learners).

This is a workshop that students from all levels can get some benefit from. If you’re just getting started with studying philosophy, or even just considering it, you’ll get a lot of helpful perspective and useful advice. If you’ve been studying philosophy on your own, or with others outside of academia, for a while, you’ll find out ways to “up your game”, so to speak, and get more out of your ongoing studies. If you’re a student enrolled in academic philosophy classes, but you’re not getting what you really were hoping for out of them, you’ll find out how to pursue further studies on your own.

Before I give you the schedule, I’ll just tell you one thing. I did go the traditional academic route in studying philosophy, earning a bachelors degree, then a masters, and finally a doctorate. But already early on, I realized that I wouldn’t get what I was hoping for just out of following the academic curriculum. I began studying outside of my classes on my own, already back in college. By graduate school, we were organizing reading groups to study works and thinkers our professors weren’t interested in or covering. And I’ve continued my own lifelong learning throughout my own career, often to the benefit of my own students, viewers, or readers who otherwise might not get introduced to the topics, texts, and thinkers I myself have studied and researched on my own.

Here’s our schedule of topics for the workshop

9:00 AM CST - Part 1 of the Workshop

• What is philosophy?

• Motives and goals for studying philosophy

• Areas or subdisciplines of philosophy

• Approaches, traditions, schools, and movements in philosophy

• Connections between philosophy and other disciplines

• Whether and how reading lists are helpful

• Where to get philosophy literature free or cheaply

• Ambiguous terms needing clarification or qualification

11:00 AM CST - Part 2 of the Workshop

• Study as an iterative and cumulative process

• Starting/starting over points for studying philosophy

• Making and assessing progress

• Notetaking and annotation as practices

• Style, structure, and genre of philosophical works

• Finding, assessing, and using secondary sources

• Concerns about translations

• Distinguishing an author’s position from others

1:00 PM CST - Part 3 of the Workshop

• More about making progress

• How to apply philosophy to life

• Finding, managing, and using time

• How deep to go before moving on

• Comparing, contrasting, connecting philosophies

• Finding other interested interlocutors or communities

• Talking about philosophy with other people

• Other issues participants want to dig into and discuss

We’ll have lots of time set aside in each session for questions and answers and discussion. I hope that you’ll consider joining me and the students already enrolled in the seminar for this philosophical learning opportunity!

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

Will 2026 be the year? Probably not, if by that one means the year that I sort everything out, enjoy massive successes, sail from virtue to virtue, or the like! But there are quite a few things I’ve got planned out for my professional and public philosophy work that I’d like to share with you. So that’s what I intend to do in this post (which to be honest, I’ve been hoping to get to for a few days now).

Of course as a person who lives in the world that just includes philosophy, I obviously have plenty of other more personal matters that figure into plans and projects, for example my continued recovery from my emergency hip replacement a few months ago, or my ongoing work at Almost Home Cat Rescue, but I’ll reserve those for a different post.

There’s a number of different categories that these matters fall into. They’re not lined up according to any particular order, for instance importance. And there’s probably some additional categories I might end up needing to add. But here’s what I’ve got in mind at present.

Online Classes, Seminars, and Workshops

I have put together a tentative schedule covering much of the year for my Study With Sadler Academy. It’s subject to change of course, depending on what happens with my other commitments, or if I pick up more speaking gigs requiring travel. For the time being, here’s what I am planning:

• Special 1-Day Seminar: Nietzsche’s Birth Of Tragedy — Meeting 9 AM - 3 PM Central Time, Saturday, January 10

• Special 1-Day Workshop: Studying Philosophy Outside Traditional Academia — Meeting 9 AM - 3 PM Central Time, Saturday, January 31

• Online 16-Week Class: Existentialist Philosophy And Literature — meeting Thursdays 9 AM Central Time, starting February 5

• Online 8-week Class: Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue — meeting Saturdays 9 AM Central Time, starting February 14

• Special 1- Day Seminar: Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy — Meeting 9 AM - 3 PM Central Time, Saturday, April 18

• Online 6-Week Class: Philosophical Themes In Philip K. Dick’s Stories — meeting Saturdays 9 AM Central Time, starting May 2

• Online 10-Week Class - Rene Descartes, Meditations, Objections, and Replies — meeting Thursdays 9 AM Central Time, starting June 4

• Special 1- Day Seminar: Topic TBD — Meeting 9 AM - 3 PM Central Time, Saturday, June 4

I’ll announce each of these in Substack, YouTube, and my social media as they become available for enrollment.

Regular Monthly and Quarterly Events

Each month, I have some regularly scheduled online events that you can take part in, if you’re interested. These include:

• My monthly Ask Me Anything sessions: these are opportunities to ask me questions about a wide range of topics, or to watch my responses to others

• Worlds Of Speculative Fiction: a series now in its 11th year, focusing each month on an author, their works, the narrative universe, and philosophical themes in them

• Classic Metal Class: discussions of a wide range of topics related to classic heavy metal bands, musicians, and movements from the 1970s-1980s and beyond, hosted with my good friend and colleague, Scott Tarulli

I’m also looking to start hosting more regular monthly sessions focused on philosophical topics in Substack Live. I held the first of those earlier this month, focused on New Years Resolutions.

A quarterly, in-person series that is now moving into its 11th year is Philosophers In The Midst Of History, which is hosted at the Frank Weyenberg Library here in the Greater Milwaukee area.

Platforms and Organizations

My wife, Andi Sciacca, and I have been providing workshops, talks, and interviews about Stoicism and relationships for a number of years now, including providing materials that have been used in the International Stoic Week classes. We are in the process of building out something quite a bit more extensive, which we call the Stoic Heart platform. We already have a Substack space staked out, plans for a podcast, monthly events, and a curriculum we’re building. All of that is in addition to the talks and workshops we have already developed and offer to a wide range of interested organizations, groups, institutions, couples, and individuals. We’ll be launching a bit later on in the year, so stay tuned!

Book Projects

I have several different book projects that I hope to make significant progress on over this current year. It’s all a matter of available time, so we’ll see how much I’m able o accomplish. But at the start of the year, we can dream big.

I’ve nearly finished my first edits of transcripts of the series of commentary videos I produced on Epictetus’s Enchiridion some years back. It turns out to run about 83,000 words, and after I add an introduction, the text I’m commenting on, and a glossary, it’ll likely be around 90,000. So a decently long book. I’ll likely self-publish it, both so I can get it out there quickly without having to jump through a lot of publisher hoops, and so that I can offer it at an affordable price.

You may notice that I’ve been publishing a number of what I call “orphaned papers” here in my Substack. I have dozens of papers that I wrote, and often presented at conferences or workshops, and then either never got around to sending out for publication, or they were supposed to be published and then something went off track (e.g. the book one was to be included in got cancelled by the press). I’m thinking of assembling these into one or more volumes (depending on how many of them I find in my files!) which again I’ll self-publish at a pretty affordable price for those interested in reading them.

There’s another longer-term, more massive book project that I’ve been working on for quite a while now. I’ve designed and taught several online classes on Stoicism and the Cardinal Virtues (and may offer it again later this year), and recently, I’ve produced a series of short videos covering topics in Stoic texts focused on cardinal and subordinate virtues. I’ve poured a lot of research into these matters, and I think that there’s likely two books that will come out of it down the line. One will be an extensively researched scholarly book which I’ll seek a home for in some academic press. The other will be more a book for the layperson interested in better understanding the full scope of the Stoic conception of the cardinal and subordinate virtues. If I get ambitious enough, I might also put together a workbook for developing them as well.

Public And Professional Speaking

It is early in the year, but I already have one big invited talk lined up for late January, on the feast of Saint Thomas, out at Mount Angel Seminary, specifically about Aquinas, varieties of Thomism, and the Christian philosophy debates. I’ve been invited as well to speak at one Stoicon-X on the topic of the Stoic sage. And I’m in discussions with organizers and institutions about several other invited workshops and speaking engagements for the year that will involve some travel. More locally, we’re looking to restart the Philosophy Eats series of dinner lectures and discussions.

This year, I’d like to do a lot more public and professional speaking, so in place of my usual course of letting those who would like to book me find me and make the invitation, I’ll be more proactively reaching out to see who would like to bring me in for a talk, workshop, or other event.

Videos And Podcasts

For years, I’ve been pretty productive when it comes to developing high-quality resources on philosophy, religious studies, literature, and political theory in both video and podcast formats. We’re close to passing the 4,000 video mark in my main YouTube channel, and we passed 1,500 episodes in the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. I also produce another podcast in Substack, called Mind & Desire.

I’ll be continuing my usual work in all three of these, but there’s some types of videos I’d like to resume or start producing. Those include:

• more Ideas That Matter interview videos

• more regular Sadler’s Honest Book Review videos

• new book review videos of works that aren’t recent that I’m revisiting

• more Self-Directed Study advice videos

• videos that examine and discuss AITA cases

• videos that examine and discuss After Dinner Conversation stories

• and perhaps a series of videos specifically geared towards helping out complete beginners in philosophy

Digital Housekeeping

I’ve been significantly online for over two decades at this point, and since I’ve switched platforms from time to time, and built out resources and sites in a number of different places, there’s a good bit of, let’s just say, messiness. Sort of like what you accumulate when living in a house, with a garage, basement, shed, and yard that you’ve owned for many years.You don’t always know what you’ve got, or where its kept, and some of it really needs tidying, organization, or a new coat of paint. That’s what I’ll be slowly chipping away at over the course of this year.

This Substack will likely end up being one place where some things ends up. But I’ve also realized I need to build out my PhilPeople profile much more extensively. Frankly, at this point, I can’t say I’m entirely sure about precisely what needs to be attended to in my sprawling online presence. But hopefully, I get things much better organized by the end of 2026.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

We’re deep into the holiday season now, and for a lot of people involves picking out and giving gifts to people they care about. If you’re looking for some last-minute gifts for someone who is interested in philosophy, you have a lot of possibilities. Books are a great option, for instance. Unless that person already has the book, or really doesn’t like the author, you almost can’t go wrong.

I’m going to make some suggestions here that are admittedly shameless plugs, but which could also turn out to be pretty decent ideas for gifts, if you’ve got someone in mind who really is into philosophy (and that could be you - it’s quite all right to give yourself a gift you don’t think anyone else will get you), then one of these might be just the thing!

Gift Options For Others

Cameo Personalized Videos: I’ve been on the site Cameo for a couple of years now. It’s more for musicians, actors, athletes, and other celebrities, but some time back they decided to let some of us philosophers in on the site as well. You can request personalized videos, which on my end I record just for the person, and about the matters, you specify. Mine typically run a bit longer than the average, about 3-5 minutes. Here’s my page on that platform, if that’s of interest to you.

Online Tutorial Sessions. This is something I’ve been doing for over a decade, and I’ve had quite a few people purchase a session or even a block of sessions as a gift for someone they care about. One person actually surprised their significant other by scheduling a Zoom videoconferencing call, and having them hop on, only to discover they had a session with the guy whose videos they watched! If you’d like to gift someone a session, here’s my site where you can do that directly.

Study With Sadler Academy Online Classes. I have an online academy as well, where I offer online classes. Some of those classes are asynchronous, meaning that the student works through the class and the resources I provide at their own pace. Some have regular scheduled meetings. Those are either classes meeting over a period of weeks, or more intensive 1-day seminars in which we meet for three 90-minute sessions. You can see the current class offerings in the academy site (and we’re going to have a lot more of them coming out in the next few months).

A Substack Subscription. If you have a reader in mind, and you think they’d enjoy reading this Substack, then a paid subscription might be something they’d enjoy. Not only do they get the pieces I publish for free, but also the Letters To A Young Philosopher series, the Mind & Desire podcast, and the Exclusive Videos. If that’s what you’d like to give someone, just head right over here.

Gifts For You And Me

If you consider the free writing, videos, podcasts, and events I regularly provide to people interested in studying philosophy as analogous to a set of gifts, you might be interested in giving back in some manner. Some of the ways you might choose actually provide you with something as well, some perks on top of the satisfaction of giving.

YouTube Channel Membership. You can become a regular supporter of my YouTube channel. Members get access to exclusive content shared with them, and this coming year, I’m planning to add member-only streams to the mix. You can check it out or become a member here..

Patreon Membership. I’ve been using Patreon to crowdfund my work, ever since I started the Half Hour Hegel project. There’s a number of different tiers of support, with increasingly cool perks associated with them, including some exclusive content and events. Here’s my Patreon site, if that’s up your alley.

Buy Me A Coffee. With this one, there aren’t any perks. It’s a site for people who want to make a one-time donation to support the continued work I’m doing, and leave a message (to which invariably respond). If that’s something you’d like to do, here’s my page on that platform.

We’re starting off the new year with a special 1-day philosophy seminar focused on a great work by a major thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth Of Tragedy Out Of The Spirit Of Music. This is one that I’ve been looking forward to for quite a while, and I’ll tell you why below in just a bit.

But first, the particulars! We will be meeting on Saturday, January 10, using Zoom to hold three 90-minute sessions, with 30-minute breaks in between the sessions. I’ll be leading the discussions as we work through all of the key and complex ideas, distinctions, and claims Nietzsche sets out in the text. Within the class site, I’m posting a number of downloadable handout resources designed to assist students in understanding the work. Recordings of each of the sessions will be posted in the class site as well, and students retain access to all of the resources stored there.

If you’d like to head right over and poke around the class site (you can preview a good bit of it, and see the curriculum set out), or even to enroll in the seminar, here’s the link to do so. I also posted a video about the class a little while back, which you can check out, if you’d like to.

