Letters To A Young Philosopher - Number 0

starting a new series of posts providing advice and perspective about studying and practicing philosophy

People have been asking me for advice about philosophy for several decades now. And I would say that at least much of the time, I’ve done a fairly decent job in providing answers to the questions they asked, as well as clarifying matters that lie behind and motivate those questions. Often the questions aren’t as straightforward as the person asking them might think at the time, and they make me stretch and exert my intellectual muscles in order to provide them a proper answer.

For me doing that work has become an integral part of how I approach my vocation. It doesn’t do a lot of good to have formed preconceived ideas of all the questions people will or ought to ask, and then tell them (whether students, clients, discussion group members, or just random people interested in philosophy) what the important questions they should be asking are. You learn a lot by addressing the matters people are particularly interested in or puzzled by, as well as by seeing what partial progress they have made on their own, what sources of varying quality they have found and consulted, and the like.

I have been doing monthly AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) sessions since late 2017, streaming them for roughly 90 minutes on YouTube Live (if you’d like to see any of them, here’s the link to the playlist of the recordings), and that has been a very fruitful ongoing exercise in finding out what people, mostly younger than myself (though that’s not saying much, since I’m in my 50s), studying or interested in philosophy, want to know or get advice about.

A while back, I began toying with the idea of writing a series of essays that are essentially open letters exploring those sorts of questions and queries, and providing not just answers but reflections from my own experience, useful suggestions, ways to understand the fuller context involved in those common topics or questions.

I’ve been teaching Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous work Letters To A Young Poet in my classes for a number of years. It is an excellent set of musings by Rilke (who was himself fairly young at the time) on the nature of not only his craft of poetry, but also some deep and helpful reflections on life, solitude, relationships, memory, God, and art, shared with a young military officer who wanted to know if he had any talent at poetry.

Later on, thanks to my wife Andi teaching (and founding the CETL) at the Culinary Institute Of America, I encountered a similar work by a great chef and restauranteur, Daniel Boulud, titled Letters To A Young Chef. (I actually gave an invited guest lecture there at the CIA discussing both Rilke’s and Boulud’s “Letters” works with culinary students, which you can watch here, if you’d like).

So for the kind of open-letter essays I have in mind here, I thought to myself: '“why not use that broad rubric of letters to a young X”, at least while they are just in the form of posts? There are, as it turns out, already several books out there titled Letters To A Young Philosopher”, including a fairly recent one by Ramin Jahanbegloo (which I’ve never read and can’t speak ton the quality of), and an earlier one by Charles Hartshorne (which I also haven’t read, but I have read other Hartshorne, so I can say it’s likely quite good).

I do plan eventually, after I’ve written enough of the letters to cover the sorts of topics I think need to be discussed, to compile them into a book. But that will likely be years down the line. And by then, I’ll no doubt have come up with a different, and perhaps better title. Probably doing the work of thinking and writing will help with that.

There’s another reason for me to eventually shift away from the letters to a young X title, which is that the pieces I’m going to write here are not intended solely for young people, but for philosophers, or even philosophy-interested people, of any age. So if you were reading this, and saying “well, it’s nice he’s doing something for the youth, but maybe this isn’t for me”, rest assured, it is!

After this initial public post announcing the new series, the following, more substantive posts will all be published to my paid Substack subscribers. It’ll be an additional perk for people for helping to support my work. I’m planning to write two or three Letters to a Young Philosopher entries each month. So keep your eyes open for new posts in the series coming soon!

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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.