<![CDATA[Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy: Resources]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/s/sadlers-resourceshttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AMne!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff7fe933f-baef-4b78-841c-cbc26c0de354_1280x1280.pngGregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy: Resourceshttps://gregorybsadler.substack.com/s/sadlers-resourcesSubstackSun, 19 Apr 2026 11:15:05 GMT<![CDATA[Resources On Simone De Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/resources-on-simone-de-beauvoirshttps://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/resources-on-simone-de-beauvoirsFri, 10 Apr 2026 22:48:26 GMT

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My first encounter with Simone de Beauvoir’s work was reading her Ethics of Ambiguity back in the early 1990s as a college student. I wasn’t the best or the brightest, and didn’t have an awful lot of useful guidance from my professors, so I expect I maybe understood at best half of what I read in that work the first few times around. But I did find it both fascinating and useful back then, not least because I had developed a strong interest in studying and trying to live out Existentialist philosophy. I had stumbled my way through Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and had read or heard somewhere that the Ethics of Ambiguity supplied what was missing in that work, a genuine and coherent ethics developed from an Existentialist perspective.

I read my way through it again in graduate school, and after that my copy sat on my shelf for a number of years (when it wasn’t being transported from one place to another), before I picked it up and reread it once I’d moved up to Kingston, New York in the early 2010s. By then, I’d read some other works by Beauvoir, and had both a better understanding of some of her key ideas and focuses, and a greater appreciation for the depth of thoughtful consideration woven into her texts.

When I had the opportunity to design and teach online Existentialism classes, and to provide a year-long monthly lecture series for the general public on Existentialist thinkers at the Kingston library, I read through The Ethics of Ambiguity several more times. And then, later after we moved back to Milwaukee, I incorporated portions of that work and her The Second Sex into the classes I taught at Marquette University, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and Carthage College.

As I was teaching some of those classes, I began producing a set of core concept videos on the first two parts of The Ethics of Ambiguity, which then I also converted to corresponding Sadler’s Lectures podcast episodes. More recently, I decided that it was about time that I produced core concept videos and podcast episodes covering all the rest of the key ideas, arguments, and distinctions of the text, and that is what I did in the last several months.

I now have available a full set of 25 lectures on the work. Here they are:

There you have them, the full set. Hopefully you find them useful or interesting!

Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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.

]]><![CDATA[Resources on Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundae Partis]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-thomas-b97https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-thomas-b97Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:41:58 GMT

One thinker whose works I’ve taught in many of my classes over the last several decades is the great 13th century Dominican, Thomas Aquinas. Most often, I’m using some small portions of the voluminous (and at his death, not completed) masterwork Summa Theologiae.

As with the other authors who I introduce my students to, I like to produce core concept videos that lead them into key ideas, arguments, and distinctions found in their work. For a number of years, I’ve recorded sets of those videos on certain topics particularly important for my classes. So far those have included Thomas’ discussions of these topics from the first part of the second part of the work:

  • the nature of human happiness

  • the human emotion of love

  • the human emotion of anger

  • the types of law

At this point, I probably ought to have produced more videos, quite frankly, given the vast number of topics covered in the Summa Theologiae. Perhaps I’ll start remedying that down the line! But for now, these are what I have available. On the other hand, I have also converted them into podcast versions of the lectures, so that’s a plus.

Here’s what I have available at this point:

Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundae Partis, question 2

Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundae Partis, question 26

Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundae Partis, question 27

Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundae Partis, question 28

Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundae Partis, question 46

Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundae Partis, questions 90-91 and 94

So there they are! 26 lectures in video and podcast form on portions of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae that you can watch, listen to, or download to learn more about thing great thinker and his ideas.

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]]><![CDATA[Orphaned And Unpublished Papers]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/orphaned-and-unpublished-papers-7b3https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/orphaned-and-unpublished-papers-7b3Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:42:34 GMT

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I’ve been kicking around a somewhat tongue-in-cheek idea for a book for years. I was originally going to call it something like “Orphaned Papers”, because it would include various academic articles or book chapters I wrote in the past, which either didn’t get published as they were supposed to have, or where they did get published and then the publication ended up going defunct. The latter were almost always cases of online journals or sites. I even considered including the story for each piece about why it didn’t get published or how I discovered the publisher had disappeared! I figured that I’d self-publish that volume, since it didn’t seem like anything any press would want to go near!

Busy as I am, I never quite got around to that project. I also realized that while I did have a number of “orphaned” papers, I had far more papers of a different sort, those that were originally intended to be published down the line, but which I simply never got around to entirely polishing and sending out or publication. Many of these were papers written for various conferences. Some were presented in other forums. A few were even more occasioned pieces, like guest sermons or invited talks. I also had quite a few decent papers I’d written back in my graduate school classes that could be of interest to some readers. I probably have somewhere less than a hundred of these unpublished papers from roughly the last 30 years of my education and career. I don’t know the precise number, because every so often, I find another one or two in my files!

I’ve decided that I will indeed bundle them all together, edit them sufficiently, and then self-publish them as a book (or two or three, depending on how long we’re talking!) for some rather affordable price. It would offer me a good opportunity to develop skills in doing the self-publishing work I want to do with some other writing projects. And if people are indeed interested in what I have to say about the dozens of philosophers my orphaned and unpublished papers engage with, it would allow them to do so readily without breaking the bank.