Here’s the schedule and topics for each of the three sessions:

Session 1: An Attempt At Self-Criticism and chapters 1-9 of the Birth of Tragedy
Nietzsche's "self-criticism"

• Overview of the poets and genres of poetry discussed in the work

• The key distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian

• Art and aesthetic responses to the problem of life

• Apollonian and Dionysian in Greek culture

• Theories of the origin of Greek tragedy

• Aeschylus and Sophocles

• The ethical basis of pessimistic tragedy

Session 2: chapters 10-17 of the Birth of Tragedy

• Transformation of tragedy as performance

• Religion, myth, and systemization

• Euripides and the suicide of tragedy

• The two Euripidean spectators

• The Socratic as a third response to life

• Socrates’ assessment of and effect on tragedy

• Socrates as archetype of the theoretical optimist

• Conflict between theoretic and tragic views

Session 3: chapters 18-25 of the Birth Of Tragedy and Nietzsche’s later assessments of his book

• Options between cultures and responses to life

• Socratic culture and the opera

• Kant, Schopenhauer and the spirit of German philosophy

• Possible rebirth of Hellenic antiquity in German culture

• German musical composers and the Apollonian-Dionysian

• The true aesthetic hearer vs the abstract man

• Nietzsche's own later assessment of his early work

As you can likely surmise looking over these topics, in this work, Nietzsche is very interested in the development of dramatic poetry in ancient Greece, not least because he thinks something important, even essential, developed within tragedy. He also thinks that special something got lost long before the ending of what people often consider tragedy’s classical era, and that the philosopher Socrates had something to do with that. He also projects a possibility of a recovery of what ancient Greek tragedy afforded in a different, late modern culture, specifically through German philosophy and music.

What is distinctive about ancient Greek tragedy at its best? For Nietzsche, this is where metaphysics, aesthetics, and philosophy of life come together in a dynamic confluence. And that’s why he introduces terms that have captivated not only philosophers and theorists of drama, but creative people of all sorts for over a century, terms that he arranges in a productive opposition with each other: the Dionysian and the Apollonian. They both represent what he calls “noble responses to the problem of life” and they come together in Greek culture in more and more complex forms, culminating in the tragic visions Aeschylus and Sophocles set before us.

There’s a third noble response to life, Nietzsche tells us, one which renders the picture far more complicated than the Apollonian-Dionysian dualism many take from this book. Nietzsche calls this response the “Socratic” or the “Alexandrian”, and he charts out how it saps and displaces both the Apollonian and Dionysian within the very heart of tragedy’s development, specifically with the works and thought of Euripides and his “second spectator”, Socrates the philosopher. Even the dialogues of a once-poet, Plato, come in for discussion, as a dramatic raft jury-rigged of what remains after tragedy’s shipwreck.

The Birth of Tragedy is not a simple work to summarize, and nearly every time you think you have it all entirely figured out, rereading it reveals there’s more to the story Nietzsche is narrating. My first reading of the work was back in college in the early 1990s, and I’ve been rereading, teaching, and thinking about it from time to time ever since. I still find the work fascinating, and I’d like to share that intense interest with you, in addition to competently introducing and setting out the central ideas, and engaging in some deep-running, engaging discussions with students as well.

So if you’re interested in learning more about the special 1-day seminar, or if you’ve now decided you want to join me and the students already enrolled in studying The Birth Of Tragedy, click here and it will take you right to the seminar site in the Study With Sadler Academy!

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

It’s time again for finding out from speculative fiction fans who they’d particularly like me to focus upon during the 11th year of the Worlds Of Speculative Fiction monthly series coming up in 2026. Here’s where you can access the Google Form I’m using for the vote this time. There are six options to choose from, and I’ll incorporate the three that get the most votes over the next week into the October, November, and December slots.

Unfortunately, Substack doesn’t allow embedding of Google Forms, so in order to vote, you’ll need to go to the actual form. But here are the options this time around:

• William Burroughs’ Nova trilogy

• Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space series

• Yoshiki Tanaka’s Legend of the Galactic Heroes

• David R. Bunch’s Moderan series

• Poul Anderson’s Polesotechnic League stories

• C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia

Here’s the schedule for 2026 so far:

• January - Steven Erikson, Malazan Book Of The Fallen continued (books 7-8)

• February - Steven Erikson, Malazan Book Of The Fallen continued (books 7-8)

• March - Special Session 100 - specifics to be announced later

• April - Jim Butcher, The Dresden Files continued (books 9-12)

• May - Robert Bloch’s Lovecraftian Tales

• June - Mary Doria Russell’s Sparrow Series

• July - Niel Hancock’s The Circle of Light Series

• August - Terry Pratchett’s Diskworld series (City Watch novels)

• September - Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain

• October - TBD by the vote

• November - TBD by the vote

• December - TBD by the vote

I’m really looking forward to the new eleventh year of the series, and to seeing what choices people select. Other than C.S. Lewis’ Narnia works, all of those possible series selections will be new to me, and I’ve enjoyed a lot of the fan selections over the years.

So if you’ve got any inclinations or interests in these authors or series, jump right in and vote sometime this week!

Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

We’re nearly at the end of the year! Sometimes it seems hard to believe that another year is almost finished, and that we’ll turn over the number yet one more time. For me, this was a month devoted to recovery as well as to some rest and relaxation near the end of it.

I started the month still using my walker, at home resting and recuperating from the emergency hip replacement operation I underwent in early October, after a fall that shattered the head of my femur within my right hip joint. In the first week of November, I had my first followup appointment with the surgeon. He explained in detail just what he did in the operation, answered a lot of questions and asked quite a few, was fairly happy with the progress so far, giving me the go-ahead for reincorporating some light activities into my days, but not for returning to teaching in-person at Marquette, which would involve a signifiant amount of walking around on campus just to get to my classroom. I did also get my sutures out, and swapped the walker for a cane.

In October, I had already, one week at a time, started doing various sorts of work online again. Teaching my classes was first, followed by resuming meetings with my clients, and then producing videos and doing some other types of work. As I’ve continued healing up this month, I’ve done more each week. Taking short walks outside, getting more independence, stamina, and stability back in our living space and on occasional planned (and fairly short) days at the office. I even got to Almost Home to visit the cats and kittens for about an hour once this last month as well.

So all told, things are going pretty well. I can be a bit impatient when it comes to long-term medical matters like this, wanting to resume various sorts of work a bit earlier than is advisable. But fortunately, a lot of what I do involves books, my computer, conversations, or classes. So by comparison to others who chafe at cooling their heels for months after a major surgery, I’m doing all right.

I meet with the surgeon again next week for the second follow-up visit, and hopefully he’ll clear me for still more activities. I also start the real PT (as opposed to the daily exercises I got sent home with from the hospital) this week as well, which I’m sure will be painful but productive.

Now that’s enough about all those medical and recovery matters. That’s likely of interest, but not really what you’re here for, right? What have we got coming up this month of December? Before I go into the usual announcements, there is something I’d like to highlight, which may appeal to some of you, depending on your level of interest in speculative fiction. I’ve lined up nine of the session topics for the eleventh year of our monthly series, Worlds Of Speculative Fiction, and I’m asking for input on the remaining three. If you’re interested in getting in on that, here’s a short video in which I explain who we’ll be doing and where to leave suggestions.

Online Classes And Seminars

We’re approaching the end of the year and the holiday season, and we’ve wrapped up online classes for the year. I’m still in process of plotting out the topics and schedule for classes I’ll be offering next year in the Study With Sadler Academy, and I’ll have an announcement about that coming out in the next few weeks.

We do, however, have a new intensive online 1-day special seminar, coming up this Saturday, December 26, starting at 9 AM Central Time and wrapping up around 3 PM (with some breaks built in, of course). We will be looking at three important and influential short pieces by the 20th century phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger.

Which three pieces by Heidegger will we be studying together? These:

• What Is Metaphysics?

• The Question Concerning Technology

• The Origin Of The Work Of Art

I’m very much looking forward to working through the key ideas in each of these tricky texts. Right now, we still have a few seats open for those who would like to enroll in the seminar, which you can do here.

Online Events

We don’t have any local, in-person events happening this month (We did have one last month, a talk on Karl Popper, the videorecording of which you can watch here, if you’re interested). They’re all online instead, which means that if you’d like to, you can participate in any of them. All of them are free to participate in.

Wednesday, December 3, 7 PM Central Time: Comprehensivist Wednesdays: Greg Sadler on the Legacy of Alasdair MacIntyre. I’ve been invited to this meetup, hosted by the 52 Living Ideas group, to discuss the late great philosopher MacIntyre, his thought, his works, and his engagement with his critics. You can find more details about it on their Meetup page here

Saturday, December 13, Noon Central Time: AMA (Ask Me Anything Session) - This is a YouTube live event in my channel. Do you any questions you’d like to ask me? Fire away and I’ll do my best to answer them during the session. You can find it in my YouTube channel, livestreaming the day of the event.

Saturday, December 20, Noon Central Time: Worlds Of Speculative Fiction Session 96 - Lois McMaster Bujold’s World Of The Five Gods. This is a fan-suggestion fantasy series that I’ve been reading and enjoying quite a bit. We’ll be looking at two novels, The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls. We start with a video premiere and live chat, and then continue the conversation in a Zoom session. You don’t have to have read Bujold’s books to participate. You can enroll in the online class here

Sunday, December 21, Noon Central Time: Classic Metal Class session 42 - Scott Tarulli and I will be hosting the class session with live chat, this time around looking at the topic of disconnects having to do with ethos, where a band or artist portrays themselves as being something different onstage or in interviews than they turn out to be in reality- click here to enroll in the free class

Video And Podcast Production

I’ve been able to produce more videos this month than last month. But only going into the office about once a week, when I was previously there at least six days a week has made it a bit challenging. The main way I met that challenge was by producing a lot of YouTube shorts exploring a number of key ideas about the cardinal and subordinate virtues found in classic Stoic texts. You can find links to all of those in this resource page.

I produced and released a few other longer videos in my YouTube channel:

• three Sadler’s Stories videos

• two Sadler’s Honest Book Reviews videos

• the videos from Classic Metal Class, Philosophers In The Midst Of History, and Worlds of Speculative Fiction

I also released a number of Sadler’s Lectures podcast episodes, specifically on:

• Heloise and Abelard’s Letters

• Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae

• invited talks and guest sermons on Stoicism, Rilke, and anger

This coming month, the videos I’m hoping to produce are:

• more shorts on Stoicism and the Cardinal Virtues

• additional Sadler’s Honest Book Reviews

• some new Sadler’s Stories videos

• a Fake Quotes video

• (perhaps) Core Concept videos on Thomas Nagel

I’m also hoping to produce and release Sadler’s Lectures podcast episodes on:

• Anselm of Canterbury

• Karl Marx

• talks I’ve given on Aristotle

• Martin Luther King

• some Stoic talks I’ve given

I hope you can join me for some of the online events, and that you find the videos, podcasts, and posts here interesting I also hope that the month ahead is a good one for all of you, and that you get to spend some good time relaxing with friends and family over the holidays!

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

Coming on on Saturday,December 6, I’m offering the final single-day online seminar of 2025, open to anyone who wants to learn, discuss, and study a selection of three of Martin Heidegger’s most important and influential essays. We’ll be focusing upon

• “What Is Metaphysics?”

• “The Question Concerning Technology”

• “The Origin Of The Work Of Art”

Here’s the course site in the Study With Sadler Academy, where you can see the curriculum, and enroll in the seminar if you’d like to!

We will be meeting online for three 90-minute sessions using Zoom, and each of these sessions will be recorded, so participants can go back and watch and listen to them anytime they would like to. The sessions will start at 9 AM, 11 AM, and 1 PM Central Time, with 30 minute breaks in between. During each session, I will lead participants through each of the key ideas, arguments, stories, and distinctions of the texts, with a mixture of lecture, discussion, and application. We will have plenty of time set aside for questions and answers.

Each of these is a text I first read in a graduate seminar centered on Martin Heidegger’s thought and works a little under three decades ago. I’ve since gone back to them many times, produced video lectures about them, and taught them in academic classes.

I use the first text, “What Is Metaphysics?” as a way to introduce students to key themes of Heidegger’s works. The second, “The Question Concerning Technology”, makes a major contribution to the philosophy of technology, and is perhaps even more applicable in our own time than it was in Heidegger’s. The third, “The Origin Of The Work Of Art”, is as you can imagine, an important work for aesthetics and philosophy of art, but it also ties together themes from many places in Heidegger’s work.

Here’s the schedule of the topics we will be examining together:

Session 1 — 9 AM Central Time: “What Is Metaphysics?”

• The nature of metaphysical inquiry

• Understanding the nothing and negation

• Mood or attunement and beings

• The fundamental mood of anxiety

• The nothing and nihilation

• The nothing and human freedom

• Metaphysical interpretations of the nothing

Session 2 — 11 AM Central Time: “The Question Concerning Technology”

• How to ask the question

• The instrumental, means, and ends

• Examining the four causes

• Poiesis, truth, and modern technology

• Standing reserve and enframing

• Technology as threat to revealing and truth

• Is there a way forward?

Session 3 — 1 PM Central Time: “The Origin Of The Work Of Art”

• The artwork and the artist

• The problem of the hermeneutic circle

• Artworks, things, and equipment

• The tension between world and earth

• Artwork, unconcealment, and truth

• Artwork, culture, and community

I try to keep these seminars fairly limited in size, so that we can ensure that everyone who wishes has the opportunity to engage in discussion or to get their questions answered. This one is capped at 30 students, and at this point we have more than half of the seats taken. I suspect the remaining slots will fill up well before the seminar begins. If there’s sufficiently strong interest, we’ll consider opening a new section of the same Heidegger seminar in early January. If you’re interested in enrolling, once again here’s the class page where you can do so. I’m very much looking forward to this excursion into these three great short work by Martin Heidegger!

Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

October was a bit of a bust for me and the work I do, for a completely unforeseen reason that I’m sure most of you readers already know about. I suffered a sort of freak accident, slipped and fell on our hardwood floor, landing on and shattering my right hip joint. I was in the hospital for about five days, which is a rather longish stay here in the USA, during the course of which they performed an emergency hip replacement surgery on me. I’ve been at home now for about two and a half weeks. Each day, there’s some progress in regaining strength, mobility, and presence of mind, and lessening of pain, but full recovery will involve a long road ahead.

The first week, I wasn’t able to do much of anything other than handle some emails, do some midterm grading, and read a bit. The second week, I was back to teaching my classes, shifted from in-person to online, but meeting for those class sessions exhausted me, as did each round of PT I did. By the end of that week, I could stretch my quadriceps again, which is where they made the incision for the operation. Last week, I continued teaching classes, and added client appointments, resuming them with established clients and taking on some new ones as well. And this week, I’m happy to say, I was able to do a bit of video production here at home.

I’ll meet with the surgeon in a few days who will check out my progress and give me some idea about when I might be able to get back into the classroom to teach my students, or back to the office. A lot of the work I routinely do, and up until now have taken for granted, has to happen there. That’s where nearly all of our books live. My camera, voice recorder, professional microphone, and the iMac computer where I do nearly all my editing work are there as well. Hopefully, I’ll get cleared soon to pick some things up from the office, do some podcast editing, and even some videorecording.

The other big thing for this month hasn’t happened yet, and takes place weeks from now. Here in the USA, the Thanksgiving holiday and break is a big thing. It’s a time to get together with family, eat good food, relax and enjoy oneself, and in our case to watch some football (the Packers play the Lions on Thanksgiving Day). It’s also a sort of break time within the academic semester. Students generally get the Wednesday before Thanksgiving off, and then have a long weekend before getting back to the last few weeks of classes.

As you can well imagine, my injury and recovery has kept me from my usual open house shifts at Almost Home Cat Rescue. It’s been weeks since I’ve been there, but I’ve been able to follow what’s going on through the Slack channel and the Facebook page. A number of cats and kittens I got to know have been adopted in that time, and I do miss getting to say goodbye to them and to wish well to their adopters. I also miss participating in the community of volunteers in person. It will be some time before I return. I’m currently using a walker, and I can well imagine that might frighten some of the more shy or skittish cats. So returning will wait until I can get around with a cane.

Online Classes And Seminars

My 8-week Aristotle on the Moral Virtues online class in the Study with Sadler Academy continues, now past the halfway point of the course. I have a number of highly engaged and thoughtful students in that particular class, so it’s quite enjoyable to lead them through Aristotle’s insights about the virtues in his Nicomachean Ethics.

In early December, Saturday the 6th specifically, I will be offering another intensive online 1-day special seminar. This time around, we will be looking at three important and influential short pieces by the 20th century phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger.

I had originally intended to lead the seminar in November, but my accident disrupted my schedule a bit. The Aristotle class sessions are about a week later than originally planned, and I don’t see any point in scheduling the seminar during our Thanksgiving weekend. So now it’s set up for November. I’ll be opening the seminar for enrollment and producing a video about the seminar in the next week or so, so keep your eyes peeled for that, if you’re interested.

Now what three pieces by Heidegger will we be studying together?

• What Is Metaphysics?

• The Question Concerning Technology

• The Origin Of The Work Of Art

I’m very much looking forward to working through the key ideas in each of these tricky texts.

Online and In-Person Events

There are some online and even one in-person events coming up this month. All of them are free to participate in.

Saturday, November 8, Noon Central Time: AMA (Ask Me Anything Session) - This is a YouTube live event in my channel. Do you any questions you’d like to ask me? Fire away and I’ll do my best to answer them during the session. You can find it in my YouTube channel, livestreaming the day of the event.

Wednesday, November 12, 6 PM Central Time: Philosophers In The Midst Of History: Karl Popper. This is an in-person event, hosted at the Frank Weyenberg Library in Mequon. I’ll be discussing the great 20th century philosopher, Karl Popper’s historical context, some of his key ideas, and the influence he exerted on history.

Saturday, November 15, Noon Central Time: Worlds Of Speculative Fiction Session 96 - Stephen King’s The Stand. We’ll be exploring this massive post-apocalyptic and supernatural novel by one of the great masters of horror. We start with a video premiere and live chat, and then continue the conversation in a Zoom session. You don’t have to have read Liu’s books to participate. You can enroll in the online class here

Sunday, November 16, Noon Central Time: Classic Metal Class session 41 - Scott Tarulli and I will be hosting the class session with live chat, this time looking at the role women played in the classic period of heavy metal’s development (1970s and 1980s). We’ll be using Streamyard videoconferencing for students enrolled in the free class (they get the link in the class site) - click here to enroll

Video And Podcast Production

After my injury, unable to create new videos until very recently, I fairly quickly ran through releasing the videos I had already produced. So October has been a month with fewer videos than usual. I did manage to get some done, however, including:

• core concept videos on Thomas Aquinas’ discussions of love in his Summa Theologiae

• two Sadler’s Stories videos

• two Sadler’s Honest Book Reviews videos

• and one videorecording from my presentation at the Philosophy Of Love And Friendship online conference

I also released a number of Sadler’s Lectures podcast episodes, specifically on:

• Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan

• Seneca’s Letters

• Heloise and Abelard’s Letters

• Soren Kierkegaard’s The Present Age

This coming month, the videos I’m hoping to produce are:

• Shorts on topics, thinkers, and texts bearing on Stoicism and the Cardinal Virtues

• more Sadler’s Honest Book Reviews

• some new Sadler’s Stories videos

• a Fake Quotes video

• at least one Wisdom for Life show recording

• Core Concept videos on Jeremy Bentham, Ninon de l’Eclos, and Immanuel Kant

As far as podcast episodes go, I’m hoping to get back to recording Mind & Desire podcasts here in Substack. What about Sadler’s Lectures? Ideally, I’ll get episodes edited and released on

• Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae

• Jeremy Bentham’s Offenses Against One’s Self

• and Ninon de l’Eclos’ Letters

I hope you can join me for some of the online events, and that you find the videos, podcasts, and posts here interesting I also hope that the month ahead is a good one for all of you as well, and if you’re here in the US that you have a Happy Thanksgiving holiday!

Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

We’re easing into Fall here in Milwaukee, with cooler nights and mornings, a few trees starting to turn to fall colors, and the last of the late summer flowers in full bloom. The academic semester is in full swing (we’re in week 6 of academic classes at the two places I’m teaching), and we’re moving into a very busy month ahead, on a number of fronts!

I’ve got quite a lot of news to share with you this month, some about this long month of October, other bits about what took place in September that you might have missed or overlooked.

Online Classes And Seminars

The 8-week Aristotle On The Moral Virtues online class started up last Saturday, with a great class session focused on Nicomachean Ethics book 2. Students had a lot of excellent conversation-provoking questions and comments about Aristotle’s conception of virtue and vice. We’ve even had a few additional students join the class after the first class session, which makes sense, given that we record all the class sessions.

Early in September, I led another special 1-day online seminar focused on Plato’s Symposium, where we went through the entire text in three 90-minute sessions. That was a very enjoyable and engaging set of discussions focused on one of my favorite Platonic dialogues. If you missed it and wish you hadn’t, I do have plans to bring out an online class covering that text later on this month.

On Saturday, November 22, I’ll be leading another 1-day special online seminar, this one focused on three short works by Martin Heidegger. One of them will be “What Is Metaphysics?”, the text I typically use to introduce students to Heidegger’s thought. The other two are being selected by a poll of four options, which you can take part in by going here.

