If we ask which philosophy professionalfessor has made the goodest influence on this decade, there’s a solid case to be made for the late Michael Sugrue. But within the close toly four-decade-long profession that followed his studies on the University of Chicago below Allan Bloom (writer of The Closing of the American Thoughts, later immortalized in Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein), he never published a guide, nor took a tenured position. His final place of make use ofment as a lecturer was Ave Maria University, a small Catholic institution discovereded by the person behind Domino’s Pizza. After his demise earlier this 12 months, his work may need lived on solely within the memories of the students with whom he shared classrooms.
That will have been the case, a minimum of, if Sugrue’s daughter hadn’t uploaded his lectures to Youtube during the COVID pandemic, when viewers the world over had been greater than prepared for a dose of philosophical wisdom. “The lectures had been fileed as a part of the Nice Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition collection,” writes John Hirschauer in a 2021 American Conservative professionalfile, “a collection of talks on the West’s niceest authors and thinkers” published by The Educateing Company in 1992. “Sugrue’s first lecture within the collection is on Plato, the final on critical theory. His commentin a position oratory ability is on display by means ofout.” What’s extra, “he doesn’t automobilery a observe card or learn from a prompter. There’s exhaustingly a stutter in 37 hours of footage.”
Sugrue was diagnosed with cancer within the early twenty-tens, and “doctors on the time gave him 5 years to stay. He stated the considered Marcus Aurelius had taken on new implying since his diagnosis.” Certainly, Sugrue’s lecture on the Roman emperor and Stoic icon is probably the most popular of his movies, with over one and a half million views on the time of this writing. Through the years, we’ve featured different introductions to Stoicism right here on Open Culture, in addition to the work of other Stoics just like the statesman-dramatist Seneca the Youthful. However Sugrue’s 42-minute exegesis on Marcus Aurelius — not simply “probably the most interesting of the Stoics,” but additionally “the one examinationple of an absolute ruler who behaves himself in such a manner as to not disgrace himself” — has resonated unusually far and extensive.
Then, as now, Marcus Aurelius serves as “a standing reproach to our self-indulgence, a standing reproach to the concept we’re unable to cope with the circumstances of human life.” He fully internalized the central Stoic perception that there are “solely two sorts of issues: there are the issues you’ll be able to control and the issues you’ll be able to’t.” Eachfactor falls into the latter group besides “your intentions, your behavior, your actions.” And certainly, simply as Sugrue stored looking to the examinationple of Marcus Aurelius — returning to his textual content Meditations as currently as a webinar he gave two years in the past — students of philosophy but unborn will little question discover their strategy to the philosophical guidance that he himself has left behind.
Under, you’ll be able to watch a playlist of Sugrue’s lecture collection, Nice Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist
by way of NYTimes
Related content:
Three Big Volumes of Stoic Writings by Seneca Now Free On-line, Because of Tim Ferriss
The Stoic Wisdom of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius: An Introduction in Six Brief Movies
Oxford’s Free Introduction to Philosophy: Stream 41 Lectures
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the guide The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceguide.