May Newsletter For That Philosophy Guy

starting up the newsletter again

It’s been a while since I wrote a proper newsletter. That’s something I’d like to back to doing here in Substack regularly, and as the saying goes, “there’s no time like the present”, so might as well get on with it! Especially, since this particular month, as it happens, I’ve got a lot of news.

The first bit is that now that I’ve been doing a decent job regularly producing the Mind & Desire podcast and exclusive videos, I’m going to start producing a new kind of written essay content exclusively for paid subscribers here in this Substack. It will be a sort of regular advice column, tentatively and tongue-in-cheek called “Letters To A Young Philosopher”. I’m hoping after I’ve written enough of them to bundle them into a book.

We are just about finished with the Spring academic semester, which officially ends today. Since my final grades don’t have to be turned in until Tuesday, I allow my students to turn in any late work through Sunday night (so Monday I can get all of my grading done). As always, I didn’t get everything accomplished that I’d hoped for my classes and students, but I did get a good bit of work in. I produced a number of new resources on some of the authors we studied, most recently on the great middle Platonist, Plutarch.

My youngest child turned 18 years old, and has plans to attend college fairly locally in the Fall at UW-Madison. There ought to be a word for parents whose children are no longer children but adults, but if there is, I don’t know what. My oldest, as many of you know, graduated last Spring from UW-Milwaukee and has been working in her field of theater locally, doing voice, film, and stage acting, puppeteering, and house management. It’ll be pretty cool to have them both here in Wisconsin, the one here in our city, the other about 90 miles down the interstate.

Another big bit of news has to do with the volunteering I do here in a local cat shelter, Almost Home Cat Rescue MKE. I’ve been going there, doing cleaning and open house shifts, and occasionally helping assimilate new arrivals, for close to 2 years. The vice president of the board recently stepped down, and they put out a call to see who would be willing to step in and assume the role. I applied, the board voted, and I’m now the incoming vice president of a great organization. So that is pretty cool!

As always, I’ve been doing interviews and guest appearances on various podcasts, channels, shows, and sites, most recently on What Is Philosophy?, Acid Horizon, What Is Stoicism?, and Phylover Philosophy. My co-host Dan and I continue producing our radio show, Wisdom For Life, of which episode 95 will air tomorrow night. My co-host Scott and I have been regularly meeting for a monthly Classic Metal Class. And I’ve done more Ideas That Matter interviews recently as well.

So, what have we got coming up this month of May?

Online Seminars And Classes

At present, I'm teaching on online class “Six Key Platonic Dialogues”, with a little over 20 students enrolled in the course. That has been going quite well!

At the very end of the month, I’m providing another special 1-day online seminar, this time focusing on the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically his work On The Genealogy Of Morals. It will be taking place Saturday, May 31, starting at 9 AM Central Time. We’ll be doing three 90-minute sessions, working through one of the three essays of the work in each of those sessions. If you’re interested in enrolling, here’s the course site.

Later on in June, I plan to offer an 8-week expanded version of a class I taught last year, titled “Stoicism On The Cardinal Virtues”. I had a great time researching, producing resources, and teaching the class sessions last time around, and I’m eventually going to write a book on the topic. The earlier version I did was a 6-week class, and that just wasn’t enough time to get through all of the texts, topics, arguments and ideas. So, keep an eye out for that next month. I’ll likely start advertising it this month.

Online and In-Person Events

I have quite a few events coming up this month, most of them online, but one of them an in-person local event here in the Greater Milwaukee area.

Saturday, May 3, 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, May 10, Noon Central Time: Worlds Of Speculative Fiction Session 91 - Terry Pratchett’s Diskworld (the Witch novels). We’re returning to this rich narrative universe for the third 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 Pratchett’s books to participate. You can enroll in the online class here

Wednesday, May 14, 6 PM Central Time: Philosophers In The Midst Of History: Diogenes of Sinope. This is an in-person event in this quarterly series, hosted at the Frank Weyenberg Library in Mequon, Wisconsin. I’ll be discussing the life, works, thought, and influence of this interesting ancient philosopher. We’ll be recording the session, and posting it in this resource page on the series.

Sunday, May 18, 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

Saturday, May 24, Noon Central Time: Understanding Anger 2.0: Ancient Cynics On Anger. This is a monthly online study of ancient philosophical, literary, and religious viewpoints on the emotion of anger, this time looking at what the ancient Cynic school has to say about the matter. We will be streaming live on YouTube.

Video And Podcast Production

I’ll be continuing recording new Mind & Desire podcast episodes this month. Here are the plans for the Sadler’s Lectures podcast:

• finishing the series started last month on Max Scheler’s work Ressentiment

• starting a series on Philip K Dick’s novel Ubik

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

• some Sadler’s Honest Book Reviews videos

• another Fake Quotes video

• a Sadler’s Soapbox “rant” video about the economics and ethics of academic layoffs

• Quick Takes videos providing some useful advice about studying philosophy

• Sadler’s Stories videos about memories and past experiences

• more Core Concept videos on Plutarch’s works On Tranquility, On Being A Busybody, and On Awareness Of Progress In Virtue

• more YouTube shorts featuring advice and reflections, scenes from Milwaukee, and perhaps the kittens and cats from Almost 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. And I hope as well that this coming year proves to be a good one for all of us!