I also have plans for another 1-day online seminar coming up on a Saturday in December, most likely the 13th, and that one will be focused on Nietzsche’s early work The Birth of Tragedy, Out of the Spirit Of Music. I’ll have more to say about that one down the line, but I just wanted to put it on your radar for now.

Online and In-Person Events

There are quite a few online and even a few in-person events coming up this month. Nearly all of them are online, and all of them are free to participate in.

Saturday, October 4, Noon Central Time: AMA (Ask Me Anything Session) - This is a YouTube live event in my channel. Do you any questions you’d like to ask me? Fire away and I’ll do my best to answer them during the session. You can find it in my YouTube channel, livestreaming the day of the event.

Sunday, October 5, 11:30 PM Central Time: Octopurrfest - this is an in-person fundraising event here in the Greater Milwaukee area, held at Root River Bowl, with all of the proceeds going to Almost Home Cat Rescue. You can find out more about it here

Saturday, October 11, Noon Central Time: Worlds Of Speculative Fiction Session 95 - Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty book 2: Wall Of Storms). We’re returning to this rich Silkpunk fantasy narrative universe for the second time. We start with a video premiere and live chat, and then continue the conversation in a Zoom session. You don’t have to have read Liu’s books to participate. You can enroll in the online class here

Saturday, October 18, 9 AM Central Time: Stoicon 2025 - Engaged Citizenship. This is the big international and online Stoicism conference. I’ll be chairing the panel Stoic Civic Engagement in Action, featuring Meredith Alexander Kunz, Allie Nava, Leonidas Konstantakos, and Ross Paton, later on in the day. You can get yourself a ticket for the full day of presentations here.

Saturday, October 25, 12 PM Central Time: The Philosophy of Love and Relationships Conference. Hosted by the Plato’s Academy Center. I’ll be presenting on Aristotle’s theory of friendship and some difficulties arising within its context. You can get yourself a ticket for the event here.

Sunday, October 26, Noon Central Time: Classic Metal Class session 41 - Scott Tarulli and I will be hosting the class session with live chat, this time looking at the role women played in the classic period of heavy metal’s development (1970s and 1980s). We’ll be using Streamyard videoconferencing for students enrolled in the free class (they get the link in the class site) - click here to enroll

Video And Podcast Production

This month, my plan is to continue and expand the momentum started last month with more Sadler’s Honest Book Reviews videos. I’m also lining up interlocutors for new the Ideas That Matter interview series.

Last month, in my YouTube channel, in addition to videos from events, I released:

• new core concept videos on Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, Heloise and Abelard’s Letters, and Seneca’s Letters

• two Sadler’s Stories videos

• a Wisdom for Life show recording

• two videos examining the question “Is Philosophy YouTube broken?”

This coming month, what I’ve got planned are:

• a slew of new core concept videos on Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae

• some core concept videos on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse On The Origins Of Inequality

• more YouTube shorts about the Stoic understanding of the Cardinal Virtues

• some additional Sadler’s Stories videos

• (if I can schedule them with guests) at least one Ideas That Matter video

Last month in the Sadler’s Lectures podcast, I released episodes on:

• Philip Jose Farmer’s novella, The Lovers

• book 2 of Cicero’s On The Nature Of The Gods

• Poul Anderson’s essay, Of Thud And Blunder

What’s coming up this month? Episodes on:

• Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan

• Seneca’s Letters

• Kierkegaard’s The Present Age

• Abelard and Heloise’s Letters

And of course, more Mind & Desire podcast episodes and exclusive videos as well

Some Personal Matters

I didn’t get as much done as I’d have liked to last month, as I picked up some sort of lingering bug from my students, one of the effects of which was getting tired quite often and easily. I’m more or less over it now, fortunately, and looking forward to getting back to my regular work schedule.

My youngest child started studies in physics and mathematics at University of Wisconsin Madison, and seems to be doing quite well, making new friends, going to departmental events, enjoying classes and the like. My oldest is very busy, working in her field of theater, which is always good, particularly for recent graduates.

As always, I’ve been helping out a good bit as a volunteer at Almost Home Cat Rescue, doing 2 open house shifts most weeks, and carrying out some administrative duties as the vice president of the organization. I also come in when we have transfers of new cats and kittens, helping welcome, comfort, and socialize them.

Andi and I are both looking forward to the weather cooling, the leaves changing color, watching Packers games together, and cooking some nice hearty food as we shift into full-on Fall.

I hope you can join me in the online events, and that you find the videos, podcasts, and posts here useful and stimulating. I also hope that the month ahead is a good one for all of you as well.

Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

Seminars take place online on one day, with three 90-minute Zoom sessions (with breaks in between them). Students enrolled in the seminar get access to a number of downloadable handouts developed for my academic classes and students.

In the past, we’ve done seminars on Plato’s Symposium, tricky ideas in Stoic literature, Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic, and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals.

This time around I’m kicking around these four ideas. I’d love to get your input on whether you think you might be interested in participating in on online seminars on these, and which one you’d get the most out of.

Thanks in advance for participating in this poll!

One of the most popular online classes offered in the Study With Sadler Academy is my Aristotle on the Moral Virtues course. I have taught it for three years in a row, and the new fourth section of it is now enrolling! If you’d like to jump straight to the course site, check it out, and perhaps enroll, you can click right here and do so.

We’ll be starting with the first class session on Saturday, September 27. The course include weekly interactive 90-minute class sessions with me, hosted on Zoom, and recorded so participants can go back over the sessions at their leisure. We will continue our conversations through discussion forums in the class site. Students also get access to resources intended to deepen and foster their learning, including:

• downloadable handouts on key ideas from the texts we’re studying

• downloadable worksheets allowing students to apply the concepts

• examples concretely illustrating the subject matters we are studying

• prompts for personal reflection

This is my 26th year of teaching philosophy classes, and my 13th year designing and teaching high-quality online philosophy classes. My students have included not just traditional-age college students, but also working professionals looking to improve their skills, lifelong learners engaging in personal development and intellectual enrichment, inmates working towards college degrees in three different state prison systems, and other people from all walks of life.

In order to take and benefit from this Aristotle On The Moral Virtues course, there’s no requirement that you have previously studied Aristotle or even philosophy. You’ll be guided through books 2-6 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics by someone who at this point has taught it to more than 1,000 students over several decades. One of my skills as an educator is taking complex philosophical concepts from classical texts and, without throwing away rigor or accuracy, making those concepts accessible and applicable for students.

Basic Information About The Class

“Aristotle On The Moral Virtues” is a fully online, synchronous, open-enrollment class. “Online” means that all the resources and activities a student will use for the class are provided in the course site. “Synchronous” means that we will meet at regularly scheduled times for class sessions. And “open enrollment” means that the class is not-for-credit and open for anyone who wants to learn about the subject.

This particular class has 90-minute class sessions that will take place for 8 weeks, from 90:00 AM to 10:30 AM Central Time. If you’re in a different time zone, you will want to check what the local time would be for you. All of the class sessions will be recorded, and those videos will be embedded in the class site as resources for students who can’t make class sessions or who would like to go back over the sessions.

Tuition for the class is $249.00. Registering for the class gives students participation in the class sessions and discussion forums, as well as lifetime access to the class site and to all of the resources hosted there.

