February 16, 2026 • 58 mins
Dr. Greg Sadler is the President of Reason IO - an organization that seeks to make philosophy accessible to the public. Additionally, as a member of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association (APPA), he uses philosophy to help counsel people through personal challenges and difficult life decisions. He is an expert in stoicism, ethics, and the history of philosophy.
Follow Greg:
Website | X | YouTube
Follow Zach:
Instagram | X | Website
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Disclaimer For all ideological interviews, this podcast is a
space for thoughtful conversation.
Hosting a guest implies neither their endorsement nor rejection
of our views, and a guest's appearance implies neither our
endorsement nor rejection of their views.
We encourage listeners to approach each conversation with
an open mind and emotional control, and to evaluate the
dialogue on the strength of the arguments presented, not one's
(00:21):
prior assumptions or biases. You read any of them and you're
like, well, clearly this stuff that we're being peddled, it's
going to make your life, you know, resilient and, you know,
make you into a warrior. This is all BS.
And that's, that's what you see with these Jim Bro types who
are, you know, stressing what they think masculinity looks
like. It's amazing that people who
(00:43):
specialize in anger management from a purely psychological
perspective are often completelyunaware.
And when you introduce it to them, they're like, holy crap,
this is great stuff. Hello, and welcome to another
edition of Ideological. I'm your host, Zach Lee, and
(01:06):
today we have a special guest. I'm joined by Doctor Greg
Sadler. Doctor Sadler, thank you so much
for being on the show today. Oh, thanks for having me.
Doctor Sather and I share a common interest in taking
philosophy from the clouds and bringing it down here, taking it
from the forms and and putting it into the shadows for the
people. And so we're going to talk a
little bit about kind of the organization that he works with
(01:28):
and some of his background and stuff.
So I appreciate you joining us today.
Doctor Sather, I wanted to ask you first of all, for those who
might not know who you are, can you tell us a little bit about
your background and education? Oh, sure.
Yeah. I started out in traditional
academia, but not as somebody who came from, let's say, an
academic oriented family. And so I just kind of, you know,
(01:53):
blundered my way into eventuallystudying philosophy and doing
graduate work in that, working as a professor for a number of
years and then switched to beingan adjunct when I got together
with my now wife because I had to move up from my my position
(02:14):
that I had to New York, where she was living.
And around that time, I started my own business.
I've been doing a lot of what wenowadays call public philosophy
for years before that. But I realized that there was,
you know, a great hunger out there for like, engagement with
ideas that wasn't being met verywell by, on the one hand, the
(02:39):
the traditional Academy. They are often very much like
the meme of Steve Buscemi with the skateboard and, you know,
the T-shirt that says fan name, yeah, saying what's up my fellow
kids. Right.
And then the popular culture was, and pretty much still is
doing a terrible job at any realengagement with ideas.
(03:03):
I mean, they love little bite sized chunks that are often
wrong. I guess the closest that they
ever got to something substantively engaging with
philosophy would be The good Place.
But I, I watched the few, the first few episodes and I was
like, yeah, I'm not watching anymore of this stuff.
So, you know, there's there, there wasn't a lot of room for
(03:23):
people in the middle of that. And so I, I jumped into that
niche and started producing videos and eventually started
adding more and more services. And, and now I would say I still
teach part time, but most of what I do is, you know, working
with clients and businesses and organizations and producing a
(03:46):
lot of content that people find useful.
I love it. And I feel like there's kind of
a a dearth in this space where people actually want to think a
little bit more, but they're either just getting political
tribalism or, you know, it's just a manual Kant puns or
something. Can't, can't puns.
And so, yeah, it's all, it's allthat.
It's, it's, yeah. So I love it.
(04:08):
OK, well, I want to just jump right into a few things.
So there is a tendency kind of for the average person to think
the philosophy is just head in the clouds thinking.
I, I think of a, a, a meme that I enjoy where somebody is dying
of a heart attack and someone says, please help, he's dying.
We need a doctor. And the, the philosopher comes
up and he's like, I'm a doctor, doctor of philosophy.
(04:29):
And then she says, well, he's dying and he says we're all
dying or whatever. So I think that we have a
tendency to think that it's disconnected.
It's kind of just peripatetics or kind of these cathedrals of
the mind in the Middle Ages. Talk to us a little bit about
how philosophy is practical and if that itself is even a fair
question. I mean, that's already assuming
that maybe the goal is to be practical, which is pragmatism.
(04:49):
So chat with us a little bit about that.
Well, I think it's important to keep in mind there's no such
thing as philosophy. There's many philosophies and,
you know, lots of different characterizations of what
philosophy is or what it should be doing by different people.
But there's never been consensusat any point in time, whether
(05:11):
we're looking at Western philosophy or non Western
philosophy about these these meta philosophical questions
about, you know, what its purpose is, what counts as
philosophy, what what doesn't work that way.
I mean, it's interesting that you brought up the parapathetics
because Aristotle is one of the first people to give us some
eminently practical stuff in, you know, not just the Nick of
(05:33):
McKeon Ethics, but the politics and the rhetoric and little
literary and dramatic criticism in the in the Poetics.
And he made a distinction between theoretical philosophy
and practical philosophy. Practical philosophy for him is
not about just, you know, sounding cool or coming up with
big thoughts. It's, it's about like, you know,
(05:54):
fixing our lives and are generally screwed up
personalities and relationships and stuff like that.
And the same thing can be said too, by the way, for a lot of
medieval philosophy, it was veryfocused on practical day-to-day
issues that would arise for people.
(06:17):
You know, I'll just give you oneprime example of a text, by the
way, that I, I've never met somebody who's read the entirety
of which is Thomas Aquinas, sometheologia.
And you hear the only words likeI don't want to read theology
that was written in part for poor guys who'd out who'd go to
university and then they'd go out to, you know, literal middle
(06:41):
of nowhere and be parish priestsand have to deal with their
parishioners crazy issues. And so they needed like a
theoretical apparatus that couldhelp them understand things
like, you know, there's an entire treatise on the emotions
in there, right? That could be very helpful for
people that are struggling with,I don't know, anger problems or
(07:03):
something like that. So I, I think there's, you know,
the way that we often teach philosophy gives this
impression. And I'll say to a lot of my
fellow peers, I think they like that notion that philosophy is
this, you know, super abstract, highly intellectual thing
because it makes them feel good about themselves.
(07:24):
You know, they're they're the gatekeepers of, I don't know,
the life of the mind or something like that.
But in, in reality, you look through the whole history of
ideas, even people that we associate with like, oh, they're
so, so abstract. Renee Descartes, for example,
you, you read his stuff carefully and you see that no,
he's very much about like fixingyour screwed up mindset on
(07:48):
things. And he gives you some
considerations for how to do that.
But we often teach them as if, well, here are the doctrines
that we need to get down in the arguments and that sort of
thing. So.
He just mentioned his cogito. We don't mention his passions
where he's trying to work this out as to some type of partial
stoicism or something like that and so.
Well, there's Stoicism actually,in the Meditations and in the
(08:10):
fourth meditation. That's right.
That's exactly right. Yeah, and and the Kojito itself,
we teach it as like it's pure isolated thought.
But actually in meditation too, the the being of the Kojito is a
being that affirms and denies, OK, that's nice and, you know,
abstract, but it's also a being that wills and wills against,
right. That feels Santilla, you know,
(08:33):
in in French and imagines and does all these other things.
So, I mean, it's us, US, you know, messed up individual human
beings. Yes, I love it.
That's super helpful. I appreciate that.
OK. So by the way, I read something
today that I didn't know. So when you were also at Notre
Dame, did you you studied with Alistair McIntyre?
(08:54):
Yeah, I was in a faculty fellowship, which was, I think
the last that they had of the Erasmus Institute.
Notre Dame likes to give seed money to its various institutes
for, you know, a certain number of years, and then it's up to
the director to raise more moneyto keep it going.
(09:15):
And I think in the case of the Erasmus Institute, they ran out
of money. So.
That's why you, you know, you, you want very practical people,
right? Not pure intellectuals running
these. And so, yeah, McIntyre was the
person leading the seminar that year.
And I was a very junior faculty member at the time, but he was
(09:38):
he was doing it on something he likes to do, you know, three
different versions of things or three traditions and bring them
into dialogue. That's kind of his shtick.
And I actually had a background in all three that he was
proposing. So I was like, you know, I could
actually possibly get this. So I put in an application.
(09:59):
As it turned out, as I found outin conversations with him later,
that was not the reason I was selected.
It was mainly because I was currently teaching at Indiana
State Prison for Ball State's four year degree program and
McIntyre wanted to know about prison education.
So he's like, yeah, let this guyin, you know?
(10:20):
And yeah, it was great. Everybody else was much more
professionally accomplished thanme.
It was a great experience of seeing the proverbial how the
other half lives academically, You know, 'cause I actually,
I'll tell you kind of a funny story about that.
It might take up a little bit oftime and be a bit of a
(10:42):
digression. So one of the things in this,
they, they put us up at Notre Dame, right?
They put us in dorm rooms and they gave us cards that would
get us into all the cafeterias, SO33 meals a day.
And we were all supposed to McIntyre wasn't doing this, but
all of us participants were supposed to eat together and,
(11:03):
you know, chat about things. That's part of what you, you do.
And so there was a professor there from McGill University,
and they were talking about how they weren't able to get much
research and publication done atat their position.
And I was like, yeah, yeah, that's a kind of a problem for
me as well. And she said, man, yeah, it's
(11:24):
really difficult teaching 5. And I was like, yeah, I teach
like 5 classes a semester too, and I'm barely getting two
articles written per year. And she looked at me and she was
like, Oh no, I only teach five classes per year.
And I was like, well, why are you having any trouble then?
(11:44):
I mean, you know, as I think sometimes academics, they, they,
if they're in a nice position like that where you only have to
teach, you know, several classesper semester, they, they kind of
lose sight of what it's like foreverybody else in the, in the,
the real trenches of education. So.
Yes, that's exactly right. OK, well, let me ask you this.
(12:06):
So we've got an episode on stoicism, but that's not my my
specialty is early modern, so Bacon and Descartes 3 Conte.
So you're you've done a lot morework on this than I have talked
to us a little bit about your work in Stoicism and also an
overview of what it is and what it's not.
There's a lot of people that just think it's like kill all
your emotions or whatever. So there's there, it's, it's
(12:26):
certainly more nuanced than that.
So give us give us some of your thoughts on that because it's
become kind of a, a popular hot topic even among there, there
are even guys that the David Goggins of the world or Navy
Seals. We'll talk about how their
Stoics and like, you've never read Marcus Aurelius, you've
never read Seneca, whatever. So I'm going to tell you a
little. Bit rant too before that.
Navy Seals are so overrated as an elite unit that I I'm, I'm ex
(12:50):
military, you know, oh what branch I was in the army and I.
OK, that's why. OK, I I say all my army buddies
are like no. No, not one hell week.
It's not because of being Army. It's just because you see so
many of them out there portraying themselves as the
ultimate warriors. And even among like elite
troops, Seals are not at the top, you know, and but they've
(13:11):
done a really great PR job for themselves.
And there's so many of them out there that are on big platforms
and turn out to be just thoroughly repugnant individuals
that you're like, well, they're not getting any moral training
in this. And they certainly are willing
to capitalize on the mystique ofbeing a Seal.
(13:33):
But yeah, I don't, I, I don't know.