Before I do that, I decided that I’d edit and publish them individually here in Substack, since those who read my work here are likely to find these rigorous and well-researched pieces interesting or even potentially useful. I started with a piece on St. Catherine of Alexandria, which I had meant to link to on her feast day last year, only to discover that the online publication in which it appeared nearly 20 years ago, The Alexandrian, had disappeared.

So here they are, in rough order of the chronology of their topics, not of their writing. You can click on the links, and they’ll take you directly to the papers.

As I publish additional previously unpublished or orphaned papers here in my Substack, I’ll certainly add links to them here in this list

Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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.

]]><![CDATA[Resources On Heloise And Abelard's Letters]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/resources-on-heloise-and-abelardshttps://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/resources-on-heloise-and-abelardsTue, 24 Mar 2026 00:30:05 GMT

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The romance between Heloise d’Argenteuil and Peter Abelard developed and was carried out first under her uncle’s nose in Paris, when the two of the were supposed to be engaged in studying together. Both of them had extraordinary gifts of intellect, and Heloise arguably surpassed Abelard in boldness in several matters. After its discovery, the two continued their affair, and when Heloise became pregnant with their child (who she would name Astrolabe), she was sent to Abelard’s family in Brittany while he tried to work something out with her uncle. There’s a lot more to the story, which you can easily find, so I’ll just say that things went quite bad.

Heloise and Abelard got married in secret. Her uncle sent men to castrate Abelard. Abelard retired to a hermitage and took religious vows, and insisted that Heloise herself should do so as well, and become a nun, which she did. Eventually, he will write a letter of consolation to one of his friends, “A History Of My Calamaties”, a copy of which finds its way to Heloise’s hands, and she writes him back, initiating a correspondence that has rightly become one compelling text in the long history of love.

I have my students read, and we discuss these letters between Heloise and Abelard in my Introduction To Philosophy classes, when I center their focus on the thematics of love, friendship, sexual desire, and relationships (you can learn more about that here). In the letters, both Abelard and Heloise discuss their relationship, its past, its prospects, and what they continue to feel for each other. Heloise advances a very interesting argument that, despite taking religious vows, and lacking any way to continue their sexual relationship, they do remain husband and wife. They can legitimately, and ought to, enjoy the measure of marriage that still remains to them, expressing and experiencing their mutual love through letters. Abelard unfortunately turns her down, advancing arguments of his own.

Last year, I produced a series of videos, and then podcast episodes on that collection of letters, working through all of the topics, each of the arguments, and discussing the recurring themes articulated within them. Here are the links to the entire set.

There you have them. Five lectures in both video and podcast format, on this collection of letters between these legendary lovers. I hope you find them useful or interesting.

]]><![CDATA[Resources On Joseph Butler's Sermons]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/resources-on-joseph-butlers-sermonshttps://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/resources-on-joseph-butlers-sermonsTue, 10 Mar 2026 02:07:47 GMT

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One early modern thinker who doesn’t get read much in the present, but whose works are well worth studying is Joseph Butler. I teach just a few of his sermons, specifically numbers 8 and 9, in one of my academic classes that focuses on theories for understanding and managing anger, but I’ve read my way through the rest of the set of his Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel in the past, and down the line when I find the time, I’m looking forward to digging into his apologetic work, The Analogy of Religion.

Reading that Butler preached sermons might be off-putting to some people, since they could assume that they’re far more focused on religious matters than anything of philosophical value. That would likely be due to their own experiences or assumptions about sermons, derived from the present-day. As it happens, Butler was indeed a clergyman, indeed rising to the level of bishop in the Anglican church. But he was also a philosopher, and his sermons engage many of the philosophical theories, thinkers, and ideas that were matters of discussion and contention in his time.

He does take verses from Jewish and Christian scriptures as the starting points for each of the sermons, and brings up other relevant verses for examination and interpretation, but each of those sermons is also eminently philosophical as well. He advances and develops arguments, draws needed distinctions, and critically considers philosophical positions advanced by others.

The two sermons that I’ve developed video and podcast lectures on so far, as resources for students in my classes, both have to do with understanding the emotion of anger and a proper Christian ethical comportment towards that emotion. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to return to Butler’s Sermons before too long to produce additional lectures on them. They deal with topics like human nature, the conscience, compassion, love of neighbor, and the meaning of piety.

Here are the lectures I have produced at this point.

Sermon 8

Sermon 9

As I produce additional video and podcast lectures on some of the other sermons, I’ll add them here.

Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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.

]]><![CDATA[Resources On John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/resources-on-john-stuart-mills-utilitarianismhttps://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/resources-on-john-stuart-mills-utilitarianismMon, 23 Feb 2026 02:58:11 GMT

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The mention of “John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism” in the title here is actually somewhat ambiguous. He did in fact author a work titled, simply Utilitarianism, which has over the years become perhaps the most commonly used and referenced text for that moral theory. But we can also talk about that moral theory, movement, and tradition of moral enquiry, called “Utilitarianism” by its official founder, Jeremy Bentham, and Mill’s work represents not just a defense of that approach against its many critics, but also an incredibly important reinterpretation and expansion of the Utilitarian philosophy.