We like to keep class sizes for these interactive courses fairly small so that discussions allow everyone ample opportunities to participate, so we are capping the class at 25 students maximum.

The main text for this class is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and we will be studying books 2–6 of that work. As you will see below, in some of the weeks, we will be focusing on an entire book of the work, while the readings for other weeks will be portions of a book of the Ethics.

During the class sessions, I will be leading all of the students through the materials we are studying that week. So there will be some lecturing, some discussion, some consideration of helpful examples, and lots of opportunities for students to ask questions or seek clarifications.

The Curriculum For The Course

Aristotle is one of the earliest philosophers to adopt a genuinely systematic approach to ethics. His ethics centers on the notions of virtue and vice, and on understanding, analyzing, and developing specific virtues, and shifting ourselves away from their opposites, particular vices.

By contrast to some of the other main schools of ancient philosophy, which framed their ethics in terms of four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, courage, and temperance), Aristotle and his followers distinguished 11 main moral virtues and one intellectual virtue integrally connected with the moral virtues (prudence).

Here is the sequence of topics for our class:

Week 1 Class Session — General Features of Virtues and Vices. Nicomachean Ethics book 2 (1103a-1109b)

• Exactness and outlines in ethics

• Virtues and vices as habits

• The doctrine of the virtuous mean

• Elements and dimensions of virtues

• How human beings develop virtues or vices

• Pleasure’ and pain’s connection with virtue and vice

• Overview of the virtues and vices

• Advice about finding the virtuous mean

Week 2 Class Session — Virtues of Courage and Temperance. Nicomachean Ethics book 3 (1115a-1119b)

• The virtue of courage

• Vices of cowardice and rashness

• Emotions of fear and confidence

• Five conditions similar to courage

• The virtue of temperance

• Vices of self-indulgence and insensibility

• Desires and pleasures of the body

Week 3 Class Session —Session 3: Virtue of Good Temper. Nicomachean Ethics book 4 (1125b-1126b) supplemented by Eudemian Ethics book 3 (1231b), and Rhetoric book 2.

• The virtue of good temper, or gentleness, or mildness

• The emotion of anger

• Vices of spiritlessness or servility

• Vices of quick-temper, ragefulness, bitter-temperedness, troublesomeness, and abusiveness

Week 4 Class Session — Virtues of Generosity and Magnificence. Nicomachean Ethics book 4 (1119b-1123a)

• External goods of wealth and other resources

• The virtue of liberality or generosity

• The vices of prodigality and meanness

• The virtue of magnificence and public use of wealth

• The vices of vulgarity and stinginess

Week 5 Class Session — Virtues of Right Ambition and Magnanimity. Nicomachean Ethics book 4 (1123a-1125b)

• External goods of honor, respect, or social status

• The virtue of magnanimity or great-souledness

• The vices of vanity or undue humility

• The semi-virtue of modesty\

• The (unnamed) virtue of right ambition

• The vices of ambitiousness and unambitiousness

Week 6 Class Session — Virtues of Friendliness, Good Humor, and Truthfulness. Nicomachean Ethics book 4 (1126b-1128b)

• The virtue of friendliness

• The vices of obsequiousness and quarrelsomeness

• The virtue of good humor

• The vices of boorishness and buffoonery

• The virtue of truthfulness (about self)

• The vices of boastfulness and self-deprecation

Week 7 Class Session — The Virtue of Justice. Nicomachean Ethics book 5 (1129a-1138b)

• The different forms of justice

• Justice as a virtuous disposition

• Justice as complete virtue

• Legal justice as norm-following

• Modes of “particular” justice

Week 8 Class Session — Prudence and the Moral Virtues. Nicomachean Ethics book 6 (1140a-1141a, 1141b-1145a)

• Prudence or practical wisdom as an intellectual virtue

• Prudence, general principles, and particular matters

• Prudence’s relation to deliberation, conjecture, understanding, and considerateness

• Prudence’s relations with moral virtues

• Natural virtue and cleverness

• The issue of the unity of the virtues

Open For Enrollment And Starting Soon

As I mentioned earlier, we already have students enrolled in this class, and space for 25 students total. If you’d like to enroll or just to find out more, you can click here and go right to the course page in the Study With Sadler Academy.

This is my 25th year of teaching philosophy classes, and my 12th year designing and teaching high-quality online philosophy classes. My students have included not just traditional-age college students, but also working professionals looking to improve their skills, lifelong learners engaging in personal development and intellectual enrichment, inmates working towards college degrees in three different state prison systems, and other people from all walks of life.

I hope you’ll consider joining the class and enrolling in Aristotle on the Moral Virtues. I know I’m looking forward to engaging class discussions, thinking about how we can improve our characters, lives, and relationships, and once again exploring Aristotles rich text!

Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

We’re now in the end of summer here in Milwaukee, with cooler nights and mornings, some later flowers still in bloom, and a few monarch butterflies and many sulphur butterflies flitting around. The academic year started last week at the two places I’m teaching, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and Marquette University. And my youngest child is off to college at University of Milwaukee Madison, the flagship university for our state. And of course, here in Wisconsin, we’re looking forward to the start of the NFL football season, and the first Packers home game.

As always I’ve got a good bit of news to share with you on a number of matters. Some of it has to do with what is coming up this month of September, and a good bit of it is stuff from the previous month that you might have missed.

Online Classes And Seminars

We finished up our 8-week Stoicism and the Cardinal Virtues class with the final two weekly sessions in August. That class went very well, and as I've mentioned before in other places, I’m currently in the early stages of a book project focused precisely on that topic.

If you’re interested in taking online classes with me in the Study with Sadler Academy, meeting on Saturdays, I have one seminar and one 8-week class that might be of interest to you.

The 1-day special seminar on Plato’s Symposium is coming up later this week on September 6. We already have 17 learners enrolled, but we still have some seats left, if you’re interested in working through this short but very rich Platonic text with me in three 90-minute sessions (with breaks in between them). Click here to see the class site.

My 8-week online Aristotle on the Moral Virtues class will start with the first class session later on in the month on September 27. This marks the fourth time I have offered and taught this class. There’s always high demand for it, since Aristotle’s version of virtue ethics has proven one of the most commonly studied. We’ll go deep into his discussions of each of the moral virtues he discusses in Nicomachean Ethics books 2 through 6. Click here to see the class site.

Online Events

I have quite a few events coming up this month, all of them online, which means that if any of these interest you, you are certainly welcome to!

Saturday, September 13, Noon Central Time: AMA (Ask Me Anything Session) - This is a YouTube live event in my channel. Do you any questions you’d like to ask me? Fire away and I’ll do my best to answer them during the session. You can find it in my YouTube channel, livestreaming the day of the event.

