The Bible and Western Culture - Nietzsche and the Death of God 

Michael Sugrue, 1957-2024 RIP

Michael Sugrue is such a brilliant, passionate, articulate man. It's hard to come by lecturers like him today. He's a gift to us all.

This is gold standard. The channel is a goldmine. Prof. Sugrue the best.

Masterful. As a professor myself, I strive to achieve this kind of oratory skill.

These philosophy lectures are BY FAR the best of their kind on the net. They are without peer. I await each new installment daily, weekly. They have become for me a kind of lifeline during Covid 19 quarantines and isolation. They are an elixir, a tonic, an alchemist's incantation. They are a plasma bottle that drips vitality into my emaciated life and Michael has become my physician. My prescription : MORE lectures and the associated readings. I gulp the medicaments and await my deliverance....

He talks so smoothly. Almost like narrating his thoughts in a stream. No ums or uhs. Extensive vocabulary. What an excellent display of public speaking. It’s not often that you find people this skilled.

Finally, a lecture which correctly shows both sides of this man: The megalomania and insanity and The master of german prose

“What are mankind’s truths but irrefutable errors?” This is a spectacular quote that underlines the philosophy of science. Nietzsche will continue to impress.

This man gives better talks than anyone I've ever seen. A gem.

I stumbled across Dr Sugrue by accident, I was looking for something mildly interesting to listen to while I fell asleep. Sugrue’s lectures had the opposite effect, I could feel the synapses in my brain sizzling with new ideas and excitement. Now I’m fantasising about starting a Masters in bioethics.

The section from 29:49 to 30:28 was extremely mind-blowing and incredibly profound. It has given me a new perspective on the postmodern condition. Thank you Professor Sugrue!

This guy transforms lectures into a work of art

Rest in peace Sir. I am always at awe in the way you deliver your lectures.

What an truly profound speech. As someone unfamiliar with philosophy or Nietzsche, this was incredibly engaging.

Would love to see Nietzsche’s facial expression if he could see in which direction art has taken the world after taking over for God.

Stumbled upon this man randomly and within few minutes I was already feeling jealous of those who can get to call themselves “his students”. I hope your father is well and sound and thank you so very much for uploading these gold mines of lectures!

Dr. Sugrue is utterly compelling. His range and references are riveting. I'm thrilled 'to have him in my life'! Thankyou. You've opened up Western Philosophy for me. ✨

The way Dr. Sugrue can articulate difficult points is incredible, whether you agree or disagree with any points he or Nietzsche is making, the delivery of said points is irrefutably powerful.

He certainly is one of the best professors I've ever came across.

I'm so happy I found this channel. Being able to come back to these lectures after reading the books and getting more and more out of them is truly very fulfilling.

Exquisite lecture. Thank you for uploading all of this professor's lectures. I listen to them and listen again a few weeks later and then again later...they are THAT good!

Another great lecture. The close of "Beyond Good and Evil" beautifully shows the tragic loneliness at the heart of Nietzsche's genius.

What a spellbinding lecture! You are much adored Dr Mike. If there was a magic wand to transform you back into the then you! 😊 Lots of love and good wishes!

This channel is getting better und better !! 👨‍🏫👏🏻

I just want to say that these lectures have added so much value to my life in the past year, or so, since I’ve discovered this channel. Thank you!

Every lecture is like an invocation of greatness and a blessing to my soul. Thank you Michael Sugrue!

What a blessing that we have access to all these lectures and videos!

Love you so much Dr. Sugrue. He presents the subject with passion. There is one charactetistic in his lectures, which makes philosophy adorable discipline for everyone.

This is my first time hearing Michael Sugrue. What an amazing speaker. A clear, concise and balanced appraisal of Nietzsche the man and the philosopher. Thank you.

This man is the best teacher I have ever been taught by.

... these lectures are pure brilliance... respect from Wales, UK...

Brilliant teacher, so articulate. The repeated mispronunciation of ‘oxymoron’ is all the more surprising in that context. A petty point, but it jars for me every time I hear him saying the word!

Thoroughly enjoyed this lecture. Always had trouble correctly understanding and comprehending Nietzche, but after listening to this lecture a few times I'm starting to understand the gravity, importance, and as you put it, the destiny the man himself held in society. Thank you Dr. Sugrue, I am a big fan and forever appreciative of this content.

I watched your Marcus Aurelius lecture a year ago and only now have found your channel, excited to binge :D

Thank you so much for this at 42 minutes and I start to get really really involved in what you’re doing. It’s incredible your passion for this writer is contagious. I love when you said he’s a dandy that explains so much.