Stylistically, Mill is a much better writer, more enjoyable to read, than Bentham is. The latter’s work is equally rigorous, but more prone to rather stuffy prose, and he loves to engage in lengthy enumerations and distinctions, often illustrated with examples. Bentham is certainly interesting and worth reading, but Mill’s work can actually be fun to work one’s way through, and to discuss with others. That’s perhaps one main reason he gets taught in Ethics classes more often than does Bentham (I generally assign and teach both of them, but I gather I’m very much the exception).

Mill in quite literally a second-generation Utilitarian. Not only does he defend and reinterpret Utilitarianism, he was actually brought up in a Utilitarian household, since his father John Mill was a good friend and follower of Bentham. John Stuart Mill introduces a number of important clarifications and distinctions that make Utilitarianism a more robust doctrine, perhaps the most well-known of which is that of qualitatively higher and lower pleasures (and pains), a contrast to Bentham’s fundamentally quantitative approach in Utilitarian Ethics.

Another interesting facet of Mill’s Utilitarianism, which I find helpful to introduce my students to, is that he realizes that there are key ideas available in other moral approaches that Utilitarians might have been a bit too hasty to dismiss or downplay. One of these is the emphasis upon the virtues. To be sure, an attentive read of Bentham reveals that he was very interested in what he calls motives and dispositions, but these aren’t quite what other moral theories understand as the virtues and the vices. Mill makes room for the development of the virtues in his version of Utilitarianism. He also devotes a good bit of analysis and discussion to the notion of rights, a concept that Bentham had famously dismissed as “nonsense on stilts”.

Over the years, as resources for my students first, and then for the general public, I produced an entire sequence of core concept videos on Mill’s Utilitarianism. As I typically do, later on, I edited the sound files from those videos into Sadler’s Lectures podcast episodes. So, here all of those lectures are:

There you have them, ten lectures, available in both video and downloadable podcast formats, on this centrally important work not just in the Utilitarian tradition, but in Ethics as a discipline.

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]]><![CDATA[Resources On Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarian Ethics]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/resources-on-jeremy-benthams-utilitarianhttps://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/resources-on-jeremy-benthams-utilitarianThu, 12 Feb 2026 14:12:29 GMT

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Understood in a broad and general sense, Utilitarianism is one of the most commonly taught and used moral theories not only in ethics classes and training, but also in practical decision-making. I first encountered it in a formal sense as a college student in an Introduction to Philosophy class my first semester, but the approach was already something vaguely familiar to me from discussions much earlier on. Continuing on in my philosophical education, I kept running into it in other classes, discussed by philosophers we read, including a second-generation Utilitarian, John Stuart Mill.

Interestingly, although just about every presentation of Utilitarianism as a moral theory made reference to Jeremy Bentham as the father and founder of the school and movement, we didn’t read him in any of our classes, even in graduate school, and I don’t even remember him being included on the voluminous reading lists for our comprehensive or preliminary examinations.

It wasn’t until after I graduated, and was teaching as a Ball State University professor at Indiana State Prison that I decided it was about time I actually knuckled down and read Bentham’s works, starting with one of his most important texts, his Introduction To The Principles Of Morality And Legislation, where he fully and comprehensively sets out his Utilitarian theory, at great length and depth, with seemingly interminable analyses and examples. His prose is not exactly the most captivating stylistically, but there’s something to be said for the scope of his project.

I began incorporating excerpts from his works into my own Ethics classes (there’s no way I would inflict the totality of the perhaps poorly-named “Introduction” upon my students, though I did read through the entirety myself. And once I started teaching at Marist College in the early 2010s, I started producing video resources on his Introduction, at first longer course recording videos and then shorter “core concept” videos. Back then, I also created a set of core concept videos working through examples of how Bentham’s Utilitarian theory might be applied.

More recently, in the class on Love, Friendship, Desire, and Relationships I taught last semester at Marquette University, I incorporated another of Bentham’s texts, his posthumously published “Offenses Against Oneself”, which is primarily an argument along Utilitarian lines for ceasing prohibition or punishment of male-male sexual relations. It was intended to be part of the Introduction, but was left out because Bentham was concerned about what the effects might be for the rest of his work.

I recently produced an entire set of core concept videos going through “Offenses Against Oneself”. I never converted the example videos into Sadler’s lectures podcast episodes, mainly because I made a lot of reference in those to what was on the chalkboard in carrying out Utilitarian calculations. But I have converted all of the other video lectures on Bentham’s Introduction and “Offenses Against Oneself” into podcast episodes, which I am providing links to here.

So here are the lectures I have available at this point:

Introduction To Principles Of Morality And Legislation

Examples For Applying Bentham’s Utilitarian Ethics

“Offenses Against Oneself”

So there you have them. Fourteen lectures in both video and podcast format, and an additional five just in video format, all designed to help you better and more fully understand Jeremy Bentham’s works. I may down the line produce some additional lectures on the Introduction To The Principles Of Morals And Legislation, and if I do, I’ll add links to them here.

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]]><![CDATA[Video and Podcast Resources On Seneca's Shorter Works]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-senecas-70ahttps://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-senecas-70aMon, 02 Feb 2026 01:39:41 GMT

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I teach, talk about, and discuss Seneca pretty frequently in my classes, presentations, workshops, and tutorial sessions, and over time he has become one interlocutor I take as particularly important for my own thought and life. That is reflected by the fact that I’ve been producing lectures on his works for a number of years, covering all the key ideas, arguments, distinctions, and practices contained in at least some of them.

Generally, I produce lectures in video format first, shooting those in front of my chalkboard, where I can diagram out his thought, and perhaps write down some of the key phrases and terms. Those are “core concept” videos in the ongoing series that now number well past a thousand. Later, I take those videos and convert them into Sadler’s Lectures podcast episodes with improved sound, downloadable and listenable in that audio format.

I’ve done that so far with two of Seneca’s shorter texts, his On The Happy Life and On Shortness Of Life. Down the line, I plan to produce lectures on more of these works, for example his On Tranquility Of Mind and On The Constancy Of The Wise Person, among others. For the time being, I have these two to offer you full sets of lectures on, which hopefully will prove useful for you in better and more deeply understanding what Seneca is up to in these books.

Here they are:

On Shortness Of Life

On The Happy Life

So there they are. 14 core concept videos and 14 corresponding podcast episodes covering a number of the important ideas from these two works by Seneca.

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]]><![CDATA[Orphaned And Unpublished Papers]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/orphaned-and-unpublished-papershttps://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/orphaned-and-unpublished-papersTue, 20 Jan 2026 16:37:30 GMT

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Over the 30 years since I first started my graduate studies in philosophy, I have written more papers than I can count or recall. Some were assignments in classes I was taking in graduate school. Others were research projects of my own, many of which I eventually presented at various conferences or other academic forums. A good number of them would eventually get sent out to journals, and most of those that I got to that point ended up getting published. But for every article (or book chapter) I did publish, there were several more that I just didn’t end up sending out, or which got rejected, and I instead moved on to the next pieces I wanted to work on.

I also had some papers that can be rightly described as “orphaned” or perhaps “homeless” (in the sense of having lost their home. One book chapter I contributed to a volume commemorating the 900-year anniversary of Saint Anselm’s death didn’t get published because the academic press decided to pass on the entire project after the editor had assembled the entire volume. Another paper was originally accepted by a journal, with the only revision desired being that I should translate the Greek and Latin passages into English. After I did that, they rather uncharacteristically decided to reject it on the basis that it didn’t contain enough discussion of secondary literature. Several others were written for online journals which, as happens from time to time, ended up disappearing from the internet.

I’ve long since decided that I wasn’t going to try to take any of those previously written pieces, generally of decent quality, and work them up into papers I’d send out to academic journals to go into their reviews and publication process. There’s broad-based good reasons not to, which I’ll write about elsewhere, but I have one that applies to me specifically. I have other current research and writing projects that already take up enough of my time, and I’d rather focus on those.

Substack provides a good place for me to publish these previously unpublished or orphaned papers. They often do prove of interest to some readers. And perhaps, down the line, I’ll take them all and bundle them into a book that I’ll also self-publish, for those who would like to read through them in a more organized format.

Here are the pieces I have published so far, organized by chronology of their subject matters:

As I publish more of these unpublished and orphaned papers here in Substack, I’ll add links to them in this resource page.

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]]><![CDATA[Video and Podcast Resources On Marcus Aurelius' Meditations]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-marcushttps://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-marcusMon, 05 Jan 2026 01:03:28 GMT

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I first encountered Marcus Aurelius’ work The Meditations 35 years ago. I’d read references to him, and saw a paperback copy in a used book store, so I bought it before I went off to college as the summer drew to a close in 1990. I remember sitting out in the sun on campus paging my way through it. I’ll admit that I didn’t get all that much out of my early reading of the text, but that has much more to do with the person I was back then than anything to do with Marcus and the book of thoughts he wrote to himself. It would take over a decade of maturing before I would be able to really read the work and. . . not so much understand what the ideas were. . . but rather what their significance and value were.

My journey into studying Stoic thinkers and texts was catalyzed later by reading Epictetus’ Discourses in graduate school, at first out of interest in his ideas about choice, character, and what we can call the will (though Epictetus uses the term prohairesis), and then to find philosophical resources for dealing with anger, an emotion I had struggled with since childhood. And that led me back to rereading Marcus Aurelius, and getting much more out of studying his Meditations.

Since then, I’ve incorporated his work into a number of my classes over the years, and I’ve given a number of talks and workshops that have drawn upon his work. Years back, people started requesting that I start producing video resources working through the Meditations, and a while later, that’s precisely what I did, shooting some core concept video lectures on selected ideas and practices. A bit later down the line, I converted those into Sadler’s Lectures podcast episodes.

This year, one of my plans is to produce many more video and podcast lectures covering other portions of the Meditations I haven’t yet gotten to. I’ll add those here once they become available. Here are the thirteen I have to offer so far.

So there you have them, for the present, thirteen lectures in video and podcast formats on Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. I hope you find them interesting and useful!

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]]><![CDATA[Video And Podcast Resources On Cicero's On The Nature Of The Gods book 2]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-ciceros-6edhttps://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-ciceros-6edMon, 22 Dec 2025 01:15:43 GMT

Book 2 of Cicero’s On The Nature Of The Gods is a good bit longer than the preceding book, and differs from it in another important way. After leading us into the dialogue itself, Book 1 is divided between two philosophical perspectives, the Epicurean and the Academic Skeptic. The Epicurean Velleius both engages in criticism of other philosophical views on the gods (especially the Stoics), and advances the Epicurean position as the correct one, providing some arguments for it. The Skeptic Cotta then brings up a number of criticisms of the Epicurean position.

Book 2 is entirely given to the Stoic position on the gods and a number of other related matters, presented by its representative in the dialogue Balbus. The Skeptic criticism of the Stoic position that will follow has to wait until book 3. Given the additional space, the Stoic views can get considerably more exposition and argument than the Epicurean did (which is not unusual in Cicero’s works).

We are quite fortunate in having this presentation of Stoic theology and cosmology in book 2. If more (or quite frankly, any) Stoic literature from the Early and Middle Stoa had survived from antiquity, we might be much less dependent upon Cicero’s work for knowing what the Stoics thought and taught about divinity. In fact, we might not need Cicero’s work at all, as great as it is. But that isn’t the case. Unless we luck out in our lifetimes and some trove of Stoic texts are discovered, Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods is pretty much what we’ve got.

So what do we get in book 2? First of all, an entire set of arguments the Stoics provided for the existence of the divine, some of which are admittedly weak, others of which we will see made later by classical theists. We also get a lot of discussion of Stoic cosmology, in which the divine plays a number of important and immanent roles. We also get some very interesting discussions of Stoic allegory and rejection of superstitious (i.e. traditional Greco-Roman religious) views on the gods. And we get an important early philosophical presentation of views on how divine providence could be understood.

Here are the resources focused on book 2 of On The Nature Of The Gods.

Stoic Arguments About God(s)

  • Argument From Divination | watch video | listen to podcast

  • Argument From Cosmic Arrangement | watch video | listen to podcast

  • Argument From Intelligence | watch video | listen to podcast

  • Argument From Degrees Of Being | watch video | listen to podcast

  • Arguments That The World Is God | watch video | listen to podcast

Stoic Cosmology

  • The Stars As Gods | watch video | listen to podcast

  • Beauty Of Cosmic Matters | watch video | listen to podcast

  • Perfection Of Earth And Stars | watch video | listen to podcast

  • Nature And The Universe | watch video | listen to podcast

  • Stability Of World And Cosmos | watch video | listen to podcast

Stoic Conceptions Of Religion

  • Deification Of Beneficial Things | watch video | listen to podcast

  • Allegorical Interpretation Of Gods | watch video | listen to podcast

  • Religion And Superstition | watch video | listen to podcast

Stoic Views On Divine Providence

  • Providence, Plants, And Animals | watch video | listen to podcast

  • Providence And Human Beings | watch video | listen to podcast

  • Providence And Individuals | watch video | listen to podcast

  • For The Sake Of Rational Beings | watch video | listen to podcast

So there they are, seventeen lectures in both video and downloadable podcast formats on book 1 of On The Nature Of The Gods. I hope you find them illuminating and useful.

Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[Video And Podcast Resources On Cicero's On The Nature Of The Gods book 1]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-ciceros-fafhttps://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-ciceros-fafMon, 15 Dec 2025 00:24:38 GMT

Cicero’s dialogue On The Nature Of The Gods is an invaluable source for our knowledge about what two major philosophical schools of antiquity, the Epicureans and Stoics, held as views about the gods, human beings, and the cosmos. It would be well worth reading just for that reason, and early on in my career, I started incorporating portions of the text into my Philosophy Of Religion class in order to provide students some alternative conceptions of divinity from ancient pre-Christian philosophies to contrast with what we can call the standard theist (usually Christian or Christian-derived) takes.

We also get some interesting, though not always strong, arguments about the divine presented by representatives from both of those schools. Some of these are arguments for the existence of the gods (and notice the plural there), which you might be surprised to see made much earlier in the history of ideas than we often see represented by figures in philosophy of religion textbooks or classes. But there are a number of other arguments that get made as well, unsurprisingly about the nature of the gods, including what their relations are to the rest of the cosmos and to the other rational nature, i.e. us human beings. And, since there’s an Academic Skeptic heavily involved in the dialogue as well, we also get critical examination and even rebuttals, of those arguments as well.

The work is divided into three books. Book 1 leads us into the dramatic situation of the dialogue and introduces us to the characters, Velleius (an Epicurean), Balbus (a Stoic), and Cotta (an Academic Skeptic. A good portion of it is a presentation of the Epicurean viewpoint on the gods, along with Epicurean criticism of other perspectives on the gods, which they consider superstitious or unreasonable. We also get Skeptical criticism of the Epicurean position and arguments. Book 2 is mostly devoted to the Stoic position, developed in considerable depth and detail. And book 3 consists in large part in a Skeptic attack on the Stoic position.

At present, I have produced a number of resources on books 1 and 2. I recorded a set of Core Concept video lectures for both books, and I’ve also converted those into Sadler’s Lectures podcast episodes. Next year I plan to finish up the work, producing lectures covering book 3.

Here are the resources focused on book 1 of On The Nature Of The Gods, as well as some more general resources about the work as a whole:

The Dialogue And Characters

The Epicurean Position

Skeptical Criticism

So there you have them, eleven lectures in both video and downloadable podcast formats on book 1 of On The Nature Of The Gods.

