Somewhat related, I fell in love with a pretty obscure philosophy lecturer who uploaded his old Princeton lecture series to YouTube, dr Micheal Segrue. Genuinely the best overview of various philosophers I’ve ever seen. Highly recommended. I left a comment on a video with 4K views and he liked it.
Two weeks later a message was posted on his channel by his daughter that he had passed away.
We need to listen to old folks a bit more than we do. The latest isn’t always the greatest.
I knew that would be part of the old teaching company videos! I'll definitely give them a watch thanks for sharing. Finding those videos as a teenager inspired my interest in philosophy and it's what I eventually studied in university. They had such incredible content. The company was rebranded as Wodrium and it's good but they pivoted to more popular, consumable content and it's less rigorous in my opinion.
Thanks for this reminder. The Robert Solomon scene in Waking Life re: Sartre had a profound impact upon upon me as a teenager and spurred my interest in Kierkegaard, but it has been several years since I have considered him.
Great to see that many of his lectures are available online.
Indeed, his lectures are a great startoff point and presented as such but often his personal opinions and philosophical narrative runs through a bit roughly.
I get the feeling he is deeply Christian and mostly looks at the history of western philosophy as the project to build the modern Christian Enlightenment and how most (to him) valuable Post-Enlightenment philosophy is fundamentally based in processing biblical scripturally derived strands of thought through a dechristianization processes.
This might sound like a harsh criticism, it's not entirely meant to be. His introduction course is definitely worth it!
Michael Sugrue's you tube channel [1] has some of the best introductions to philosophy. His ability to articulate such complex concepts and lay them out logically and connect them is like magic. True performance from a master! RIP
For folks who lean more Republican - there's also an excellent series of lectures by Rick Roderick on youtube.
Just be aware that these people have failed to produce any original philosophical thought of their own - they are philosophy historians, rather than philosophers.
Two weeks later a message was posted on his channel by his daughter that he had passed away.
We need to listen to old folks a bit more than we do. The latest isn’t always the greatest.