Wisdom for Life

Living a Meaningful Life

In this thirty-third episode of the Wisdom for Life radio show, hosts Dan Hayes and Greg Sadler engage in a wide-ranging discussion centered on what living a meaningful life is, what the challenges, obstacles, or misunderstandings that stand in the way can be, and useful perspectives and practices for keeping, finding, or developing meaning on one's life. 

Some of the approaches and thinkers they discuss include Existentialists like Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Friedrich Nietzsche; Stoics like Seneca and Epictetus; Cynics and Minimalists; and Aristotle and Aristotelians.

Jean Paul Sartre's No Exit (with Lucy Lawless) - https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2014/01/02/sartres-no-exit-read-with-lucy-lawless-jaime-murray/

 

Why It's Good To Give - https://wisdomforlife.podbean.com/e/why-its-good-to-give/

 

Show Music is by Scott Tarulli - https://www.scotttarulli.com/

One Year In To The Show

In this thirty-second episode of the Wisdom for Life radio show, hosts Dan Hayes and Greg Sadler celebrate hitting the milestone of being on the air together, producing the Wisdom for Life show, for a year.  They discuss a number of topics, including the backstory for the show itself, lessons they have learned (sometimes the hard way), their favorite episodes, why community radio is so important (and how you can support it), and what they'd like to do with the show this coming year.

 

Show Music is by Scott Tarulli - https://www.scotttarulli.com/

Philosophy As A Way Of Life (With John Sellars)

In this thirty-first episode of the Wisdom for Life radio show, hosts Dan Hayes and Greg Sadler discuss the topic of Philosophy As A Way Of Life.  This was a common, recurring, and traditional approach in philosophy until roughly the last two centuries. For this episode, Greg and Dan interviewed one of the present-day experts in this field, John Sellars, one of the co-founders of Modern Stoicism, ltd, professor of philosophy at Royal Holloway College in London, and the author of many books and articles on the matter.

 

They discuss what Philosophy As A Way Of Life is and what its main characteristics are, how it differs from standard types of academic philosophy, the importance of philosophical practices, and a number of other related topics.

 

John Sellars' article, What Is Philosophy As A Way Of Life can be found here - https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia28/parrhesia28_sellars.pdf

 

The book recommendations from this session are:

Pierre Hadot, Philosophy As a Way of Life - https://amzn.to/2N3nnvd

Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire - https://amzn.to/2Z8N14d

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue - https://amzn.to/3afmOHl

John Sellars, The Fourfold Remedy - https://amzn.to/3agvKfE

 

Show Music is by Scott Tarulli - https://www.scotttarulli.com/

AITA Posts As Everyday Moral Dilemmas

In this thirtieth episode of the Wisdom for Life radio show, hosts Dan Hayes and Greg Sadler discuss an advice forum on Reddit called AITA (Am I The A-Hole), which has 2.5 million members, and allows people to post their accounts of moral conflicts they are in or anticipate being in, and then advice and judgements from readers.

 

Dan and Greg introduce and describe the forum, and discuss the usefulness and morality of having such a forum, and then go on to examine several of their favorite cases found in the AITA Reddit from moral perspectives.

 

Asymmetric Knowledge Problems

In this twenty-ninth episode of the Wisdom for Life radio show, hosts Dan Hayes and Greg Sadler discuss the notion of "asymmetric knowledge problems", that is, situations in which some of the people involved have significantly more knowledge or information than others, who typically ought to be provided with that information.

Dan and Greg discuss and examine a number of common situations in which these sorts of information imbalances arise, and what we can do within the scope of our lives and society about these problems.  They also discuss the concepts of information literacy, information overload, and a distinction between known unknowns and unknown unknowns articulated by Donald Rumsfeld.