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]]><![CDATA[Video and Podcast Resources on H. P. Lovecraft's "The Call Of Cthulhu"]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-hhttps://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-hWed, 19 Nov 2025 02:55:26 GMT

As a writer of what he preferred to call “weird” fiction, H. P. Lovecraft left behind a legacy of excellent stories that straddle cosmic horror, dreamscape fantasies, and science fiction. Not only did he write tales, he was a significant part of a nexus of other great writers corresponding to each other. And beyond that, he was the generous creator of what has come to be called the “Cthulhu mythos” (he preferred the term “Yog-Sogothery”), generous because he invited other writers to not only step into his narrative universe as readers, but to try their own hands at setting stories within it.

One of his most important short stories, understandably, is his “The Call Of Cthulhu, first published in Weird Tales in 1928, later anthologized in many collections of his work as well as compendia collections with other great horror authors. People had asked me for quite some time to produce Speculative Fiction Studies videos on works by Lovecraft, and I decided that this particular story was the natural one to begin with. So I shot a set of ten video lectures, which then later I turned into Sadler’s Lectures podcast episodes.

Down the line, I’ll produce additional lectures on other stories by this great master of imaginative cosmic horror. I’m looking forward to that prospect quite a bit, in fact. Lovecraft is an author I first read as a grade-schooler, and I return to at least some of his works just for my own enjoyment most years. Once I’ve shot those videos and released those podcast episodes, I’ll create new resource pages here with links to those. For now, what I have to offer you are these on “The Call Of Cthulhu”.

So there you have them: ten lectures covering all the key themes, structure, framing, and the plot of this excellent story. I hope that you enjoy them!

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]]><![CDATA[Video and Podcast Resources On Frantz Fanon's Black Skin White Masks]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-frantzhttps://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-frantzSun, 09 Nov 2025 02:33:39 GMT

One of the philosophers whose work I long ago incorporated into my recurring classes on Existentialism is the West Indian philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. He authored several books, but the one that I have my students read a number of chapters from is his early work Black Skin White Masks. It is an excellent and insightful piece of analysis of how conceptions, power structures, and lived experiences, centered by race but also sexuality, language, politics, and colonialism, play themselves out.

One reason to incorporate Fanon into Existentialism classes is to show my students the reality that the loose movement we call Existentialism wasn’t entirely an affair of white European men. That’s clearly not the case, for anyone who has studied widely within it, and even if it were the case, I don’t see that as a reason to discount it. But it does help to address a common complaint I get from overzealous students on occasion.

A better reason to read Fanon is that he is an author who really represents a culmination of a number of strains of thought, and who integrates them thoughtfully and well in his works. If you read Black Skin White Masks, you’ll see him critically engaging a number of psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners, explaining judiciously where there ideas work and where they fall short. He also understands how to use phenomenological approaches effectively, and is keenly attentive to language and to cultural products. He has a solid philosophical background, and again incorporates thinkers, like Hegel for instance, without buy into their ideas wholesale.

His approach to race is quite complex, and that, to me is a really strong suit of his works. He rejects any simple solutions or criticisms, and looks forward to a time he doesn’t inhabit (and we still don’t), where the many issues and problems can be productively worked through. Race isn’t just a social construct, nor is it something with a basis in actual science, but it is something manifesting within bodies, in language, political structures and action, and within psyches.

He’s also an excellent writer, stylistically, which fortunately does come through in the translations of the work. That’s always a plus.

I created a series of core concept videos working through key ideas of Black Skin White Masks in front of my chalkboard, and then, as I usually do, came back to those and turned those into Sadler’s Lectures podcast episodes that people could listen to or download. Here are links to all of those

There you have them. Nine lectures in video and podcast formats on this great first main work by Frantz Fanon. Later on down the line, if I can find the time, I may create other sets of lectures on some of his other works as well.

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]]><![CDATA[Video And Podcast Resources On Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-thomas-1cehttps://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-thomas-1ceSun, 26 Oct 2025 00:15:50 GMT

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Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is a very important work in early modern philosophy. I think that most people tend to associate Hobbes’ work primarily with political philosophy, but he makes some very interesting contributions to ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of language as well. Often we credit his contemporary Rene Descartes as being the “father of modernity”, but I’d argue that Hobbes deserves that title just as much as he does.

I have taught books 1 and 2 of Leviathan pretty regularly in my academic classes, and continue to do so in the present with my students. I’ve also engaged in some academic research and publishing on various aspects of Hobbes’ thought over the years, which you can find in my PhilPapers page.

Over the years, off and on, I produced a number of core concept videos covering various key ideas, distinctions, and arguments found in Leviathan. I’ve also more recently converted those videos into Sadler’s Lectures podcast episodes. These were all developed initially as resources for my students, but I think that others can certainly find some use for them as they study Leviathan.

Here are all sixteen of the lectures I have produced so far, in both video and podcast formats.

There are still quite a few topics left to discuss in future lectures, and when I get to producing those, I’ll add links to those here on this page. For the time being, then, you have sixteen lectures in both video and podcast format that will lead you through most of the key ideas of the work. I hope you find them interesting and useful.

Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[Video And Podcast Resources On Cicero's On The Nature Of The Gods]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-ciceros-707https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-ciceros-707Sun, 05 Oct 2025 01:13:16 GMT

One of the texts I’ve taught in past classes, both Intro To Philosophy and Philosophy Of Religion, is Cicero’s On The Nature Of The Gods. This is a dialogue between representatives of some of the main schools of antiquity, looking at views and arguments that these traditions worked out on the gods, the cosmos, and related matters, as well as criticisms that can be raised against those perspectives.

