I think you need to get out more bro

@wafflestaster i agree man something about Dr. Sugrue's lectures have me interested from start to finish. Throughout my entire undergrad degree i could never pay this much attention to any lecture, i would zone out every 3 minutes.

Yes, he is a great communicator. Great progression, clarity, and organization of ideas, fine diction and cadence, direct while layered, and humorous. I felt similarly engaged and have been by his other lectures since I came across them a month ago. My understanding of philosophy and through it myself has been clarified by Sugrue.

There is brilliant, and then there is this guy.

Mmmm waffles…

Measure for measure was the only play I ever had done , it was after senior year of high school, and I was a late bloomer in the arts, didn't know I had any talent before that.

Dad said Bloom was a wonderfully well read scholar but his treatment of MFM was hopelessly weak.

@@dr.michaelsugrue I was also pretty surprised by Bloom's take after having heard the analysis here.

@@historia_agnostic Dad said I spoke to Bloom before his death- he was a wonderfully learned man- a great reader, but he always had a blind spot about the "anxiety of influence" when it came to Christianity and Western literature which led him to argue for an improbable separation of the Romantic poets from religion, a weak reading of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and a misreading of MFM.

I love the Blooms, Allen and Harold, but I sensed that about Harold and Christianity. Just a sense. Wonderful to know, as I’m really not smart enough or well read enough to challenge most of what Harold said and thought, and I’m too busy to chase down where he was a bit off. Now, after I finish The Idiot and Aron’s “The Opium of the Intellectuals,” I’m full-court pressing your Dad’s lectures. What you and he have done is priceless.

I share your high estimation for the great religious and philosophical traditions inside and outside the West, past and contemporary. I am indebted to ancient masters: Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Chuang Tzu, Ashoka, Marcus Aurelius, Isaiah, Amos, Mencius, Solomon, Luke, the Vedic writers, the Gilgamesh poet(s), Homer, Thucydides, at the very least. Every one of them was a better man than I am. I am indebted to a choir of voices I heard thereafter: Saint Augustine, Celestine V, Meister Eckhardt, Thomas a Kempis, Maimonides, Montaigne, Averroes, Rumi, Saint Francis, Erasmus, Pascal, Hobbes, Lessing, Spinoza, Moliere, Blake, Beethoven, Kant, Goethe, Burke, Kierkegaard, Marx. Their heroism is inspiring. I am indebted to, and currently running an intellectual tab with, a First Circle of first rate intellects, contemporary prophets all, living and dead, beyond mere mortality: Plato, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov, Camille Paglia, Leonard Cohen, WB Yeats, The Sex Pistols, James Joyce, Iggy Pop, Hans Urs Von Balthazar, Cormac McCarthy, John Coltrane, Jordan Peterson, Patti Smith, Maximillian Kolbe, Leo Strauss, Jackson Pollack, WH Auden, Alvin Gouldner, Eric Voegelin, Jurgen Habermas, Stanley Kubrick, Pink Floyd, John Rawls, Lenny Bruce, Thomas Mann, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Anthony Burgess, Terry Eagleton, Salvador Dali, George Orwell, GWF Hegel, Frank Zappa. All have my gratitude and respect. All have helped me ask and answer the question, “What can be defended and what is worth defending?”

@@dr.michaelsugrue Honestly thank you for your time and comment!! You have given me a great list of authors which I can start to read their writings. I have looked into a great deal of those authors and their work but, as you know I’m sure the paradox of knowledge, "as our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.” -Einstein. I have practiced zen for over 12 years and coming from a Christian background I believe reading the Eastern philosophy has for lack of a better term both stretched and strengthened my relationship with “God” not just in his personified form in Judao-Christian sense or in the various ways in which we try and shrink “God” into the realm of man and of reason. If I have learned anything about “God” whatever God that is could not be explain away by words alone. The infinite cannot be realized from the point of the finite. Words as clumsy as they are and language as messy as it is will not and could not explain away this Infinite multitude of reality of which we both are the experience and experiencer in tandem. Even many of the same great ideas that try and explain god in their Various ways that have come from the east and west are in many ways the same but, of a different flavor if you will. I think those ideas that share the same “spirit” are like the evolution of wings of birds and of insects. Both have the same function but the process that creates that paralleled function of the wings are greatly different. The same like minded ideas where created in far different conditions of necessity that come from their own time, place and world views. Yes we should fight for what we believe is truth but, in our ignorance truth can be a easy thing to create if we don’t try hard enough to ponder its validity. I think Soren found a beautiful quote we could live by if we’re are to make it in this world with our sanity intact. "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced." - Kierkegaard

Start with Thomas Merton's Way of Chuang Tzu. You would profit from Meister Eckhart too.