I I'm I would put a a seal up against a Ranger any day and I
think it would be an even match.I've got interviews with both,
by the way, so I'll let them, I'll let them fight each other.
Later we'll have a. And, and you actually do see
Seals, former Seals who come outand say, you know, a lot of
these guys are not representing us well.
(13:54):
So there's kind of like a, a cottage industry of, of seals
doing stuff. But yeah, there's, there's a
lot, there's a whole industry out there of monetizing Stoicism
as well as other philosophies asways of life.
And, and most of it tends to be pretty fake and just money grabs
or misunderstandings. So why don't we start there?
(14:17):
That we often make a distinctionbetween uppercase S Stoicism and
lowercase S Stoicism. Donald Robertson has probably
got the best article out there about that.
So, and it's easy to just put itinto Google, you know, stoicism
versus Stoicism. So what you were talking about,
you know, stuff all your emotions down, don't feel them
at all. All that BS that's that's fake
(14:37):
stoicism, that's lowercase S Stoicism.
And you know, there's a long historical story that could be
told about how how we got there.But we don't have to go into all
of that. The point in that that's really
vital is when you start reading classic Stoic authors like
Seneca or Epictetus. Marcus Aurelius, Yeah, not not
(14:59):
bad, but, you know, definitely not as important as those two
are. Even Musonius Rufus or Cicero,
who wasn't a Stoic, by the way, but knew more about Stoicism
than I think most contemporary Stoics.
Do you read any of them? And you're like, well, clearly
this stuff that we're being peddled, it's going to make your
(15:20):
life, you know, resilient and, you know, make you into a
warrior. This is all BS, you know?
And so there's a lot of schlock or slop, as they like to say,
out there. And then there's the actual
uppercase, A Stoicism. And there are, you know, there
are many people out there doing work on that, representing it
(15:42):
well, but you kind of have to work a bit to find it.
So I mentioned Donald Robertson,you know, a good friend and and
colleague. He's a great representative of a
contemporary stoic. And you take him over any of
these media personalities who are advocating it.
Donald is the real deal. And these other people are
(16:04):
faking the funk, so to speak. So, you know, what Stoicism is,
is a coherent systematic philosophy that says that what
we should primarily be focused on is developing what they call
the virtues. And there's a complicated sort
of doctrine of what exactly the the virtues are in their
(16:27):
fullness. But we can make it simple and
say they like to talk in terms of cardinal meaning, like top
level and then subordinate virtues.
So the cardinal virtues are prudence, you know, practical
wisdom, figuring out what's actually good for us, what's bad
for US, number of other things involved there.
Courage, which is what all the broics as we call them, get
(16:50):
attracted to, and that ignore everything else.
Temperance, which means it can be translated to self-control,
but that's only one aspect of it.
And then justice, which is absolutely central for the
Stoics. As a matter of fact, some Stoics
think that that's the most important of the, the virtues.
And each of these is like, thinkof it as like a basket that
(17:12):
you've got a bunch of different things in.
So courage isn't just about mastering your fear in scary
situations. It's also about like doing your
job when you don't feel like doing it and you're getting
bored or getting restless or stuff like that.
That that's Philiponia, love of Labor.
That's one of the subordinate virtues.
(17:32):
And temperance doesn't just meannot eating like a slob at the
buffet or drinking too much It it also has to do with, like,
how you arrange your life, you know, being well ordered.
And justice isn't just about, like, not violating other
people's rights or, you know, being honest about things.
(17:52):
It's also about being kind to people.
And so you know, anybody who there's there's this great
lawsuit a while ago and actuallygreat is the wrong term for it.
It's it's it's a great illustration of how people get
things wrong. There was a guy in Britain and
he was being a prick to his Co workers and saying crappy things
(18:15):
to them. And he got called into HR and he
was like, I'm a stoic. So I have to, you know, speak
the truth as I, I think it. And he got fired.
They were like, yeah, we don't care about that.
And in Britain, you can claim a philosophy of life as a kind of
religious exemption for your activities, just like, you know,
(18:35):
somebody might, you know, say I'm a Christian, so I can't do
this or that, right. So the judge in his case didn't
actually know enough about Stoicism and gave the guy a pass
because he said, you know, this is what Stoicism means, speaking
the truth. Well, if he just read Cicero or
Seneca, which he clearly hadn't,you know, he would have seen
(19:01):
right through that, that pretense of that guy.
So, you know, that's, that's keyto stoicism.
There's other things too. Some people like to talk about
the dichotomy of control, what'sin our control, what's not.
But all of that kind of feeds into the, the virtues really.
So I, I think that's, that's probably enough of a
characterization for your audience to maybe get them
(19:22):
interested in in it, you know, but it.
Is more holistic. I mean, you're, you're talking
for them a worldview for sure. And so it's as the broics, as as
you've mentioned, they, they will, they will emphasize for
example, Kurds there. They will not emphasize
temperance. In fact, it's the opposite.
It is, you know, moderation, allthings in moderation, including
moderation and kind of that stuff.
(19:43):
Well, and, you know, the classicStoics would say they don't even
understand courage because I mean, again, to bring up Cicero
and Seneca, they both are like, listen, if you don't actually
have justice and practical wisdom moderating it, courage
just becomes brutality and and savagery and stuff like that.
And that's what that's what you see with these Jim bro types who
(20:05):
are, you know, stressing what they think masculinity looks
like. And yeah.
Very good. Yeah, it seems to be.
And and this this kind of dovetails into our our next
question here. But would you say Stoicism is
more about emotion or agency in light of what we said?
And then how does that relate toour culture's desire to be
authentic? So what I see is a lot of, you
(20:26):
know, be authentic, be yourself instead of asking first, what
should a human be? So I think of of, of Aristotle
and, you know, humaning well. And so give me your some
thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean, the authenticity
part is kind of an interesting point to enter into it, right?
Because if you're authentically an A hole, you probably should
(20:51):
stop doing that. Whatever virtue ethics,
philosophy of life you pick. Platonics, Stoic, even
Epicureans would be like, yeah, quit.
Just quit being a jerk. So authenticity by itself is not
really a value, but I guess you could say that if you if you
(21:13):
reconceptualize it into becoming, you know, a human
being and in a better sense thanwhere you currently find
yourself, which I mean, we oftenthink of ourselves like these
independent, we're totally free beings, but we're we're so much
products of our background and the.
(21:34):
Stupid. We're trying to interpret it
outside of that framework. Oh yeah, good point.
Yeah, yeah. Narrative framework, right,
Right. And the narrative framework is
often like, how did I get so messed up, you know?
So yeah. I mean, if you, if you think
about authenticity as like moving towards what a, you know,
a real good person would look like, and it's going to look
(21:58):
different for different people. Like, it's not going to look the
same for you as it is for me. So we're not all going to be
like clones or some kind of hivemind, right?
I think that that could be a good, good descriptor for
Stoicism. No, I mean, the emotions, they
matter. The Stoics tend to view most of
(22:21):
what we call emotions as not something to be repressed, but
definitely something to be understood.
And then, you know, lesson. So if you think about anger is a
great example, the Stoics, theirattitude towards anger is kind
of 0 tolerance. It's never a good thing, right?
(22:42):
But other emotions like fear there is it it's possible to
feel fear in a rational way. So if I see, I don't know, my
not so well smart but not so smart teenage kid about to make
some stupid decision that is going to have some pretty big
(23:05):
effects. It it's it's rational for me to
feel a sense of fear, but not tofeel a sense of panic, right?
You know this. Seems to be more about control
active versus passive than it does emotion rights.
You know, as you, as you create more virtue, as you understand
that virtue is where you find that happiness, emotions will
(23:27):
still hit you, you just have farmore control over Is this
controlling me or am I controlling it?
Is my happiness really found mind in or mind out?
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
OK, again, I'm not, I'm not a, I'm not a ancient expert.
I just wanted to to see if that would be helpful.
I. Will add one other thing which
is that the Stoics you know I mentioned rational fear so they
(23:49):
call that caution your labia, which by the way is a term we
find in Aristotle and in Plato. It's not something that they
came up with on their own. They talk about several other we
often talk call them the positive emotional States and
and the idea is you, you should try to have these in your life
would be missing something without joy, you know, genuine
(24:13):
enjoyment of things or love for other people.
You know, sometimes people oh stoics should be non attached.
That's complete BS too. You know you should actually
feel good about your your connections with other people.
Yes, proper emotions, not no emotions.
Yeah, yeah. So I think that's that's an
important thing. And you mentioned agency.
(24:36):
I would say it's not just stoicism, but any, any virtue
ethics orientation is aimed at giving us greater agency.
I mean, you mentioned the word control.
That's another way of thinking about it, being able to use our
rational capacities to enhance and further them, right?
(24:58):
So I can be more rational tomorrow than I was yesterday.
And that's what making progress means.
Sometimes people think about like, while human beings are the
rational animal and it's like anon off switch, right?
So long as we got our brains, we're all equally rational.
But I mean, all you got to do islook at your own messed up life
and you know, little bit of little bit of like, what would
(25:21):
you call it? Retrospective stuff to realize
I'm I'm that guy back then 25 years ago was rational, but
definitely not as rational as this guy today, right?
That's right. That's right.
That's a great way to say it. OK, I want to, I want to take a
turn into something that you do that I find fascinating that a
lot of people don't know much about, which is the idea of
philosophical counseling. So when we think of counseling
(25:44):
today, we only think of it either in a medical context or
in just the traditional kind of psychological, you know, post
Freud, post Skinner, post Foyer Bach, laying down on the couch
talking about your dreams. Explain though a little bit
about philosophical counseling because this this also seems to
work with making philosophy practical for people.
Can you chat with us a little bit about that?
Because I know that's a big thing that you do.
(26:04):
Yeah, you could think of it as taking concepts from philosophy
that are applicable to, to people on their problems and,
you know, relationships and, andissues and transforming them
into constructs that they can they can use.
(26:26):
And it's good that you brought up like the medical and the
psychological because here in America, the two of them are
basically, with a few exceptions, they're basically
combined with each other, right.Big question is do you take
insurance, which is a very practical question.
And you can take insurance if you are classified as a medical
(26:49):
provider. So the psychological, we'll call
it establishment. You can think about the
American, the Psychological Association, medicalized
psychology years and years and years ago.
And there's other kinds of psychology as well, educational
psychology, experimental psychology.
But those you, you really can't get insurance for, you can't
(27:13):
claim it as psychotherapy. So philosophical counseling is
in the old sense of the term psychotherapeutic, right?
It is, it is helping people out with their psyche, but it's not
doing so under a medical umbrella or paradigm.
(27:33):
Instead, it's more humanistic, right?
And, and there's two different organizations here in the US
that certify psychological counselors. 1 is much more
oriented towards like the critical thinking movement and
logic based therapy. The other is much more eclectic
and and humanistic. So a lot of people do it in
different ways, but it's a it's it's a form of philosophical
(27:57):
practice. You can't do it effectively with
people that have serious deep rooted totally messing up their
lives psychological problems. They need to go to see somebody
else and and may and may indeed need to be like, you know, put
on medication or something. So you're not going to help
somebody deal with their psychosis or, you know, somebody
(28:21):
who's severely depressed with reading Plato and talking about
Plato, despite Lou Marinoff's, you know, Plato, not Prozac.
Sometimes you need the Prozac. But yeah, it's, it's, it's a
viable way of dealing with things.
