Michael Sugrue, RIP
05/26/2024
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From the New York Times obituary section:

Michael Sugrue, 66, Dies; His Talks on Philosophy Were a YouTube Hit

After an academic career spent in near obscurity, he became an internet phenomenon during the pandemic by uploading talks he had given three decades earlier.

By Trip Gabriel
Published May 25, 2024

… Michael Sugrue would go on to teach Plato, the Bible, Kant and Kierkegaard to two generations of undergraduates, including for 12 years at Princeton, without ever publishing a book—an academic who hadn’t “really had a career,” as he toldThe American Conservative after retiring in 2021.

But that same year, in the depths of the pandemic, Dr. Sugrue uploaded his three-decade-old philosophy lectures to YouTube, where many thousands of people whose aperture on the world had narrowed to a laptop screen discovered them. His talk on the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, in particular, seemed to fit the jittery mood of lockdown, when many people sought a sense of self-sufficiency amid the chaos of the outside world. It has now been viewed 1.5 million times.

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