If we ask which philosophy professor has made the greatest impact in this decade, there’s a solid case to be made for the late Michael Sugrue. Yet in the nearly four-decade-long career that followed his studies at the University of Chicago under Allan Bloom (author of The Closing of the American Mind, later immortalized in Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein), he never published a book, nor took a tenured position. His last place of employment as a lecturer was Ave Maria University, a small Catholic institution founded by the man behind Domino’s Pizza. After his death earlier this year, his work might have lived on only in the memories of the students with whom he shared classrooms.
That would have been the case, at least, if Sugrue’s daughter hadn’t uploaded his lectures to Youtube during the COVID pandemic, when viewers the world over were more than ready for a dose of philosophical wisdom. “The lectures were recorded as part of the Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition series,” writes John Hirschauer in a 2021 American Conservative profile, “a collection of talks on the West’s greatest authors and thinkers” published by The Teaching Company in 1992. “Sugrue’s first lecture in the series is on Plato, the last on critical theory. His remarkable oratory skill is on display throughout.” What’s more, “he does not carry a note card or read from a prompter. There is hardly a stutter in 37 hours of footage.”
Sugrue was diagnosed with cancer in the early twenty-tens, and “doctors at the time gave him five years to live. He said the thought of Marcus Aurelius had taken on new meaning since his diagnosis.” Indeed, Sugrue’s lecture on the Roman emperor and Stoic icon is the most popular of his videos, with over one and a half million views at the time of this writing. Over the years, we’ve featured different introductions to Stoicism here on Open Culture, as well as the work of other Stoics like the statesman-dramatist Seneca the Younger. But Sugrue’s 42-minute exegesis on Marcus Aurelius — not just “the most interesting of the Stoics,” but also “the one example of an absolute ruler who behaves himself in such a way as not to disgrace himself” — has resonated unusually far and wide.
Then, as now, Marcus Aurelius serves as “a standing reproach to our self-indulgence, a standing reproach to the idea that we are unable to deal with the circumstances of human life.” He fully internalized the central Stoic insight that there are “only two kinds of things: there are the things you can control and the things you can’t.” Everything falls into the latter group except “your intentions, your behavior, your actions.” And indeed, just as Sugrue kept looking to the example of Marcus Aurelius — returning to his text Meditations as recently as a webinar he gave two years ago — students of philosophy yet unborn will no doubt find their way to the philosophical guidance that he himself has left behind.
Below, you can watch a playlist of Sugrue’s lecture series, Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist
via NYTimes
Related content:
What Is Stoicism? A Short Introduction to the Ancient Philosophy That Can Help You Cope with Our Hard Modern Times
How to Be a Stoic in Your Everyday Life: Philosophy Professor Massimo Pigliucci Explains
Three Huge Volumes of Stoic Writings by Seneca Now Free Online, Thanks to Tim Ferriss
The Stoic Wisdom of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius: An Introduction in Six Short Videos
Oxford’s Free Introduction to Philosophy: Stream 41 Lectures
A History of Philosophy in 81 Video Lectures: A Free Course That Explores Philosophy from Ancient Greece to Modern Times
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