Sometimes they call it therapy for the same.
And it can help people in a lot of ways that maybe psychologists
(28:46):
aren't our social workers who also do a lot of our, our
counseling these days, at least in some states, may not be as
well equipped to, to do so. Take for example, anger
management. You know, there's a lot of great
clinical work on anger management, but understanding
what anger is goes all the way back into the ancient period.
(29:09):
Aristotle is the first person tolike really look at it in a
number of different modalities and to come up with remedies and
guidelines for how to to lessen and understand anger.
The Stoics come after and, and they give you a ton of different
useful practices, some of which are kind of long term, some of
(29:31):
which are immediate. And it's amazing that people who
specialize in anger management from a purely psychological
perspective are often completelyunaware of these philosophical
resources. And when you introduce it to
them, they're like, holy crap, this is great stuff, you know?
So it's not about this. Before me.
(29:52):
Yeah, yeah. Well, there's, there's, there's
a lot of that right in, in, in humanity, reinventing wheels.
That's right. Yeah.
I mean, I tease. So I've got some friends that
that do either counseling or in the psychology field.
And so I just say, hey, the problem you're trying to solve,
is it material or immaterial? And I start going down fly.
I'm like, well, if it's material, you should be talking
to a neurologist and immaterial a priest or theologian.
So anyway, I start, mine's just a mess with him, though.
(30:14):
It doesn't actually help people.I'm there, I'm destroying.
You're building up, though. You're helping.
Yeah, and usually I'm not engaging in too many exchanges
of that sort, right. I don't do debates or stuff, but
yeah, work with individual clients.
They usually, I'm terrible at marketing, so I'm pretty
fortunate that they find their way to me.
My website, I think it's over 10years old and kind of needs to
(30:37):
be updated, but I, I get a steady stream of, of clients
coming to me and it's, I really enjoy it because it's a way of
taking the stuff that I, I love and study on my own philosophy
and then introducing it to people.
And you get to see them apply itwithin their own life and
(31:01):
improving their relationships and sometimes figuring out what
to do after they've lost their job or they've gone through a
difficult breakup or things likethat.
That's fascinating. I appreciate that.
OK. I also know that you spend a lot
of time studying ethics. Here's my question.
If you could say only one thing on that topic to a listening
(31:21):
audience, to our culture. My my audience is pretty broad.
I've got people of different world views, religions,
political views, just kind of the, the average American.
I know that's a that's a heavy like, yeah, someone could do a
dissertation just on that question.
What, what would you say though?What, what's something that you
see related to ethics where if you're, if you could say
anything, you're just like, listen, everybody this or don't
(31:44):
think of it this way or go down this route or this isn't what's
going to make you happy or whatever it might be.
What? What would you say?
That is a very tough one, but it's good sometimes to get those
sort of sort of challenges right.
And I will hold you to it. I mean, the later you'd be like,
oh, I should have said this or whatever.
Well, I probably will think of something after we can finish.
I'll be like I should have said that.
(32:06):
I mean, what comes to mind for me immediately is the need not
to be too perfectionistic in thinking about doing what's,
what's good or what's less bad in the situations that we're in.
I think a lot of people get tripped up because they think
(32:27):
that unless they can like have atotally airtight case for their
their choices, they're better off just like, you know, not
doing anything or following someprotocol that they don't really
buy into. Any good that we do is genuine
good. Even if it like misfires in some
(32:51):
way or it's part of some, I don't know, some overall system
in which the good winds up beingeroded or being misused by, by
somebody else, it's still good. So if I, I don't know, I, I do
something good for some strangerand it turns out that I don't
(33:11):
know they, they're the next Hitler or something.
It doesn't remove the goodness from that, that action.
And so I think hearing that can sometimes be helpful for people.
And maybe I can sneak in anotherthing too, please.
So, you know, that's sort of like, don't let the best be the
enemy of the good, right? The the imaginary, essentially
(33:32):
illusory best that we never actually reach.
But, you know, in between the best and the good is the better
and most of our ethical decisionmaking in life.
Cicero recognized this very, very well.
He talks about this in in his book On Duties, where he
criticizes the Stoic Pennatius for not paying enough attention
(33:54):
to this. We're usually not having to
choose between, you know, what'sclearly good and what's clearly
bad, although sometimes that happens, right?
It's usually between two things that are good and we have to
decide, well, which one is actually better, which one is
the greater good, right? And that's tough sometimes to
(34:14):
figure out, but you know, we canmake our best effort at it.
And same thing with like bad things, right?
We often have to choose, well, which one is worse and which one
is less bad. That's really doing ethics.
So you can't always come up withthe optimal solution every time.
And you don't have to, because you're not, you know, God
(34:35):
Incarnate. Yeah, very good, very good.
That's a, that's a great answer.This one is more about academia
overall. Do you see the modern
university, which I I would, I think it's been doing this for a
long time. I don't want to get your
thoughts, but do you see the modern university moving away
from the humanities and philosophy in particular, just
towards a STEM focus just because it's practical, like it
(34:58):
works, right? We are very we are very person
doing. We're very American.
Give me your thoughts on the, the move kind of or the the
downplaying of humanities and just to focus on the STEM.
Don't get me wrong, I like the STEM.
We're we're we're doing STEM right now as we talk over the
Internet. But like give me your thoughts.
I'm not going to be particularlyarticulate with this because
I've been mulling this over for a while and kind of trotting out
(35:20):
bits and pieces of this in conversations with people, but I
don't think STEM is really a thing.
I think that's a tagline that's been sold to people because,
yeah, when you look at the the contemporary academic landscape,
which is a, a patchwork, there'sno such thing as like the
university or academia any more than there is philosophy.
(35:43):
We've got like 4000 difference degree granting institutions
across the United States and then, you know, a lot of them
have graduate or professional schools so they can call
themselves universities, but they're very, very different
from each other. There is, there is a trend you
can say gutting the humanities and it takes place in the way
(36:06):
Gen. Ed or the core gets shrunk.
And we saw this just recently atone of the places that I
occasionally teach, Marquette University.
They went from having two philosophy classes to only one.
They also did that with English to two writing classes.
Now there's only one theology totop down to one, but they're
(36:28):
also doing that to the sciences and to mathematics.
So it's not like STEM is 1 big cohesive thing.
It's more like you got SM over here and then you've got ET over
here. And the ET are really bundled
together with the other professions, which include law,
(36:52):
medicine, business, nursing, those things that are the real
money makers for academic institutions.
And you can, so I'll, I'll just use Marquette as an example.
You can tell where the priorities are, not just like,
and where hiring is taking place, but just go look at the
buildings. The, the science buildings are
(37:17):
just as rundown and crappy as the humanities buildings are.
And where's the money flowing oncampus?
They've got a beautiful new business building.
The old business building was torn down to put up a beautiful
new nursing building. They have an amazing engineering
(37:38):
complex. The law school is, you know,
just, I mean night and day. It's like, you know, you're,
you're not even on the same campus.
And they even have an incredibledentistry building, right?
So it's, it's, you know, but thescience buildings, you know, the
physics, chemistry, life sciences, they look like crap.
(38:00):
That's not practical enough to sell.
So, yeah, and it's practical in a certain sense, because I mean,
you can do a lot with the humanities and, and the sciences
and mathematics, right, which isone of the most abstract of, of
disciplines. But university administrators
and boards of trustees and people like that, that's not
(38:22):
where their heads are in part cause most of them are no longer
educators. I mean, that was the case for
boards of trustees in the past. You get a bunch of business
people who have money they can sink into it and they get, you
know, some Benny's out of it, some perks.
But the, the administration at, at places that are universities
these days are typically people have never set foot in a
(38:43):
classroom before. And so they're very isolated
from what actually goes on. And, you know, they've got this
motto of let's run a, a university like a business.
So I think that's what's what's really happening now, to be
(39:03):
fair, a lot of humanities peopleare historically not great at
making a case for why they matter and why you should fund
them and all of that. There is kind of a philosophy in
the United States kind of screwed itself over in the 70s
and early 80s. You know, you look at like how
(39:25):
it portrayed itself. It was sort of like, you know,
we're the, the discipline for the really smart people.
If you ask us about what do you do with this?
You, you belong somewhere else, like history or political
science or all of that. And then that's great so long as
the money is flowing, right? Because then you can be as
elitist as you want, but as soonas somebody asks you, can you
(39:48):
please justify your existence, you're screwed.
You built up habits of not beingable to do that.
So yeah, that that that kind of set things back, particularly
for philosophy. But I would say that there's
many of the other disciplines, you know, the idea that you're
going to study literature just for its own sake.
(40:11):
And I don't know give talks about Proust.
You know, do we, do we really have an obligation to fund that
sort of thing? I, I don't know, you know.
Right, that's well said. Yeah.
It comes back to what is the purpose of a university?
Is it a resume builder or is it to be this free exchange of
ideas where you're challenged with masters almost like into a
(40:33):
Guild. So it's that's I think.
That, I mean, there's so little coherence to the curricula in
most colleges and universities. I mean, there's some exceptions,
right? But they tend to often be kind
of weird outliers where you're like, yeah, I don't know about
this curriculum, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's
(40:55):
great. I mean, that's not great The,
the down, the, the, the falling of the university.
But your explanation is great. I'm going to give you 2 more
questions here that are that I think are also helpful with,
with some of the stuff in which you're an expert.
To what degree are mental healthstruggles a crisis of meaning or
truth instead of or in addition to psychological meaning?
(41:18):
Obviously there, there there aremore cases at least diagnosed
now of people having depression or need to be on meds or
whatever. And so that's, that's, I'm not,
I'm not here to discuss the prosand cons of that.
To what degree, though, do you think there's something beyond
that which is a crisis of meaning or truth?
So I, I've, I've used this with some friends kind of on a
cognitive behavioral therapy side when it comes to Aristotle
(41:40):
and Virtuex and practicing virtues, practicing courage,
practicing kindness, practicing whatever it is before you are
that thing to become that thing.Because we always do the
opposite. We think that we'll just wake up
one day and not be anxious anymore instead of having to
practice not being anxious. But that's a way of like
combining philosophy and psychology.
But do to what degree do you think this is merely
(42:03):
psychological or medical? Again, I'm blending the two,
although I know they're different.
And what is it some this this mean the search for meaning, the
search for truth, people feelingdespair.
I mean spiritual or even if you want to make it not spiritual,
you could make it Albert Camus and you kind of determining your
own value. But but just some sort of
(42:24):
meaning. Like I think a lot of people are
just working and making money and then they can work some more
and then they die. And I'm like, what?
OK, what are we doing along the way?
Yeah. Well, so I'll say a few things.
One is that it's going to vary from individual to individual
and there could be components ofall three at at the same time.
(42:48):
I mean, there are definitely some people whose brain
chemistry is off in significant way who can be helped through
medical interventions. I think of my, my uncle on my
mother's side, Amy, who was severely bipolar and who wasn't
diagnosed until probably his 40sbecause, I mean, he grew up in
(43:10):
the baby boom generation in a relatively poor working class
family. And, you know, when you're
manic, everybody loves you, you're, you're on all the time.
And then when you're depressed, maybe everybody just kind of
ignores you. And he was severely.
So, you know, they have this, these diagnosis, mild, moderate
(43:30):
and, and severe. And he really needed medication.
And sometimes the medication would stop working for him,
which really sucked. And there were, you know, big
trade-offs, losing those highs that you, you get with the manic
phase, the feeling of being alive.
(43:50):
He would talk about that sometimes, but he realized at a
certain point that his life was much better using, you know,
whatever he could, he could be on.
So that's, that's going to be some people, right?
Some people definitely could usethings like antidepressants or
(44:11):
Ritalin, but it's probably, you know, much fewer who, who
absolutely need it than what we currently have in our, our
medical regime where we've been dosing people up now for what
like, I don't know. So really took off in the 80s
I'd say. So we know, I guess we're
(44:33):
talking about 40 years. So you know, 2 generations of,
of doing so. And then we, you know, we've got
the prevalent forms of psychotherapy.
You mentioned CBT and you know, we could talk about other
cognitive approaches like our EBT and things like that.
It's interesting that CBT, what we've seen is it tends to be
(44:56):
less effective. It tends to be very front loaded
in its effectivity, but doesn't seem for some things doesn't
seem to have great long term success, in part because it's a
little bit too practice oriented.
It's kind of a law of diminishing returns.
You get more at the beginning than you do as you go.
You do, yeah. And there's there's there isn't
(45:16):
enough about like an undergirding structure the way
that you have with the talk therapy things where narrative
comes in. It's interesting, Donald
Robertson, he and I had a conversation a while back where
and he's a, he's actually a practicing CBT person as well as
somebody with a philosophy degree and somebody does work on
Stoicism. And he, he, he, he was music
about stuff. And he wrote about this later.
(45:38):
He was like, you know, I wonder why people are so attracted to
rereading, you know, Marcus's Meditations or Seneca's letters
or Epictetus's Discourses. And you can give them these
classics of, you know, like Burns is feeling good and
they'll read it once and then they're like, I'm not reading
(45:59):
this crap again. I got everything I'm going to
get out of it. You know, what's that about?
Well, there's, there's a structure, there's a narrative
to it that's deeper than just psychotherapy, right?
So, you know, philosophy or other things can supply
something that's missing. And maybe the psychologist don't
(46:22):
don't really know that as well. And, you know, there's a lot of
good reasons that could be brought up why that would be the
case. That has to do with training
and, you know, being within a medical paradigm and having to
like do all the work involved with taking insurance, which is
a big problem in in America. But yeah, I think there's a lot
(46:43):
of cases where however you want to frame it, you, you use the
term meaning. That's that's a good one.
It's not that you can't find anymeaning whatsoever in
traditional psychotherapy in itsvarious modalities, but you're,
you are going to find at least some people are going to find
(47:03):
more working through Camus. I mean, some people get pissed
off reading him. I had a client one time who
wanted to work on him. And then he was like, I hate
this guy. And I was like, well, he is very
rhetorical, you know, But, you know, there, there could be
other things. Maybe reading Kierkegaard
actually helps you. Maybe sorting through Aristotle
(47:23):
helps you out. And I think there's, yeah,
unfortunately, there's not a lotof space in our culture for
promoting that. You know, again, think about
like shows like The Good Place, right?
It's great for talking about thetrolley problem, but who the
hell is the trolley problem everhelped out of their
(47:45):
psychological difficulties? That's nobody.
It's. It's just an interesting thought
experiment, right? You need something with more
weight, more, more heft to it that you can sink your teeth
into. So yeah, I, I, I think there's
definitely room for it. And, you know, to their credit,
the better psychologists are often people who have a deep
(48:09):
background in the humanities and, and draw upon that and draw
it in there, you know? Yes, it would seem that instead
of fighting each other, if you if you do these two together,
the psychology side and the philosophy side.
I mean, how many issues of, let's say, mental illness or
some type of psychosis or even just more things that are more
banal, some type of just generalunderlying anxiety.
(48:31):
If you had certain anchors, you had certain things that were
truth, certain traditions, certain whatever that you lived
in, could that it seems like it couldn't hurt.
Perhaps it could only help. It might not help at all, but I
don't know that it would make itworse.
Yeah. And I will say I'm the side of
philosophers in particular, we haven't done a very good job in
(48:55):
being good dialogue partners forthe most part with other
disciplines because we, you know, maybe from insecurity some
of the time or maybe out of a sense of pride, you know, like
we're the most important discipline, right?
You can say a lot of philosophers don't play well
with people of other disciplinesand tend to alienate them when,
(49:20):
you know, I mean, if you want toget into talking about
psychological issues, you betterknow some psychology or else
it's, it's like, you know, the, the jerk at the, the back of the
room when you're at the talk whoraises their hand and wants to
ask some irrelevant question about some trivial thing, right.
(49:42):
But that's what a lot of the, unfortunately, a lot of the
philosophers are like that. The really good philosophers are
people who have done, done the the groundwork for talking with
the people that they're going totalk with, you know, and they
respect the expertise on the others too.
We just, we just like, yeah, we,we do like the kind of gotcha
(50:04):
where someone's like, why is philosophy needed today?
And you're like, oh, that's a very philosophical question.
And we just try to to do the thegotcha, which is fun.
But it's, you're right. It is unhelpful to say, hey, the
way you think about, I don't know, reality, knowledge,
ethics, religion, politics mightactually be really, really
important for everything else. And so.
Yeah. Yeah, the gotcha thing too is
(50:26):
something that gets cultivated quite a bit by the way that
philosophy gets done and practiced within certain
traditions in the the university.
If you think that solving an issue for the time being means
producing A defeater, as the analytics like to call it, well,
(50:50):
that's just like the start of work that doesn't close the
issue. But a lot of people have been
trained like, oh, if I can just find a, a place where there's a
counter exception. Well, no, you need to figure out
like, is it a real counter exception?
What do you do in that case? Is it such an outlier that we
don't really care? Because most ordinary people
(51:10):
don't care if you, if you have aa, you know, clincher like that.
That's right. That's very yes.
Well said. OK, I'm going to give you the
last question here. And again, I, I appreciate your
time. Thanks so much for for chatting
with us today. But for anyone who might be
wanting to grow in applying philosophy to their daily lives,
(51:31):
are there some resources or somepractices you would recommend?
So we're going to, we're going to include, you know, your
information and stuff in the link so people can check out
what you're doing. But also if you just had kind of
a, hey, if you want to get started and making this more
applicable to your life or certain practices, I'd recommend
certain maybe resources, books, websites, podcasts, whatever it
(51:52):
is. What are some things that you
would recommend for somebody to get started?
I don't think that you can really thoughtfully and
productively just like jump intopractices and apply philosophy
without knowing something about philosophy.
(52:14):
So you probably want to have some sort of practice of
reading. And I think a lot of people are
scared to read primary texts because they feel like I'm, I'm
not up for that Philosophy. Is this really high level
discipline Well. Let's start with like Hegel or
Heidegger or something. And I'm like, let's, let's,
let's, let's back it off a little.
So that's. So that's, that's a good
example. So I, I, you know, I do get a
(52:35):
lot of people who are like, I'm going to start philosophy by
reading Hegel's phenomenology spirit.
And I'm like, that's a terrible idea, terrible idea.
Don't do that. I don't even like suggest
starting Hegel with the Phenomenology of Spirit, you
know, read some other more accessible stuff.
But I think that, you know, anybody who is sufficiently
motivated, provided they're not setting the bar too high for
(52:57):
themselves and being a perfectionist, they can read
some Platonic dialogues and get something out of it, or
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics or some of, you know, Cicero's
works or Seneca's letters. They'll have to reread it.
But that's what we do with all philosophical texts.
I, I think sometimes people approach text, not just in
(53:20):
philosophy, but the humanities, as if it's going to be as simple
as just working your way througha textbook or I don't know, like
a, a checklist or something likethat.
So, you know, you should expect that it's going to be difficult,
but it'll be something that thathelps.
And I would say, you know, if you're going to read around in
(53:40):
philosophy, you don't have to start with Plato, but he's a
good place to start. I mean, you could start with
Descartes. He's an interesting guy.
You're probably not going to understand 3/4 of what you're
reading, which was definitely the case for me and my first
reading of the Meditations as anundergraduate.
But you know, you shouldn't deprive yourself of the
(54:02):
opportunity to, to read primary text if you want to read
secondary stuff to help you out,like encyclopedia articles or, I
don't know, popular guides or you consult videos or stuff like
that. There's plenty of resources out
there and you shouldn't feel badabout using them.
(54:23):
But you shouldn't just rely on those because you don't know if
you're getting the genuine thingright.
That's right. I don't know if did you, have
you ever read William Durant's The Story of Philosophy?
Yes. OK, so I read it when I was an
undergraduate and I got all sorts of mistaken understandings
of the various people that he talks about because it turns out
that William Durant is a little bit of a bullshitter, you know,
(54:45):
at times. And if I hadn't actually like
gone to Schopenhauer and read them, I don't think I would have
known that Durant was kind of off on stuff.
Right. So you don't know until you
actually go to the the original.Now, the other thing I'll say
too is some philosophies have easy to pick out practices.
(55:09):
Like, you know, anytime a Stoic says when in a situation like
this, do this, OK, there's like a philosophical practice, but
there's others where you have todo a little bit more legwork on
your own. But I don't think it's too
difficult. So to take, you know, anger
again, Aristotle talks about, you know, these different
(55:30):
criteria for figuring out, excuse me, whether the anger
that you're feeling or acting onis really appropriate to the
situation, right? So right person, right time,
right reason, right way, all these sorts of things.
That's effectively the skeleton for a philosophical practice.
(55:52):
You're angry. Ask yourself, am I actually
directing my anger at the right person?
Now, Aristotle doesn't say to dothat, but that doesn't mean you
can't do that, right? So and then, you know, he gives
you some guidance about how anger works and when you're
likely to get more angry and what anger actually is in the
(56:14):
rhetoric in Book 2. And so you could like take his
rhetoric definition and I'm getting angry.
There was one term that shows upin there a lot phenomenon,
meaning a parent is the thing that I'm perceiving from the
other person. Is that merely a parent or is it
real? Right.
There's a philosophical practice.
(56:34):
So I think doing things like that can be quite helpful.
There may even be some things that seem very, very
theoretical, but you can turn them into, you can
operationalize them as, as the business people like to say,
into practices. And then the other thing I'll
(56:55):
say too, because I don't want togo too long on, on this
particular thing is it's good toconnect with other people who
have similar interests. You know, it can be kind of
lonely studying philosophy entirely on your own.
Then it's good also to have people to to bounce ideas off of
(57:20):
her to say, I think you got thatwrong.
You need to take another look atwhat the text actually says.
I know I my initial readings of many philosophers in the past.
I look at how I interpreted themback when I was a college
student or graduate student. Wow, I got this guy totally
wrong. You know, now in my 50s or back,
(57:41):
you know, my 30s or 40s, I actually understand.
Well, Descartes is a prime example.
I, I was quite wrong about Descartes, who I even took a
graduate summit her on in, in Graduate School.
And then there were things in my30s were like, finally I get
what he's actually saying. So you know.
(58:02):
Oh gosh, I regret so many of thethings that I've said and
written because at the time I thought this is clever and then
I reread it. I'm like, I completely
misinterpreted that. So I hear you.
That's that's helpful. The philosophy does bring both
pride and humility. And so you.
Well, it'll humiliate you. Correct.
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Well, Doctor Sadler, thank you
so much for taking the time that's been this was fantastic.
(58:25):
Thanks for sharing your wisdom with us.