 

Show Music is by Scott Tarulli - https://www.scotttarulli.com/

The Paradox of Choice

In this twenty-eighth episode of the Wisdom for Life radio show, hosts Dan Hayes and Greg Sadler discuss the "paradox of choice", which is the idea that having a greater range of options - usually looked at as a good thing - often makes people less able to choose and less happy with the choices they make.

They discuss Barry Schwartz's conception of this in terms of consumer purchasing in his book titled "The  Paradox of Choice, and then broaden consideration of this problematic to a number of other fields. After that, they discuss how resources and insights from philosophy can help us avoid falling into the paradox of choice and to be happier with the choices we do make. 

 

Show Music is by Scott Tarulli - https://www.scotttarulli.com/

Doing Well in a Polarized Society

 In this twenty-sixth episode of the Wisdom for Life radio show, hosts Dan Hayes and Greg Sadler discuss how people can use resources and insights from philosophy to do well in the sort of polarized society we have been becoming for decades, and which was revealed as such even more in our recent 2020 election.  They discuss a number of ways in which our political processes are fractured and how people are often alienated from each other, from their political representatives, and from an increasingly contentious culture.  Philosophy can help to provide us with needed perspective and practices that not only allow us to get by, but even perhaps, in some ways, to make things better for ourselves and for others. 

 

Show Music is by Scott Tarulli - https://www.scotttarulli.com/

 

Professional Sports, Fandom, and A Rational Life

In this twenty-fifth episode of the Wisdom for Life radio show, hosts Dan Hayes and Greg Sadler are joined by special guest, Michael DeVito, former defensive end for the New York Jets and Kansas City Chiefs, and the topics they discuss revolve around the issue of being a fan of professional sports. Since retirement, Michael has earned two Masters degrees in philosophy and is currently a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Birmingham

There are many examples of fans behaving badly due to their emotional attachment to their teams, and so this raises a question:  can being a committed fan be a part of a rational way of living?  Or is a genuine attachment to a professional sports team - or indeed any sort of fandom - incompatible with an intentional, virtues-oriented mode of life?

The answer they provide is that it is indeed possible to be a good fan - not just "good" in terms of being devoted to a team, but in moral and ethical terms.

 

Michael DeVito's Wikipedia Entry - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_DeVito

 

Gregory Sadler's article "Stoicism, Sports, And Packers Fandom" - https://medium.com/stoicism-philosophy-as-a-way-of-life/stoicism-sports-and-packers-fandom-3895f9423e57

 

Show Music is by Scott Tarulli - https://www.scotttarulli.com/

 

The Season of Stoicism

In this twenty-fourth episode of the Wisdom for Life radio show, hosts Dan Hayes and Greg Sadler revisit their previous discussions of Stoic philosophy, not least because October and November are the "Season of Stoicism", with Stoic Week, the main Stoicon conference, and a number of Stoicon-X conferences coming up.  

 

They discuss a number of practices and insights from Stoic philosophy, and a recent case of a person who wrongly used Stoicism as a pretext for bad behavior in the workplace.  They also address a question about whether taking medication for mental illness is compatible with Stoicism, and briefly discuss a Stoic practice deriving from Epictetus, that of examining and rejecting mistaken inferences

 

More on Stoicon can be found here : https://modernstoicism.com/stoicon/

More on StoiconX can be found here : https://modernstoicism.com/stoicon-x-events-coming-up-worldwide/

More on Stoic Week can be found here : https://modernstoicism.com/stoic-week/

 

Show Music is by Scott Tarulli - https://www.scotttarulli.com/

What Else We Can Learn From Thought Experiments

In this twenty-third episode of the Wisdom for Life radio show, hosts Dan Hayes and Greg Sadler continue their conversation from the last show, when they began examining philosophical thought experiments to see what we can learn from them to improve our lives or to better understand ourselves. 

They engage in in-depth discussion of the Teletransportation Paradox, Searle's Chinese Room, Rawl's Veil of Ignorance, and Nozick's Experience Machine.

 

Show Music is by Scott Tarulli - https://www.scotttarulli.com/