Dr. Sugrue's lectures are the best pieces of knowledge that I have come across in the last decade. I've learned so much, and thanks to him, I now own a fresh copy of Meditations. Thank you, Dr. Sugrue. May your soul be blessed.

This man is a hidden treasure of knowledge

Thank you very much for making these wonderful lectures available ♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️

Professor Michael Sugrue is by far one of my biggest inspirations. Such a blessing of an educator and actually actually lectures. A lecture of which I feel no need to bud in because he is consciously keeping me with him with words. Great Stuff. Eternalized.

So glad these lectures are on the net. I think I've watched almost everyone now some 3 or 4 times. Just such a great lecturer, he breaks down complexity so well...

These lectures along with those of Rick Roderick have been a great discovery and much appreciated that there is a platform that these can live on. Thank you.

I know this video is old. I had this series. Loved his lectures in it the best. I think he did the one on Kierkegaard that got me into him. I do not know Dr. Sugrue's beliefs or worldview but he is a great lecturer. He gives you what the thinker really believed and makes them come alive. He does not ramble about things that do not matter. He is clear but interesting to listen to.

This is incredible. Thank you for posting it

This was so insightful, thanks for posting it!

*sip coffee *continues dropping knowledge

Thank you Dr. Sugrue. This lecture has been very informative and galvanizing.

These are so good I'll even do the accompanying assignment

We will remember you for the brilliant learned man that you were. Rest in peace Dr. Michael Sugrue.

you never fail to amaze me. thank you for sharing your thoughts Dr. Sugrue

These lectures are a sheer delight! Where has Michael Sugrue been all these years?

Very fair and excellent review of Nietzsche, Dr. Sugrue. The problem with Nietzsche is the refusal to acknowledge we are still social creatures--the same with Machiavelli. All great thinkers, but it's the hole in their amoral theories.

Marvelous! These lectures are like the flow of a river. Thanks Dr. Sugrue, big respect and I wish you all the best.

“It is the destiny of the west to be forced to confront their rational capacities.” Amen, sir. Brilliantly put. Unites every major issue of the 20th and 21st centuries.

That was really really interesting. I like your passion and the flowing ideas style you follow. Thanks Sir! ♡

Listening to your mind, explain his mind, has re-organized the way I think. Ergo, listening to you has changed my life. It's wonderfully unsettling. My admiration and love to you Professor.

Splendid lecture. It's so good that cameraman's hands trembling of excitement. )

Domain over any entity demands an understanding of that entity, knowing the limitations and needs of that entity, and imposes a moral responsibility over that entity. Empathy is in us for a reason and everything has a cost or a trade.

One of the greatest, most accurate, and most concise synopses of Nietzsche. What an incredible teacher, synthesizer, and communicator you are, Dr Sugrue!

I have watched to this lecture so many times that I have memorized it word for word!

I feel Joyous when I listen to Dr. Sugrue's lectures--they are that enlightening!

This was my introduction to lectures on philosophy, and I can’t thank Dr. Sugrue enough!

The best lecturer ever, period!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks a million for enlightening the 🌍

Ohhh, the way so much knowledge flows out so easily, effortlessly. It's like a stream running downhill. No stammer, no fumbling for words. The passion is to share his understanding of the most challenging views n philosophies in the Western world. The lectures have a compulsive hold... you r forced to listen till the end.

Dr. Sugrue's and Dr. Staloff are my favorites.!!!!! Thank you.❤

I love these lectures

Well done.

I just finished the book All Things Shining and this is right up my alley. Thank you Michael

I am reading THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS at the moment, and this clears up and number of things. Thank you for the learned perspective.

Glad I chose to stay. Very good lecture. It explains Nietzsche's place in the modern philosophical realm. So many think in this way actually and it's somewhat scary... The nihilistic and aristocratic behavior... Very interesting!

I had to spell out "occimeron" before I realised he meant oxy-moron. Otherwise, fantastic lecture as always.

Phenomenal lecture. I watched to the end with great captivating interest!

You are the finest public speaker I’ve ever seen and heard

The idea that science ended metaphysics seems Neitzche’s worst vanity and a common one today.

Your channel has cleared up so many things for me. Thanks man.

I can't stop watching these lectures. For all of the troubles that have came with the proliferation of the internet, a hillbilly such as myself would otherwise have never had access to anything approaching this. Watching the one on Kierkegaard next.

This lecture was much more clear and comprehensive compared to JBP’s, Thank you Professor.

I've never heard anyone pronounce it "ox emm er ron" before. I've always heard it as "oxy moron". Did this stand out to anyone else?

Everything that is excellent, is just as hard te find as it is rare. This video is amazing.