And for those watching or listening, check out Doctor
Sadler and his stuff and Reason IO.
And thanks so much for for joining us today.
Well thanks for having me on, itwas a nice conversation.
It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for joining us.
And we'll see you on ideologicalnext time.
Disclaimer For all ideological interviews, this podcast is a
space for thoughtful conversation.
Hosting a guest implies neither their endorsement nor rejection
of our views, and a guest's appearance implies neither our
endorsement nor rejection of their views.
We encourage listeners to approach each conversation with
an open mind and emotional control, and to evaluate the
dialogue on the strength of the arguments presented, not one's
(00:21):
prior assumptions or biases. You read any of them and you're
like, well, clearly this stuff that we're being peddled, it's
going to make your life, you know, resilient and, you know,
make you into a warrior. This is all BS.
And that's, that's what you see with these Jim Bro types who
are, you know, stressing what they think masculinity looks
like. It's amazing that people who
(00:43):
specialize in anger management from a purely psychological
perspective are often completelyunaware.
And when you introduce it to them, they're like, holy crap,
this is great stuff. Hello, and welcome to another
edition of Ideological. I'm your host, Zach Lee, and
(01:06):
today we have a special guest. I'm joined by Doctor Greg
Sadler. Doctor Sadler, thank you so much
for being on the show today. Oh, thanks for having me.
Doctor Sather and I share a common interest in taking
philosophy from the clouds and bringing it down here, taking it
from the forms and and putting it into the shadows for the
people. And so we're going to talk a
little bit about kind of the organization that he works with
(01:28):
and some of his background and stuff.
So I appreciate you joining us today.
Doctor Sather, I wanted to ask you first of all, for those who
might not know who you are, can you tell us a little bit about
your background and education? Oh, sure.
Yeah. I started out in traditional
academia, but not as somebody who came from, let's say, an
academic oriented family. And so I just kind of, you know,
(01:53):
blundered my way into eventuallystudying philosophy and doing
graduate work in that, working as a professor for a number of
years and then switched to beingan adjunct when I got together
with my now wife because I had to move up from my my position
(02:14):
that I had to New York, where she was living.
And around that time, I started my own business.
I've been doing a lot of what wenowadays call public philosophy
for years before that. But I realized that there was,
you know, a great hunger out there for like, engagement with
ideas that wasn't being met verywell by, on the one hand, the
(02:39):
the traditional Academy. They are often very much like
the meme of Steve Buscemi with the skateboard and, you know,
the T-shirt that says fan name, yeah, saying what's up my fellow
kids. Right.
And then the popular culture was, and pretty much still is
doing a terrible job at any realengagement with ideas.
(03:03):
I mean, they love little bite sized chunks that are often
wrong. I guess the closest that they
ever got to something substantively engaging with
philosophy would be The good Place.
But I, I watched the few, the first few episodes and I was
like, yeah, I'm not watching anymore of this stuff.
So, you know, there's there, there wasn't a lot of room for
(03:23):
people in the middle of that. And so I, I jumped into that
niche and started producing videos and eventually started
adding more and more services. And, and now I would say I still
teach part time, but most of what I do is, you know, working
with clients and businesses and organizations and producing a
(03:46):
lot of content that people find useful.
I love it. And I feel like there's kind of
a a dearth in this space where people actually want to think a
little bit more, but they're either just getting political
tribalism or, you know, it's just a manual Kant puns or
something. Can't, can't puns.
And so, yeah, it's all, it's allthat.
It's, it's, yeah. So I love it.
(04:08):
OK, well, I want to just jump right into a few things.
So there is a tendency kind of for the average person to think
the philosophy is just head in the clouds thinking.
I, I think of a, a, a meme that I enjoy where somebody is dying
of a heart attack and someone says, please help, he's dying.
We need a doctor. And the, the philosopher comes
up and he's like, I'm a doctor, doctor of philosophy.
(04:29):
And then she says, well, he's dying and he says we're all
dying or whatever. So I think that we have a
tendency to think that it's disconnected.
It's kind of just peripatetics or kind of these cathedrals of
the mind in the Middle Ages. Talk to us a little bit about
how philosophy is practical and if that itself is even a fair
question. I mean, that's already assuming
that maybe the goal is to be practical, which is pragmatism.
(04:49):
So chat with us a little bit about that.
Well, I think it's important to keep in mind there's no such
thing as philosophy. There's many philosophies and,
you know, lots of different characterizations of what
philosophy is or what it should be doing by different people.
But there's never been consensusat any point in time, whether
(05:11):
we're looking at Western philosophy or non Western
philosophy about these these meta philosophical questions
about, you know, what its purpose is, what counts as
philosophy, what what doesn't work that way.
I mean, it's interesting that you brought up the parapathetics
because Aristotle is one of the first people to give us some
eminently practical stuff in, you know, not just the Nick of
(05:33):
McKeon Ethics, but the politics and the rhetoric and little
literary and dramatic criticism in the in the Poetics.
And he made a distinction between theoretical philosophy
and practical philosophy. Practical philosophy for him is
not about just, you know, sounding cool or coming up with
big thoughts. It's, it's about like, you know,
(05:54):
fixing our lives and are generally screwed up
personalities and relationships and stuff like that.
And the same thing can be said too, by the way, for a lot of
medieval philosophy, it was veryfocused on practical day-to-day
issues that would arise for people.
(06:17):
You know, I'll just give you oneprime example of a text, by the
way, that I, I've never met somebody who's read the entirety
of which is Thomas Aquinas, sometheologia.
And you hear the only words likeI don't want to read theology
that was written in part for poor guys who'd out who'd go to
university and then they'd go out to, you know, literal middle
(06:41):
of nowhere and be parish priestsand have to deal with their
parishioners crazy issues. And so they needed like a
theoretical apparatus that couldhelp them understand things
like, you know, there's an entire treatise on the emotions
in there, right? That could be very helpful for
people that are struggling with,I don't know, anger problems or
(07:03):
something like that. So I, I think there's, you know,
the way that we often teach philosophy gives this
impression. And I'll say to a lot of my
fellow peers, I think they like that notion that philosophy is
this, you know, super abstract, highly intellectual thing
because it makes them feel good about themselves.
(07:24):
You know, they're they're the gatekeepers of, I don't know,
the life of the mind or something like that.
But in, in reality, you look through the whole history of
ideas, even people that we associate with like, oh, they're
so, so abstract. Renee Descartes, for example,
you, you read his stuff carefully and you see that no,
he's very much about like fixingyour screwed up mindset on
(07:48):
things. And he gives you some
considerations for how to do that.
But we often teach them as if, well, here are the doctrines
that we need to get down in the arguments and that sort of
thing. So.
He just mentioned his cogito. We don't mention his passions
where he's trying to work this out as to some type of partial
stoicism or something like that and so.
Well, there's Stoicism actually,in the Meditations and in the
(08:10):
fourth meditation. That's right.
That's exactly right. Yeah, and and the Kojito itself,
we teach it as like it's pure isolated thought.
But actually in meditation too, the the being of the Kojito is a
being that affirms and denies, OK, that's nice and, you know,
abstract, but it's also a being that wills and wills against,
right. That feels Santilla, you know,
(08:33):
in in French and imagines and does all these other things.
So, I mean, it's us, US, you know, messed up individual human
beings. Yes, I love it.
That's super helpful. I appreciate that.
OK. So by the way, I read something
today that I didn't know. So when you were also at Notre
Dame, did you you studied with Alistair McIntyre?
(08:54):
Yeah, I was in a faculty fellowship, which was, I think
the last that they had of the Erasmus Institute.
Notre Dame likes to give seed money to its various institutes
for, you know, a certain number of years, and then it's up to
the director to raise more moneyto keep it going.
(09:15):
And I think in the case of the Erasmus Institute, they ran out
of money. So.
That's why you, you know, you, you want very practical people,
right? Not pure intellectuals running
these. And so, yeah, McIntyre was the
person leading the seminar that year.
And I was a very junior faculty member at the time, but he was
(09:38):
he was doing it on something he likes to do, you know, three
different versions of things or three traditions and bring them
into dialogue. That's kind of his shtick.
And I actually had a background in all three that he was
proposing. So I was like, you know, I could
actually possibly get this. So I put in an application.
(09:59):
As it turned out, as I found outin conversations with him later,
that was not the reason I was selected.
It was mainly because I was currently teaching at Indiana
State Prison for Ball State's four year degree program and
McIntyre wanted to know about prison education.
So he's like, yeah, let this guyin, you know?
(10:20):
And yeah, it was great. Everybody else was much more
professionally accomplished thanme.
It was a great experience of seeing the proverbial how the
other half lives academically, You know, 'cause I actually,
I'll tell you kind of a funny story about that.
It might take up a little bit oftime and be a bit of a
(10:42):
digression. So one of the things in this,
they, they put us up at Notre Dame, right?
They put us in dorm rooms and they gave us cards that would
get us into all the cafeterias, SO33 meals a day.
And we were all supposed to McIntyre wasn't doing this, but
all of us participants were supposed to eat together and,
(11:03):
you know, chat about things. That's part of what you, you do.
And so there was a professor there from McGill University,
and they were talking about how they weren't able to get much
research and publication done atat their position.
And I was like, yeah, yeah, that's a kind of a problem for
me as well. And she said, man, yeah, it's
(11:24):
really difficult teaching 5. And I was like, yeah, I teach
like 5 classes a semester too, and I'm barely getting two
articles written per year. And she looked at me and she was
like, Oh no, I only teach five classes per year.
And I was like, well, why are you having any trouble then?
(11:44):
I mean, you know, as I think sometimes academics, they, they,
if they're in a nice position like that where you only have to
teach, you know, several classesper semester, they, they kind of
lose sight of what it's like foreverybody else in the, in the,
the real trenches of education. So.
Yes, that's exactly right. OK, well, let me ask you this.
(12:06):
So we've got an episode on stoicism, but that's not my my
specialty is early modern, so Bacon and Descartes 3 Conte.
So you're you've done a lot morework on this than I have talked
to us a little bit about your work in Stoicism and also an
overview of what it is and what it's not.
There's a lot of people that just think it's like kill all
your emotions or whatever. So there's there, it's, it's
(12:26):
certainly more nuanced than that.
So give us give us some of your thoughts on that because it's
become kind of a, a popular hot topic even among there, there
are even guys that the David Goggins of the world or Navy
Seals. We'll talk about how their
Stoics and like, you've never read Marcus Aurelius, you've
never read Seneca, whatever. So I'm going to tell you a
little. Bit rant too before that.
Navy Seals are so overrated as an elite unit that I I'm, I'm ex
(12:50):
military, you know, oh what branch I was in the army and I.
OK, that's why. OK, I I say all my army buddies
are like no. No, not one hell week.
It's not because of being Army. It's just because you see so
many of them out there portraying themselves as the
ultimate warriors. And even among like elite
troops, Seals are not at the top, you know, and but they've
(13:11):
done a really great PR job for themselves.
And there's so many of them out there that are on big platforms
and turn out to be just thoroughly repugnant individuals
that you're like, well, they're not getting any moral training
in this. And they certainly are willing
to capitalize on the mystique ofbeing a Seal.
(13:33):
But yeah, I don't, I, I don't know.
I I'm I would put a a seal up against a Ranger any day and I
think it would be an even match.I've got interviews with both,
by the way, so I'll let them, I'll let them fight each other.