We get an Epicurean, Velleius, who presents the Epicurean point of view and some interesting arguments reflective of that perspective in book 1. Book 2 is almost entirely given to a lengthy presentation of the Stoic views by Balbus, providing arguments not just for the existence and nature of the gods but also their providential care extended into the cosmos. In book 3, Cicero has the Skeptic Cotta (who is also the host of the conversation) take the stage and present counter-arguments and an interesting skeptic justification for observing the established religion, even if skeptics don’t really buy into it.

It’s a great text for a number of reasons. One of them is that it is a main source for our understanding of what the Stoics, and to a lesser extent the Epicureans, really held as their cosmological and theological views. Another is that it provided a blueprint for a much later author, David Hume, in his own work, the Dialogues Concerning Naturwal Religion. The third is that it presents us with some very interesting theistic and philosophical positions on the divine and the cosmos, of major significance at some times in Western thought, that aren’t within the orbit of classical (generally Christian) theism or atheist reactions against that.

So far I’ve produced core concept videos and corresponding podcast episodes covering both books 1 and 2, and some preliminary matters as well. Down the line, when I have some time, I hope to finish up the work and produce videos and podcast episodes covering the entirety of book 3.

For the moment, what I have available are 28 lectures in both video and podcast formats covering the entirety of the first two books of the work. Here they are:

Episodes On The Dialogue As A Whole

Episodes About Book 1

Episodes About Book 2

So there you have them. I hope you find them interesting and helpful. Once I’ve produced additional lectures on book 3, I’ll post them here as well.

Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[Video And Podcast Resources On Søren Kierkegaard's The Present Age and The Crowd Is Untruth]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-srenhttps://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-srenWed, 24 Sep 2025 02:37:38 GMT

One of the classes I teach regularly is Existentialist Philosophy and Literature. After we go through some generalities about Existentialism as a movement, the very first thinker whose works we begin examining together is the Danish philosopher, theologian, and essayist Søren Kierkegaard, one of the earliest of the figures associated with a new set of approaches that we place under that rubric of Existentialism.

Usually, I start my students off with two of his shorter works that set the stage not only for their introduction to Kierkegaard’s works (I also provide selections from Fear and Trembling as a supplementary text), but also as an introduction to some key themes that appear again in other Existentialist author’s works. One of these is quite short, and is called “The Crowd Is Untruth”. The other, “The Present Age” is a bit longer, and is actually one half of his work The Two Ages.

Both of these show up frequently in anthologies of Existentialist literature, and that is where I encountered them my freshman year in college, where they exercised significant influence on me, dealing with themes of individuality, truth and falsity, conformism, public opinion, and the media. Back then, I found Kierkegaard’s works that focused much more on Christianity a bit harder to get into, but these two were a bit less religion-heavy, so I was more receptive to reading and reflecting upon them. That’s another reason I chose them for my young students, who might be similarly inclined.

“The Present Age” contains some very incisive critique of how media works to produce a “public” that isn’t really anyone, and quite a few scholars have noted that it becomes even more relevant in the age of the internet and social media. So it has that going for it as well!

Some time back, I produced a series of core concept videos on both of these works, and then edited those into downloadable podcast episodes. Seven lectures on “The Present Age” and two on “The Crowd Is Untruth” sufficed to cover all of the main ideas. Here they are, for anyone who would like to use them as resources to study these great short works.

The Present Age

The Crowd Is Untruth

Later on down the line, I’ll be adding more Kierkegaard content here in my Substack dealing with other works. But for now, there you have them, nine lectures on these texts, in both video and podcast formats. I hope you enjoy them.

Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[Video and Podcast Resources On Philip Jose Farmer's "The Lovers"]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-philip-aa4https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-philip-aa4Mon, 08 Sep 2025 21:39:33 GMT

Philip Jose Farmer was a great science fiction and fantasy author who I first encountered back in middle school in the early 1980s, when I ran across and checked out some of his works at the Waukesha Public Library. He is perhaps best known for his highly imaginative and complex Riverworld, World of Tiers, and Dayworld series of novels. I’ve been enjoying rereading his works for decades, and highly recommend them to anyone interested in speculative fiction.

A few years ago, I produced a set of videos in my Speculative Fiction Studies series on his early novella, “The Lovers”. More recently, I discovered that I had never converted the sound files of those videos into Sadler’s Lectures podcast episodes, so I buckled down and did precisely that, releasing them all earlier this month. As I edit those podcast episodes, I get to hear what it was that particularly captivated me about the story, the worldbuilding, and the characters when I was producing the videos.

“The Lovers” would win the Hugo Award for Best New Science Fiction Author or Artist in 1953, and when you read it, even in the present day, more than 70 years later, it probably won’t be a surprise. It’s a genuinely excellent story for several reasons that I’ll mention shortly.

I should note, however, that the lectures I’m providing here are not focused on the story in its original state, published in Startling Stories in 1952, but rather on the expanded version of it, first published in 1961, and then republished in his anthology Strange Relations. The original story, interestingly, was rejected by some more traditional editors, namely John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science-Fiction and H.L. Gold, editor of Galaxy Science Fiction". And given some of its subject-matter, that’s quite understandable.

The Lovers has a reputation for having “broken the taboo on sex in science-fiction”, a claim that I think on its face is rather dubious, for reasons I talk about in the first lecture. If we reframe and qualify the claim in terms of depicting human beings having sex with other intelligent species, in the case of this story a parasitic pseudo-arthropod who is one of the titular “lovers”, well then Farmer was definitely breaking new ground.