@@dr.michaelsugrue I listened to your lecture on Meister Eckhart which was a great lecture that already inspired me to learn more about him. I am currently listening to sermons of Meister Eckhart on audible. Thank you for taking the time to respond.

Wake me up when he gets to the post-modernists. . . .

Lost to time

What justice is seen to be evolves over time and changes back and forth and has many layers. And even if we submit to accepting and understanding what we've done often is not enough for those in positions of power to grant a more leniant sentence. So that the perpetrator now not o ly has to endure his punishment but also to endure his guilty conscience without forgiveness. This is why many inmates turn to fantasy religion where they can feel forgiven by some ultimate metaphysical judge. We are not a forgiving culture when it comes to acts we find reprehensible, but we seek understanding and acceptance from others for acts that are rephrensible and violent. Aborting the unborn is the main issue that comes to mind. A most violent act against the most vulnerable of our species and one where the justifications and hand waving is in steady supply.

Any video on this channel

Jordan petersons biblical series lectures. He does a psychological Interpretation of biblical stories and what they symbolize.

Most of the sonnets are love poems to the Earl of Southampton, a 17 year old aristocrat. CS Lewis wrote that "this was not a normal friendship between men" because the sonnets are obviously queer. I don't know many many practicing, much less devout Catholics inclined to address an adolescent boy as "the master mistress of my passion". Do you?Shakespeare's other sonnets are to a "Dark Lady". Shakespeare may have made a deathbed Confession and returned to the Church, but his conduct in the notoriously bawdy theatre culture of London does not seem indicative of great religiosity in any particular direction. For decades he and his wife did not cohabit [although they did have children] and his sex life seems to have been as unorthodox as his family life. BTW, King John, which is little produced, is red meat for Protestant interpreters. Sonnet 20 BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion; A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted With shifting change as is false women’s fashion; An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling, Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth; A man in hue, all hues in his controlling, Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth. And for a woman wert thou first created, Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting, And by addition me of thee defeated By adding one thing to my purpose nothing. But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure, Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.

Same.

The relationship exists because of its use in the famous verse in which Jesus attacks the hypocrisy of the puritans of the day: Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness (Matthew 23.27)

@@shakshiagrawal1375 Hahah 9 months later but finally got the answer. I didn't know it was a direct quote from the bible. It's funny cause I was just think about heart of darkness again the other day. Good timing. Thank you

@@Laocoon283 Haha, you're welcome. I was wondering if you'd see the reply or not because it had been a while, I'm glad I could help. The sepulchre imagery is also used widely in poetry, I don't remember which poems but it is quite common, thought it would interest you :)

@Indigo Child are you sure he is dead?

@@StoicFlame My father is ill but still alive.

@@dr.michaelsugrue thank god, i hope he recovers soon, he is one of the best teachers ever.

@@dr.michaelsugrue brother is he doing fine ??? Sending love from pakistan

@@dr.michaelsugrue I hope he gets better. How is he handling his illness and the thoughts of his own possible mortality? I know he spoke an awful lot about Keikegaard and his contemplations on mortality. It will be interesting to know your dad’s personal experience in reality vs his initial philosophical contemplations. He is such a great man, with such presence, I could almost feel like I knew him personally and I only started listening to him 2 weeks ago. Thank you for uploading these contents.

See my substack for an essay which addresses these questions.

"Would have been"?

@@dr.michaelsugrue was!!

was a Professer instead

How gracious of you. The height of arrogance is the least of my vices, and I appreciate your not mentioning the entire scroll of my enormities.

@@dr.michaelsugrue I simply anounce those things which strike my nerve. After all who is not most sensitive to when one offends our own position? This is a beef that I would happily take up with anyone so persumptious to speak in the voice of a Christan Orthodoxy. History herself conjured the Arabs to punish the Orthodoxy for this particular arrogance. She is being merciful to you by only conjuring me.