Later we'll have a. And, and you actually do see
Seals, former Seals who come outand say, you know, a lot of
these guys are not representing us well.
(13:54):
So there's kind of like a, a cottage industry of, of seals
doing stuff. But yeah, there's, there's a
lot, there's a whole industry out there of monetizing Stoicism
as well as other philosophies asways of life.
And, and most of it tends to be pretty fake and just money grabs
or misunderstandings. So why don't we start there?
(14:17):
That we often make a distinctionbetween uppercase S Stoicism and
lowercase S Stoicism. Donald Robertson has probably
got the best article out there about that.
So, and it's easy to just put itinto Google, you know, stoicism
versus Stoicism. So what you were talking about,
you know, stuff all your emotions down, don't feel them
at all. All that BS that's that's fake
(14:37):
stoicism, that's lowercase S Stoicism.
And you know, there's a long historical story that could be
told about how how we got there.But we don't have to go into all
of that. The point in that that's really
vital is when you start reading classic Stoic authors like
Seneca or Epictetus. Marcus Aurelius, Yeah, not not
(14:59):
bad, but, you know, definitely not as important as those two
are. Even Musonius Rufus or Cicero,
who wasn't a Stoic, by the way, but knew more about Stoicism
than I think most contemporary Stoics.
Do you read any of them? And you're like, well, clearly
this stuff that we're being peddled, it's going to make your
(15:20):
life, you know, resilient and, you know, make you into a
warrior. This is all BS, you know?
And so there's a lot of schlock or slop, as they like to say,
out there. And then there's the actual
uppercase, A Stoicism. And there are, you know, there
are many people out there doing work on that, representing it
(15:42):
well, but you kind of have to work a bit to find it.
So I mentioned Donald Robertson,you know, a good friend and and
colleague. He's a great representative of a
contemporary stoic. And you take him over any of
these media personalities who are advocating it.
Donald is the real deal. And these other people are
(16:04):
faking the funk, so to speak. So, you know, what Stoicism is,
is a coherent systematic philosophy that says that what
we should primarily be focused on is developing what they call
the virtues. And there's a complicated sort
of doctrine of what exactly the the virtues are in their
(16:27):
fullness. But we can make it simple and
say they like to talk in terms of cardinal meaning, like top
level and then subordinate virtues.
So the cardinal virtues are prudence, you know, practical
wisdom, figuring out what's actually good for us, what's bad
for US, number of other things involved there.
Courage, which is what all the broics as we call them, get
(16:50):
attracted to, and that ignore everything else.
Temperance, which means it can be translated to self-control,
but that's only one aspect of it.
And then justice, which is absolutely central for the
Stoics. As a matter of fact, some Stoics
think that that's the most important of the, the virtues.
And each of these is like, thinkof it as like a basket that
(17:12):
you've got a bunch of different things in.
So courage isn't just about mastering your fear in scary
situations. It's also about like doing your
job when you don't feel like doing it and you're getting
bored or getting restless or stuff like that.
That that's Philiponia, love of Labor.
That's one of the subordinate virtues.
(17:32):
And temperance doesn't just meannot eating like a slob at the
buffet or drinking too much It it also has to do with, like,
how you arrange your life, you know, being well ordered.
And justice isn't just about, like, not violating other
people's rights or, you know, being honest about things.
(17:52):
It's also about being kind to people.
And so you know, anybody who there's there's this great
lawsuit a while ago and actuallygreat is the wrong term for it.
It's it's it's a great illustration of how people get
things wrong. There was a guy in Britain and
he was being a prick to his Co workers and saying crappy things
(18:15):
to them. And he got called into HR and he
was like, I'm a stoic. So I have to, you know, speak
the truth as I, I think it. And he got fired.
They were like, yeah, we don't care about that.
And in Britain, you can claim a philosophy of life as a kind of
religious exemption for your activities, just like, you know,
(18:35):
somebody might, you know, say I'm a Christian, so I can't do
this or that, right. So the judge in his case didn't
actually know enough about Stoicism and gave the guy a pass
because he said, you know, this is what Stoicism means, speaking
the truth. Well, if he just read Cicero or
Seneca, which he clearly hadn't,you know, he would have seen
(19:01):
right through that, that pretense of that guy.
So, you know, that's, that's keyto stoicism.
There's other things too. Some people like to talk about
the dichotomy of control, what'sin our control, what's not.
But all of that kind of feeds into the, the virtues really.
So I, I think that's, that's probably enough of a
characterization for your audience to maybe get them
(19:22):
interested in in it, you know, but it.
Is more holistic. I mean, you're, you're talking
for them a worldview for sure. And so it's as the broics, as as
you've mentioned, they, they will, they will emphasize for
example, Kurds there. They will not emphasize
temperance. In fact, it's the opposite.
It is, you know, moderation, allthings in moderation, including
moderation and kind of that stuff.
(19:43):
Well, and, you know, the classicStoics would say they don't even
understand courage because I mean, again, to bring up Cicero
and Seneca, they both are like, listen, if you don't actually
have justice and practical wisdom moderating it, courage
just becomes brutality and and savagery and stuff like that.
And that's what that's what you see with these Jim bro types who
(20:05):
are, you know, stressing what they think masculinity looks
like. And yeah.
Very good. Yeah, it seems to be.
And and this this kind of dovetails into our our next
question here. But would you say Stoicism is
more about emotion or agency in light of what we said?
And then how does that relate toour culture's desire to be
authentic? So what I see is a lot of, you
(20:26):
know, be authentic, be yourself instead of asking first, what
should a human be? So I think of of, of Aristotle
and, you know, humaning well. And so give me your some
thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean, the authenticity
part is kind of an interesting point to enter into it, right?
Because if you're authentically an A hole, you probably should
(20:51):
stop doing that. Whatever virtue ethics,
philosophy of life you pick. Platonics, Stoic, even
Epicureans would be like, yeah, quit.
Just quit being a jerk. So authenticity by itself is not
really a value, but I guess you could say that if you if you
(21:13):
reconceptualize it into becoming, you know, a human
being and in a better sense thanwhere you currently find
yourself, which I mean, we oftenthink of ourselves like these
independent, we're totally free beings, but we're we're so much
products of our background and the.
(21:34):
Stupid. We're trying to interpret it
outside of that framework. Oh yeah, good point.
Yeah, yeah. Narrative framework, right,
Right. And the narrative framework is
often like, how did I get so messed up, you know?
So yeah. I mean, if you, if you think
about authenticity as like moving towards what a, you know,
a real good person would look like, and it's going to look
(21:58):
different for different people. Like, it's not going to look the
same for you as it is for me. So we're not all going to be
like clones or some kind of hivemind, right?
I think that that could be a good, good descriptor for
Stoicism. No, I mean, the emotions, they
matter. The Stoics tend to view most of
(22:21):
what we call emotions as not something to be repressed, but
definitely something to be understood.
And then, you know, lesson. So if you think about anger is a
great example, the Stoics, theirattitude towards anger is kind
of 0 tolerance. It's never a good thing, right?
(22:42):
But other emotions like fear there is it it's possible to
feel fear in a rational way. So if I see, I don't know, my
not so well smart but not so smart teenage kid about to make
some stupid decision that is going to have some pretty big
(23:05):
effects. It it's it's rational for me to
feel a sense of fear, but not tofeel a sense of panic, right?
You know this. Seems to be more about control
active versus passive than it does emotion rights.
You know, as you, as you create more virtue, as you understand
that virtue is where you find that happiness, emotions will
(23:27):
still hit you, you just have farmore control over Is this
controlling me or am I controlling it?
Is my happiness really found mind in or mind out?
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
OK, again, I'm not, I'm not a, I'm not a ancient expert.
I just wanted to to see if that would be helpful.
I. Will add one other thing which
is that the Stoics you know I mentioned rational fear so they
(23:49):
call that caution your labia, which by the way is a term we
find in Aristotle and in Plato. It's not something that they
came up with on their own. They talk about several other we
often talk call them the positive emotional States and
and the idea is you, you should try to have these in your life
would be missing something without joy, you know, genuine
(24:13):
enjoyment of things or love for other people.
You know, sometimes people oh stoics should be non attached.
That's complete BS too. You know you should actually
feel good about your your connections with other people.
Yes, proper emotions, not no emotions.
Yeah, yeah. So I think that's that's an
important thing. And you mentioned agency.
(24:36):
I would say it's not just stoicism, but any, any virtue
ethics orientation is aimed at giving us greater agency.
I mean, you mentioned the word control.
That's another way of thinking about it, being able to use our
rational capacities to enhance and further them, right?
(24:58):
So I can be more rational tomorrow than I was yesterday.
And that's what making progress means.
Sometimes people think about like, while human beings are the
rational animal and it's like anon off switch, right?
So long as we got our brains, we're all equally rational.
But I mean, all you got to do islook at your own messed up life
and you know, little bit of little bit of like, what would
(25:21):
you call it? Retrospective stuff to realize
I'm I'm that guy back then 25 years ago was rational, but
definitely not as rational as this guy today, right?
That's right. That's right.
That's a great way to say it. OK, I want to, I want to take a
turn into something that you do that I find fascinating that a
lot of people don't know much about, which is the idea of
philosophical counseling. So when we think of counseling
(25:44):
today, we only think of it either in a medical context or
in just the traditional kind of psychological, you know, post
Freud, post Skinner, post Foyer Bach, laying down on the couch
talking about your dreams. Explain though a little bit
about philosophical counseling because this this also seems to
work with making philosophy practical for people.
Can you chat with us a little bit about that?
Because I know that's a big thing that you do.
(26:04):
Yeah, you could think of it as taking concepts from philosophy
that are applicable to, to people on their problems and,
you know, relationships and, andissues and transforming them
into constructs that they can they can use.
(26:26):
And it's good that you brought up like the medical and the
psychological because here in America, the two of them are
basically, with a few exceptions, they're basically
combined with each other, right.Big question is do you take
insurance, which is a very practical question.
And you can take insurance if you are classified as a medical
(26:49):
provider. So the psychological, we'll call
it establishment. You can think about the
American, the Psychological Association, medicalized
psychology years and years and years ago.
And there's other kinds of psychology as well, educational
psychology, experimental psychology.
But those you, you really can't get insurance for, you can't
(27:13):
claim it as psychotherapy. So philosophical counseling is
in the old sense of the term psychotherapeutic, right?
It is, it is helping people out with their psyche, but it's not
doing so under a medical umbrella or paradigm.
(27:33):
Instead, it's more humanistic, right?
And, and there's two different organizations here in the US
that certify psychological counselors. 1 is much more
oriented towards like the critical thinking movement and
logic based therapy. The other is much more eclectic
and and humanistic. So a lot of people do it in
different ways, but it's a it's it's a form of philosophical
(27:57):
practice. You can't do it effectively with
people that have serious deep rooted totally messing up their
lives psychological problems. They need to go to see somebody
else and and may and may indeed need to be like, you know, put
on medication or something. So you're not going to help
somebody deal with their psychosis or, you know, somebody
(28:21):
who's severely depressed with reading Plato and talking about
Plato, despite Lou Marinoff's, you know, Plato, not Prozac.
Sometimes you need the Prozac. But yeah, it's, it's, it's a
viable way of dealing with things.
Sometimes they call it therapy for the same.
And it can help people in a lot of ways that maybe psychologists
(28:46):
aren't our social workers who also do a lot of our, our
counseling these days, at least in some states, may not be as
well equipped to, to do so. Take for example, anger
management. You know, there's a lot of great
clinical work on anger management, but understanding
what anger is goes all the way back into the ancient period.