What I particularly enjoy about the story, and perhaps you might as well if you read it, is not just the interplay between those two lovers, the human Hal Yarrow and the lalitha Jeanette Rastignac, as well as between Hal and some of the other characters, or the question about whether love felt between members of two species is as real and valuable as that between two humans. It is the extent of the worldbuilding that goes into the novel, both for the future Earth and for the planet Ozagen where most of the story takes place.

Earth has gone through an “apocalyptic war”, from which the human population is still recovering, centered around several surviving and thriving successor states. Hal happens to be unfortunate enough to be from the Haijac Union, dominated by the “sturch”, a combination of state and church, which is thoroughly imbued with a new religion founded by Isaac Sigman. Farmer provides enough narrative descriptions and interactions between characters to really flesh out these key aspects of the secondary world he constructs for the reader.

I could go on and on about this great story, but this is supposed to be a resource post, so I should get to providing you those links. Here they are, six lectures in both video and podcast form on Philip Jose Farmer’s novella, “The Lovers”.

I hope that you find these lectures interesting and that they spur you to reading this excellent early work by Farmer!

Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[Video and Podcast Resources On Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-rainerhttps://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-rainerWed, 27 Aug 2025 00:29:58 GMT

A short text I teach fairly often in my philosophy classes, strictly speaking, isn’t a work typically classified as one within that discipline. As it turns out, this semester, students in all three of the classes (Foundations Of Philosophy, The Creative Professional In Context, and Philosophies Of Human Nature, and I’m teaching will be reading it.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet is a work rich in ideas, observations, and suggestions for how we might understand ourselves and make our way through this complicated thing called life. It is a set of ten letters charting Rilke’s side of a correspondence that took place for several years with a young would-be poet, who attended a military academy and later was commissioned as and officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Franz Xaver Kappus would publish these letters after Rilke’s death, and readers since have derived great enjoyment, satisfaction, and wisdom by reflecting upon them.

The letters range over a number of different subjects, but keep circling back to a set of common themes, perhaps the most central of which is the need to develop within oneself what Rilke calls “solitude” (Einsamkeit), a metaphysical dimension and depth in the human person, which as the letters proceed we learn is essential to genuine love between developed people. Rilke also tells us at one point that all who deepen and expand their solitude share one single solitude.

The Letters have been translated from German to English many times by a number of various scholars and poets. The one I have my students read is by Stephen Mitchell, but I think you could profitably check out multiple versions and compare them with each other. If you can read German, you can find a copy online here, among many other places.

Rilke is a poet, novelist, and letter-writer whose works I have been reading and rereading since my college days, enjoying them, finding affinities with his ways of seeing things, and drawing upon them in a variety of different situations. I find that my students often respond in profound ways to him as well.

So some time back, as I began teaching the Letters To A Young Poet in my classes, I realized that I should develop resources on them to help students make their way through them, and get as much out of this work as possible. I found that seven core concept videos were enough to cover the entire work, and after producing those, I edited the sound files into a set of corresponding podcast episodes. Here they are:

There you have them then, seven lectures in both video and podcast form on this wonderful short work of thoughtful letters from one of the great poets of the early 20th century. I hope you find them helpful if you should make the plunge into this profound text.

Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[Video and Podcast Resources On John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism]]>https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-johnhttps://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/video-and-podcast-resources-on-johnWed, 13 Aug 2025 01:15:23 GMT

John Stuart Mill’s short work Utilitarianism is one that I have taught in my various classes many times, going all the way back to my first Ethics class at the very start of my teaching career in 1999. It’s always a pleasure to do so because I enjoy rereading his excellent and provocative prose, and thinking along the lines of the arguments and distinctions that he sets out.

I’m not myself a utilitarian in ethics, but I do think it is an important and often quite useful approach in ethical decision-making. By the time that Mill is writing, it has become what we can call an explicit tradition in ethics. John Stuart Mill’s father, John Mill, was one of the first generation of those who called themselves “utilitarians”, and he attempted to bring up his child along utilitarian lines, drawing upon the thought of his friend, Jeremy Bentham, who can rightly be called the “father of utilitarianism”.

Mill encountered and thought deeply about some of the challenges raised against the recently formed utilitarian doctrine and movement, and also was well-versed enough in other common approaches in ethics. So his work titled Utilitarianism doesn’t just reinterpret their moral doctrine. It responds to those challenges and objections brought up against utilitarianism, often pursuing the argumentative strategy of showing that seeming rival theories actually assume or use utilitarian principles in their own approaches.

Perhaps the idea most commonly discussed that is drawn from Mill’s Utilitarianism is the distinction between qualitatively higher and lower pleasures for human beings, along with the implication that there could also be qualitatively higher and lower pains. You might have encountered his famous verdict:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.

But there are a number of other important ideas that he articulates in the work, and I’ve produced lectures in both video and podcast format covering all of them. I use these in my own classes as resources provided for my students, and as I’ve learned over the years, quite a few other students, lifelong learners, and professors rely upon them as well.

Here they are:

So there they are. 10 lectures in both video and podcast format that will walk you through each key concept in John Stuart Mill’s work Utilitarianism. I hope you find them useful for studying and understanding the work!

Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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