Saturday, September 20, Noon Central Time: Worlds Of Speculative Fiction Session 95 - Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty book 2: Wall Of Storms). We’re returning to this rich Silkpunk fantasy narrative universe for the second time. We start with a video premiere and live chat, and then continue the conversation in a Zoom session. You don’t have to have read Liu’s books to participate. You can enroll in the online class here

Sunday, September 21, Noon Central Time: Classic Metal Class session 37 - Scott Tarulli and I will be hosting the class session with live chat, this time looking at the role metal magazines played in the development of the metalhead community in the 1970s and 1980s. We’ll be using Streamyard videoconferencing for students enrolled in the free class (they get the link in the class site) - click here to enroll

Friday, September 26 Noon Central Time: Acid Horizon - "Answers without Organs". I have been invited back on to the Acid Horizon podcast, for an open-format question and answer session about philosophy. This will be my fifth appearance on Acid Horizon, and I’m very much looking forward to it. they should have an announcement later on this month on their channel.

Video And Podcast Production

This month, one of my priorities is to get to producing a number of long-delayed Sadler’s Honest Book Reviews videos. I’m also hoping to return to two other video series that have been on hold for a while, namely the Ideas That Matter interview series, and the Self-Directed Study: Sadler’s Advice videos.

I’ll also be returning a bit more regularly to the Mind & Desire podcast episodes and the Exclusive videos.

In my YouTube channel, in addition to videos from events, I released:

• a new Fake Quotes video, this one on Rene Descartes

• a video about a conversation in Twitter

• a set of core concept videos on Cicero’s On The Nature of the Gods

• a Sadler’s Stories video

• and an Evil Sadler video

Something else that you might have seen is a milestone we crossed in the Wisdom For Life radio show, hitting episode 100, released in both video and podcast formats.

What I’ve got planned for this month are:

• another Fake Quote video (not sure yet which philosopher I’ll focus on)

• at least one more Sadler’s Stories video

• core concept videos on Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan

• core concept videos on Abelard’s and Heloise’s Letters

• more YouTube shorts about the Stoic understanding of the Cardinal Virtues

• and a video responding to a recent Michael Burns video about doing philosophy on YouTube

Last month in the Sadler’s Lectures podcast, I released episodes on:

• Albert Camus’ Letters To A German Friend

• Jorges Luis Borges’ short stories

• Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions

This month, what’s on the docket? Episodes covering:

• Philip Jose Farmer’s novella The Lovers

• Cicero’s On The Nature Of The Gods

• Paul Anderson’s “Of Thud And Blunder”

There may be some other podcast episodes and videos, if I find myself with extra time and energy.

Some Personal Matters

In August, we celebrated my 55th birthday, mainly enjoying ourselves in some low-key manners, with chili dogs and chocolate cake for dinner. August was also a month of getting some low-grade longstanding medical matters sorted out.

I spent a good bit of time at Almost Home Cat Rescue, where I both serve as a volunteer but also as the vice-president of the organization (since May). Last month, we had a board meeting, where there was a good bit of business to discuss, particularly as we gear up for one of our major fundraising events. In addition to doing a number of open house shifts, I also helped out with two transfers after-hours, where we take in and welcome cats from a shelter we partner with. We passed the 540 adoptions mark last month as well.

As I mentioned earlier, my youngest child is now off at college, starting her freshman year, majoring in mathematics and physics. My oldest is here in Milwaukee, busy with her life, and especially with working in her chosen field, theater. It’s always good to see one’s kids getting on with their education, work, and lives.

As the weather cools, and we move into fall, I’m looking forward to crisp air, the trees beginning to turn their colors, the final fragrant flowers (chrysanthemums), walks along the river and through the city, and settling in to cozy evenings for Andi and I in our little home.

I hope you can join me in some of the online events, and that you will find the videos, podcasts, and posts here interesting and helpful. I also hope that the month ahead is a good one for all of you as well.

Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

Coming on on Saturday, September 6, I’m offering another single-day online seminar, open to anyone who wants to learn, discuss, and study Plato’s Symposium, a classic dialogue about the nature, meaning, and importance of love. Here’s the course site in the Study With Sadler Academy, where you can see the curriculum, and enroll in the seminar if you’d like to!

We will be meeting online for three 90-minute sessions using Zoom, and each of these sessions will be recorded, so participants can go back and watch and listen to them anytime they would like to. The sessions will start at 9 AM, 11 AM, and 1 PM Central Time, with 30 minute breaks in between. During each session, I will lead participants through each of the key ideas, arguments, stories, and distinctions of the text, with a mixture of lecture, discussion, and application, with plenty of time set aside for question and answer.

This is a work that I first encountered nearly 3 decades ago, and have taught and given talks on numerous times. It is among my favorites of Plato’s dialogues, and indeed of philosophical works more generally, and students who devote themselves to reading it often find it becomes one of their favorites as well.

The core of the Symposium is a set of seven speeches given by the host and guests at a drinking party, where they decide not to continue the heavy drinking from the previous day and to instead each take a turn at praising Love. In the process, they don’t just do that, but also provide accounts, arguments, stories, displays of rhetorical skill, and even jokes all bearing upon love, spanning a range from affection and friendship to infatuation and sexual desire.

We get to hear well-worked out ideas about these matters from an earnest young man, a legal expert, a doctor, a comic poet, a tragedian, and then from Socrates himself, who relates conversations he had with the legendary older wise woman Diotima, who taught him everything he knows about love. And then, a drunk Alcibiades breaks in to the party and gives a wild speech about his own love for Socrates.

Participants not only participate in each of the seminar sessions, but also get lifetime access to a series of downloadable handouts on each of the speeches and the overall structure of the Symposium, developed and used in my own academic classes where I teach this wonderful text.

Here’s the schedule of the topics we will be examining together:

9:00 AM CDT - Part 1: Overview of the Text and Plato's Thought, Narrative Framework of the work, and the First Two Speeches

• The complex narrative framing of the work

• Why the symposium attendants give speeches about Love

• Views on sexual desire and relationships in ancient Greece

• The key characters, their occupations, and their relationships

• Phaedo's first speech about love's age and nobility

• The concept of an army of lovers

• Pausanius' second speech about the laws and love

• The distinction between heavenly and earthly love

• Distinctions between legal approaches to love

11:00 AM CDT - Part 2: The Three Middle Speeches About Love: Medicine, Comedy, and Rhetoric

• Eryximachus' third speech about love as a medical and cosmic phenomenon

• Suggestions about how to enjoy good aspects of love

• Aristophanes' fourth speech about love and uniting separated halfs

• An origin myth for human beings and soulmates

• Explaining same-sex and opposite-sex attraction and love

• Agathon's fifth speech about love's beauty and love's virtues

• How speeches about love ought to be made

• Why love possesses all of the virtues

• Socrates' cross-examination of Agathon

1:00 PM CDT - Part 3: The Final Speeches, Conclusion(s) To The Work

• Socrates' sixth speech about love, a dialogue inside the dialogue

• Socrates' teacher, the wise woman Diotima

• What love or desire are actually for

• The ladder of love from bodies to the beautiful itself

• Alcibaides' drunken seventh speech about Socrates

• Why Socrates is beautiful inside though ugly outside

• Socrates' friend-zoning Alcibiades

• The conclusion of the dialogue with comedy and tragedy

I hope you’ll consider joining me and the other already-enrolled students in this excellent opportunity to delve deeply into a very rich Platonic text. Once again, here’s a link to the class site, where you can enroll and get your seat before it fills up (we’re restricting the number of participants to keep it a decent size for a seminar of this sort)!

Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.