(29:09):
Aristotle is the first person tolike really look at it in a
number of different modalities and to come up with remedies and
guidelines for how to to lessen and understand anger.
The Stoics come after and, and they give you a ton of different
useful practices, some of which are kind of long term, some of
(29:31):
which are immediate. And it's amazing that people who
specialize in anger management from a purely psychological
perspective are often completelyunaware of these philosophical
resources. And when you introduce it to
them, they're like, holy crap, this is great stuff, you know?
So it's not about this. Before me.
(29:52):
Yeah, yeah. Well, there's, there's, there's
a lot of that right in, in, in humanity, reinventing wheels.
That's right. Yeah.
I mean, I tease. So I've got some friends that
that do either counseling or in the psychology field.
And so I just say, hey, the problem you're trying to solve,
is it material or immaterial? And I start going down fly.
I'm like, well, if it's material, you should be talking
to a neurologist and immaterial a priest or theologian.
So anyway, I start, mine's just a mess with him, though.
(30:14):
It doesn't actually help people.I'm there, I'm destroying.
You're building up, though. You're helping.
Yeah, and usually I'm not engaging in too many exchanges
of that sort, right. I don't do debates or stuff, but
yeah, work with individual clients.
They usually, I'm terrible at marketing, so I'm pretty
fortunate that they find their way to me.
My website, I think it's over 10years old and kind of needs to
(30:37):
be updated, but I, I get a steady stream of, of clients
coming to me and it's, I really enjoy it because it's a way of
taking the stuff that I, I love and study on my own philosophy
and then introducing it to people.
And you get to see them apply itwithin their own life and
(31:01):
improving their relationships and sometimes figuring out what
to do after they've lost their job or they've gone through a
difficult breakup or things likethat.
That's fascinating. I appreciate that.
OK. I also know that you spend a lot
of time studying ethics. Here's my question.
If you could say only one thing on that topic to a listening
(31:21):
audience, to our culture. My my audience is pretty broad.
I've got people of different world views, religions,
political views, just kind of the, the average American.
I know that's a that's a heavy like, yeah, someone could do a
dissertation just on that question.
What, what would you say though?What, what's something that you
see related to ethics where if you're, if you could say
anything, you're just like, listen, everybody this or don't
(31:44):
think of it this way or go down this route or this isn't what's
going to make you happy or whatever it might be.
What? What would you say?
That is a very tough one, but it's good sometimes to get those
sort of sort of challenges right.
And I will hold you to it. I mean, the later you'd be like,
oh, I should have said this or whatever.
Well, I probably will think of something after we can finish.
I'll be like I should have said that.
(32:06):
I mean, what comes to mind for me immediately is the need not
to be too perfectionistic in thinking about doing what's,
what's good or what's less bad in the situations that we're in.
I think a lot of people get tripped up because they think
(32:27):
that unless they can like have atotally airtight case for their
their choices, they're better off just like, you know, not
doing anything or following someprotocol that they don't really
buy into. Any good that we do is genuine
good. Even if it like misfires in some
(32:51):
way or it's part of some, I don't know, some overall system
in which the good winds up beingeroded or being misused by, by
somebody else, it's still good. So if I, I don't know, I, I do
something good for some strangerand it turns out that I don't
(33:11):
know they, they're the next Hitler or something.
It doesn't remove the goodness from that, that action.
And so I think hearing that can sometimes be helpful for people.
And maybe I can sneak in anotherthing too, please.
So, you know, that's sort of like, don't let the best be the
enemy of the good, right? The the imaginary, essentially
(33:32):
illusory best that we never actually reach.
But, you know, in between the best and the good is the better
and most of our ethical decisionmaking in life.
Cicero recognized this very, very well.
He talks about this in in his book On Duties, where he
criticizes the Stoic Pennatius for not paying enough attention
(33:54):
to this. We're usually not having to
choose between, you know, what'sclearly good and what's clearly
bad, although sometimes that happens, right?
It's usually between two things that are good and we have to
decide, well, which one is actually better, which one is
the greater good, right? And that's tough sometimes to
(34:14):
figure out, but you know, we canmake our best effort at it.
And same thing with like bad things, right?
We often have to choose, well, which one is worse and which one
is less bad. That's really doing ethics.
So you can't always come up withthe optimal solution every time.
And you don't have to, because you're not, you know, God
(34:35):
Incarnate. Yeah, very good, very good.
That's a, that's a great answer.This one is more about academia
overall. Do you see the modern
university, which I I would, I think it's been doing this for a
long time. I don't want to get your
thoughts, but do you see the modern university moving away
from the humanities and philosophy in particular, just
towards a STEM focus just because it's practical, like it
(34:58):
works, right? We are very we are very person
doing. We're very American.
Give me your thoughts on the, the move kind of or the the
downplaying of humanities and just to focus on the STEM.
Don't get me wrong, I like the STEM.
We're we're we're doing STEM right now as we talk over the
Internet. But like give me your thoughts.
I'm not going to be particularlyarticulate with this because
I've been mulling this over for a while and kind of trotting out
(35:20):
bits and pieces of this in conversations with people, but I
don't think STEM is really a thing.
I think that's a tagline that's been sold to people because,
yeah, when you look at the the contemporary academic landscape,
which is a, a patchwork, there'sno such thing as like the
university or academia any more than there is philosophy.
(35:43):
We've got like 4000 difference degree granting institutions
across the United States and then, you know, a lot of them
have graduate or professional schools so they can call
themselves universities, but they're very, very different
from each other. There is, there is a trend you
can say gutting the humanities and it takes place in the way
(36:06):
Gen. Ed or the core gets shrunk.
And we saw this just recently atone of the places that I
occasionally teach, Marquette University.
They went from having two philosophy classes to only one.
They also did that with English to two writing classes.
Now there's only one theology totop down to one, but they're
(36:28):
also doing that to the sciences and to mathematics.
So it's not like STEM is 1 big cohesive thing.
It's more like you got SM over here and then you've got ET over
here. And the ET are really bundled
together with the other professions, which include law,
(36:52):
medicine, business, nursing, those things that are the real
money makers for academic institutions.
And you can, so I'll, I'll just use Marquette as an example.
You can tell where the priorities are, not just like,
and where hiring is taking place, but just go look at the
buildings. The, the science buildings are
(37:17):
just as rundown and crappy as the humanities buildings are.
And where's the money flowing oncampus?
They've got a beautiful new business building.
The old business building was torn down to put up a beautiful
new nursing building. They have an amazing engineering
(37:38):
complex. The law school is, you know,
just, I mean night and day. It's like, you know, you're,
you're not even on the same campus.
And they even have an incredibledentistry building, right?
So it's, it's, you know, but thescience buildings, you know, the
physics, chemistry, life sciences, they look like crap.
(38:00):
That's not practical enough to sell.
So, yeah, and it's practical in a certain sense, because I mean,
you can do a lot with the humanities and, and the sciences
and mathematics, right, which isone of the most abstract of, of
disciplines. But university administrators
and boards of trustees and people like that, that's not
(38:22):
where their heads are in part cause most of them are no longer
educators. I mean, that was the case for
boards of trustees in the past. You get a bunch of business
people who have money they can sink into it and they get, you
know, some Benny's out of it, some perks.
But the, the administration at, at places that are universities
these days are typically people have never set foot in a
(38:43):
classroom before. And so they're very isolated
from what actually goes on. And, you know, they've got this
motto of let's run a, a university like a business.
So I think that's what's what's really happening now, to be
(39:03):
fair, a lot of humanities peopleare historically not great at
making a case for why they matter and why you should fund
them and all of that. There is kind of a philosophy in
the United States kind of screwed itself over in the 70s
and early 80s. You know, you look at like how
(39:25):
it portrayed itself. It was sort of like, you know,
we're the, the discipline for the really smart people.
If you ask us about what do you do with this?
You, you belong somewhere else, like history or political
science or all of that. And then that's great so long as
the money is flowing, right? Because then you can be as
elitist as you want, but as soonas somebody asks you, can you
(39:48):
please justify your existence, you're screwed.
You built up habits of not beingable to do that.
So yeah, that that that kind of set things back, particularly
for philosophy. But I would say that there's
many of the other disciplines, you know, the idea that you're
going to study literature just for its own sake.
(40:11):
And I don't know give talks about Proust.
You know, do we, do we really have an obligation to fund that
sort of thing? I, I don't know, you know.
Right, that's well said. Yeah.
It comes back to what is the purpose of a university?
Is it a resume builder or is it to be this free exchange of
ideas where you're challenged with masters almost like into a
(40:33):
Guild. So it's that's I think.
That, I mean, there's so little coherence to the curricula in
most colleges and universities. I mean, there's some exceptions,
right? But they tend to often be kind
of weird outliers where you're like, yeah, I don't know about
this curriculum, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's
(40:55):
great. I mean, that's not great The,
the down, the, the, the falling of the university.
But your explanation is great. I'm going to give you 2 more
questions here that are that I think are also helpful with,
with some of the stuff in which you're an expert.
To what degree are mental healthstruggles a crisis of meaning or
truth instead of or in addition to psychological meaning?
(41:18):
Obviously there, there there aremore cases at least diagnosed
now of people having depression or need to be on meds or
whatever. And so that's, that's, I'm not,
I'm not here to discuss the prosand cons of that.
To what degree, though, do you think there's something beyond
that which is a crisis of meaning or truth?
So I, I've, I've used this with some friends kind of on a
cognitive behavioral therapy side when it comes to Aristotle
(41:40):
and Virtuex and practicing virtues, practicing courage,
practicing kindness, practicing whatever it is before you are
that thing to become that thing.Because we always do the
opposite. We think that we'll just wake up
one day and not be anxious anymore instead of having to
practice not being anxious. But that's a way of like
combining philosophy and psychology.
But do to what degree do you think this is merely
(42:03):
psychological or medical? Again, I'm blending the two,
although I know they're different.
And what is it some this this mean the search for meaning, the
search for truth, people feelingdespair.
I mean spiritual or even if you want to make it not spiritual,
you could make it Albert Camus and you kind of determining your
own value. But but just some sort of
(42:24):
meaning. Like I think a lot of people are
just working and making money and then they can work some more
and then they die. And I'm like, what?
OK, what are we doing along the way?
Yeah. Well, so I'll say a few things.
One is that it's going to vary from individual to individual
and there could be components ofall three at at the same time.
(42:48):
I mean, there are definitely some people whose brain
chemistry is off in significant way who can be helped through
medical interventions. I think of my, my uncle on my
mother's side, Amy, who was severely bipolar and who wasn't
diagnosed until probably his 40sbecause, I mean, he grew up in
(43:10):
the baby boom generation in a relatively poor working class
family. And, you know, when you're
manic, everybody loves you, you're, you're on all the time.
And then when you're depressed, maybe everybody just kind of
ignores you. And he was severely.
So, you know, they have this, these diagnosis, mild, moderate
(43:30):
and, and severe. And he really needed medication.
And sometimes the medication would stop working for him,
which really sucked. And there were, you know, big
trade-offs, losing those highs that you, you get with the manic
phase, the feeling of being alive.
(43:50):
He would talk about that sometimes, but he realized at a
certain point that his life was much better using, you know,
whatever he could, he could be on.
So that's, that's going to be some people, right?
