Gregory B. Sadler
As a speaker, author, educator, and consultant, I bring philosophy into practice, making complex classic philosophical ideas accessible for a wide audience of professionals, students, and life-long learners. People need frameworks, applications, and guidance to successfully incorporate those useful ideas into their own personal and professional lives, and I provide those with enthusiasm and competence. I also help people find and use philosophical resources to map out and make difficult decisions, understand and solve complex problems, and reorient their practice and projects into more positive directions.
Having traveled down these paths myself, I know how powerful, exciting, and helpful well-understood ideas from philosophy can be for individuals and to organizations. Think of me as your expert guide, ready to lead you through the mountain ranges, metropolises, and labyrinths of an entire library of philosophical works, and bring you back not only having learned, but with a rucksack full of treasures and tools
With over a decade of professional experience as an educator, researcher, scholar, and internationally published author, I’ve developed and delivered high-impact educational content in a variety of formats and settings. I specialize in Ethics, Critical Thinking, Practical Reasoning, the History of Ideas, and Assessment of Student Learning.
“If the attitude of many non-Catholic modern philosophers toward Catholic thought could be summarized in a single sentence, it would be: It has been tried, it has produced its definitive results, which have been found lacking, and now its time is past”
“Wrangling about precisely what constitutes genuine philosophy, proper philosophical practice, method, and aims is an important part of modern philosophy’s content and heritage”
“examination of its own history and of the forms of thought given the name “philosophy” indicates that “philosophy” has itself borne many fundamentally different meanings through the years, and from one school or movement to another.”
“Within Hobbes’ depiction of the motives for conflict. . . there is a problematic in which the grave threat that human beings pose to other human beings is not constituted simply by the structures of human passions, interests, and desires, nor by the addition of a self-deceptive and egotistical desire for recognition and proof of one’s perhaps illusory power. In this moment, it is the very rationality of other humans, reason in the broad sense, understood as roughly equal to oneself in both capacity and structure, that poses such a threat”
“Humans do not simply, innocently, and honestly disagree with each other about the good, the just, the right, the principles and applications of moral distinction and valuation, for they are already caught, like it or not, in a complex dynamic of each other’s desires, recognition, power, and comparisons which not only relativizes moral distinctions and valuations, but makes them a constant and dangerous source of discord.”
“The more rigid and exclusive one makes the border between philosophy and theology, the more that distinction itself has to fall on the side of theology, and the more inaccessible that very distinction becomes to philosophy”
“Simply to render oneself able to understand what other Christian thinkers have themselves come to understand and to more or less felicitously communicate requires that one's mind not be a blank slate but already properly formed, disciplined, and exercised.”
“The very fact of having fixed conclusions to strive for in orthodox belief does not render the Christian philosopher dogmatic but rather intellectually fruitful, willing to take and follow reason further than the putatively undogmatic unbelieving philosopher”