Some people definitely could usethings like antidepressants or
(44:11):
Ritalin, but it's probably, you know, much fewer who, who
absolutely need it than what we currently have in our, our
medical regime where we've been dosing people up now for what
like, I don't know. So really took off in the 80s
I'd say. So we know, I guess we're
(44:33):
talking about 40 years. So you know, 2 generations of,
of doing so. And then we, you know, we've got
the prevalent forms of psychotherapy.
You mentioned CBT and you know, we could talk about other
cognitive approaches like our EBT and things like that.
It's interesting that CBT, what we've seen is it tends to be
(44:56):
less effective. It tends to be very front loaded
in its effectivity, but doesn't seem for some things doesn't
seem to have great long term success, in part because it's a
little bit too practice oriented.
It's kind of a law of diminishing returns.
You get more at the beginning than you do as you go.
You do, yeah. And there's there's there isn't
(45:16):
enough about like an undergirding structure the way
that you have with the talk therapy things where narrative
comes in. It's interesting, Donald
Robertson, he and I had a conversation a while back where
and he's a, he's actually a practicing CBT person as well as
somebody with a philosophy degree and somebody does work on
Stoicism. And he, he, he, he was music
about stuff. And he wrote about this later.
(45:38):
He was like, you know, I wonder why people are so attracted to
rereading, you know, Marcus's Meditations or Seneca's letters
or Epictetus's Discourses. And you can give them these
classics of, you know, like Burns is feeling good and
they'll read it once and then they're like, I'm not reading
(45:59):
this crap again. I got everything I'm going to
get out of it. You know, what's that about?
Well, there's, there's a structure, there's a narrative
to it that's deeper than just psychotherapy, right?
So, you know, philosophy or other things can supply
something that's missing. And maybe the psychologist don't
(46:22):
don't really know that as well. And, you know, there's a lot of
good reasons that could be brought up why that would be the
case. That has to do with training
and, you know, being within a medical paradigm and having to
like do all the work involved with taking insurance, which is
a big problem in in America. But yeah, I think there's a lot
(46:43):
of cases where however you want to frame it, you, you use the
term meaning. That's that's a good one.
It's not that you can't find anymeaning whatsoever in
traditional psychotherapy in itsvarious modalities, but you're,
you are going to find at least some people are going to find
(47:03):
more working through Camus. I mean, some people get pissed
off reading him. I had a client one time who
wanted to work on him. And then he was like, I hate
this guy. And I was like, well, he is very
rhetorical, you know, But, you know, there, there could be
other things. Maybe reading Kierkegaard
actually helps you. Maybe sorting through Aristotle
(47:23):
helps you out. And I think there's, yeah,
unfortunately, there's not a lotof space in our culture for
promoting that. You know, again, think about
like shows like The Good Place, right?
It's great for talking about thetrolley problem, but who the
hell is the trolley problem everhelped out of their
(47:45):
psychological difficulties? That's nobody.
It's. It's just an interesting thought
experiment, right? You need something with more
weight, more, more heft to it that you can sink your teeth
into. So yeah, I, I, I think there's
definitely room for it. And, you know, to their credit,
the better psychologists are often people who have a deep
(48:09):
background in the humanities and, and draw upon that and draw
it in there, you know? Yes, it would seem that instead
of fighting each other, if you if you do these two together,
the psychology side and the philosophy side.
I mean, how many issues of, let's say, mental illness or
some type of psychosis or even just more things that are more
banal, some type of just generalunderlying anxiety.
(48:31):
If you had certain anchors, you had certain things that were
truth, certain traditions, certain whatever that you lived
in, could that it seems like it couldn't hurt.
Perhaps it could only help. It might not help at all, but I
don't know that it would make itworse.
Yeah. And I will say I'm the side of
philosophers in particular, we haven't done a very good job in
(48:55):
being good dialogue partners forthe most part with other
disciplines because we, you know, maybe from insecurity some
of the time or maybe out of a sense of pride, you know, like
we're the most important discipline, right?
You can say a lot of philosophers don't play well
with people of other disciplinesand tend to alienate them when,
(49:20):
you know, I mean, if you want toget into talking about
psychological issues, you betterknow some psychology or else
it's, it's like, you know, the, the jerk at the, the back of the
room when you're at the talk whoraises their hand and wants to
ask some irrelevant question about some trivial thing, right.
(49:42):
But that's what a lot of the, unfortunately, a lot of the
philosophers are like that. The really good philosophers are
people who have done, done the the groundwork for talking with
the people that they're going totalk with, you know, and they
respect the expertise on the others too.
We just, we just like, yeah, we,we do like the kind of gotcha
(50:04):
where someone's like, why is philosophy needed today?
And you're like, oh, that's a very philosophical question.
And we just try to to do the thegotcha, which is fun.
But it's, you're right. It is unhelpful to say, hey, the
way you think about, I don't know, reality, knowledge,
ethics, religion, politics mightactually be really, really
important for everything else. And so.
Yeah. Yeah, the gotcha thing too is
(50:26):
something that gets cultivated quite a bit by the way that
philosophy gets done and practiced within certain
traditions in the the university.
If you think that solving an issue for the time being means
producing A defeater, as the analytics like to call it, well,
(50:50):
that's just like the start of work that doesn't close the
issue. But a lot of people have been
trained like, oh, if I can just find a, a place where there's a
counter exception. Well, no, you need to figure out
like, is it a real counter exception?
What do you do in that case? Is it such an outlier that we
don't really care? Because most ordinary people
(51:10):
don't care if you, if you have aa, you know, clincher like that.
That's right. That's very yes.
Well said. OK, I'm going to give you the
last question here. And again, I, I appreciate your
time. Thanks so much for for chatting
with us today. But for anyone who might be
wanting to grow in applying philosophy to their daily lives,
(51:31):
are there some resources or somepractices you would recommend?
So we're going to, we're going to include, you know, your
information and stuff in the link so people can check out
what you're doing. But also if you just had kind of
a, hey, if you want to get started and making this more
applicable to your life or certain practices, I'd recommend
certain maybe resources, books, websites, podcasts, whatever it
(51:52):
is. What are some things that you
would recommend for somebody to get started?
I don't think that you can really thoughtfully and
productively just like jump intopractices and apply philosophy
without knowing something about philosophy.
(52:14):
So you probably want to have some sort of practice of
reading. And I think a lot of people are
scared to read primary texts because they feel like I'm, I'm
not up for that Philosophy. Is this really high level
discipline Well. Let's start with like Hegel or
Heidegger or something. And I'm like, let's, let's,
let's, let's back it off a little.
So that's. So that's, that's a good
example. So I, I, you know, I do get a
(52:35):
lot of people who are like, I'm going to start philosophy by
reading Hegel's phenomenology spirit.
And I'm like, that's a terrible idea, terrible idea.
Don't do that. I don't even like suggest
starting Hegel with the Phenomenology of Spirit, you
know, read some other more accessible stuff.
But I think that, you know, anybody who is sufficiently
motivated, provided they're not setting the bar too high for
(52:57):
themselves and being a perfectionist, they can read
some Platonic dialogues and get something out of it, or
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics or some of, you know, Cicero's
works or Seneca's letters. They'll have to reread it.
But that's what we do with all philosophical texts.
I, I think sometimes people approach text, not just in
(53:20):
philosophy, but the humanities, as if it's going to be as simple
as just working your way througha textbook or I don't know, like
a, a checklist or something likethat.
So, you know, you should expect that it's going to be difficult,
but it'll be something that thathelps.
And I would say, you know, if you're going to read around in
(53:40):
philosophy, you don't have to start with Plato, but he's a
good place to start. I mean, you could start with
Descartes. He's an interesting guy.
You're probably not going to understand 3/4 of what you're
reading, which was definitely the case for me and my first
reading of the Meditations as anundergraduate.
But you know, you shouldn't deprive yourself of the
(54:02):
opportunity to, to read primary text if you want to read
secondary stuff to help you out,like encyclopedia articles or, I
don't know, popular guides or you consult videos or stuff like
that. There's plenty of resources out
there and you shouldn't feel badabout using them.
(54:23):
But you shouldn't just rely on those because you don't know if
you're getting the genuine thingright.
That's right. I don't know if did you, have
you ever read William Durant's The Story of Philosophy?
Yes. OK, so I read it when I was an
undergraduate and I got all sorts of mistaken understandings
of the various people that he talks about because it turns out
that William Durant is a little bit of a bullshitter, you know,
(54:45):
at times. And if I hadn't actually like
gone to Schopenhauer and read them, I don't think I would have
known that Durant was kind of off on stuff.
Right. So you don't know until you
actually go to the the original.Now, the other thing I'll say
too is some philosophies have easy to pick out practices.
(55:09):
Like, you know, anytime a Stoic says when in a situation like
this, do this, OK, there's like a philosophical practice, but
there's others where you have todo a little bit more legwork on
your own. But I don't think it's too
difficult. So to take, you know, anger
again, Aristotle talks about, you know, these different
(55:30):
criteria for figuring out, excuse me, whether the anger
that you're feeling or acting onis really appropriate to the
situation, right? So right person, right time,
right reason, right way, all these sorts of things.
That's effectively the skeleton for a philosophical practice.
(55:52):
You're angry. Ask yourself, am I actually
directing my anger at the right person?
Now, Aristotle doesn't say to dothat, but that doesn't mean you
can't do that, right? So and then, you know, he gives
you some guidance about how anger works and when you're
likely to get more angry and what anger actually is in the
(56:14):
rhetoric in Book 2. And so you could like take his
rhetoric definition and I'm getting angry.
There was one term that shows upin there a lot phenomenon,
meaning a parent is the thing that I'm perceiving from the
other person. Is that merely a parent or is it
real? Right.
There's a philosophical practice.
(56:34):
So I think doing things like that can be quite helpful.
There may even be some things that seem very, very
theoretical, but you can turn them into, you can
operationalize them as, as the business people like to say,
into practices. And then the other thing I'll
(56:55):
say too, because I don't want togo too long on, on this
particular thing is it's good toconnect with other people who
have similar interests. You know, it can be kind of
lonely studying philosophy entirely on your own.
Then it's good also to have people to to bounce ideas off of
(57:20):
her to say, I think you got thatwrong.
You need to take another look atwhat the text actually says.
I know I my initial readings of many philosophers in the past.
I look at how I interpreted themback when I was a college
student or graduate student. Wow, I got this guy totally
wrong. You know, now in my 50s or back,
(57:41):
you know, my 30s or 40s, I actually understand.
Well, Descartes is a prime example.
I, I was quite wrong about Descartes, who I even took a
graduate summit her on in, in Graduate School.
And then there were things in my30s were like, finally I get
what he's actually saying. So you know.
(58:02):
Oh gosh, I regret so many of thethings that I've said and
written because at the time I thought this is clever and then
I reread it. I'm like, I completely
misinterpreted that. So I hear you.
That's that's helpful. The philosophy does bring both
pride and humility. And so you.
Well, it'll humiliate you. Correct.
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Well, Doctor Sadler, thank you
so much for taking the time that's been this was fantastic.
(58:25):
Thanks for sharing your wisdom with us.
And for those watching or listening, check out Doctor
Sadler and his stuff and Reason IO.
And thanks so much for for joining us today.
Well thanks for having me on, itwas a nice conversation.
It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for joining us.
And we'll see you on ideologicalnext time.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Betrayal Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com