This is a free college class channel. Very addictive. Thank you Dr. Michael!

Nietzsche was the most compassionate man of our times, showing us how to help everyone by raising up the strongest to move us forward as a species, the uberman was greater in every capacity of the human being and that was what would help humanity the most, if humanity can ever escape the monetary slavery system imposed on it, i believe Nietzsche's insights will be the best decisions humanity can make.

Wow! I think I need to listen to this a few more times to fully grasp it. I don't like Nietzsche, but that doesn't mean he has nothing to contribute.

The way he explains the book is just amasing !!

Michael Surgrue is one of my favorite scholars, and I revere him with the same reverence of a neophyte for his great teacher! He is articulate and his locution is alike brilliant and extempore!!!

And yet nietcsche's whole basis apon the thought that God is dead is merely because he says so. He makes the mistake of assuming that God is in the minds of the masses and not the minds of the individual. God lives so long as the last individual believes. Just as the memory of you lives so long the last individual you know or have produced exists.

Great lecture with one exception. He gets Darwin/Nietzsche totally backwards. in fact I think it's where Nietzsche says Darwin is wrong that you see the thought-provoking brilliance typical of the man (I give examples see below). It was a case of philosophy affecting the sciences, not the other way around. I just read Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" and absolutely agree with Nietzsche that Darwinism is Hegelianism, just served up differently. Nietzsche does not even mention Darwin a quarter as much as this professor and when he does, it's to critique him, and I mean on every point. Even the seed for "God is dead" is in "Phenomenology." Darwin had zip to do with anything in Nietzsche and Percy Shelley distributed his "The Necessity of Atheism" long before Darwin and the French Revolution tried to cancel god nationally 20 years before that (in a massively Catholic country and with a civil war in the Vendee over this issue with extreme casualties never discussed in the context of the Reign of Terror). People were grinding an axe for God (literally, w/ priests forced to leave or be executed in the French Revolution and the appropriation of church land) well before Darwin. Nietzsche on Darwinism in "The Gay Science": "That our modern natural sciences have become so thoroughly entangled in this Spinozistic dogma (most recently and worst of all, Darwinism with its incomprehensibly one-sided doctrine of the his struggle for existence') is probably due to the origins of most natural scientists: In this respect they belong to the ''common people"; their ancestors were poor and undistinguished people who knew the difficulties of survival only too well at firsthand. The whole of English Darwinism breathes something like the musty air of English overpopulation, like the smell of the distress and overcrowding of small people. But a natural scientist should come out of his human nook; and in nature it is not conditions of distress that are dominant but overflow and squandering. even to the point of absurdity. The struggle for existence is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life. The great and small struggle always revolves around superiority, around growth and expansion, around power:...:...in accordance with the will to power which is the will of life." Brilliant, and it echoes Hamlet's soliloquy of nature being "rank and gross," an "unweeded garden." And again in "The Gay Science": "Let us take, thirdly, the astonishing stroke of Hegel, who struck right through all our logical habits and bad habits when he dared to teach that species concepts develop out of each other. With this proposition the minds of Europe were preformed for the last great scientific movement. Darwinism-for without Hegel there could have been no Darwin. Is there anything German in this Hegelian innovation which first introduced the decisive concept of "development., into science?" He's probably talking about Hegel's "Philosophy of Nature" but Hegel's dialectic from Phenomenology applies just as well, and it probably imbued everything Hegel wrote or thought. "Ecce Homo": "Other scholarly cattle have suspected me of Darwinism for this reason..." From "Twilight of the Idols": "Anti-Darwin. - As far as the famous 'struggle for existence' is concerned, this seems to me to be more of an opinion than a proven fact at the moment. It takes place, but as an exception; the overall condition oflife is not a state of need, a state of hunger, but rather abundance, opulence, even absurd squandering. Where there is a struggle, it is a struggle for power"

This is too good! Love this lecture!

Splendid explanation of Nietzche, amazing orator and great setting... Thank you, may God bless you and may you now rest in peace with the Father, the Son and the Holly Spirit.

Nietzsche's nihilism drove him insane. Power is but one characteristic of humanity and Being. It must be balanced by morals, ethics, compassion, and love. These are more evolved faculties and aspects of consciousness. Nietzsche was a deluded nut.

RIP a real one

One of the few people I Sub to and truly listen. His way with words are like a beautiful painting.

I am perhaps a quarter through all of these lectures. I am certainly going to watch every single one

"Professor Sugrue takes interpretation of the Dialogues to a new place. It is almost as if these characters were his intimates and he is reporting events as he witnessed them. This is truly excellent work."

So good! Michael are you still lecturing these days? What are you doing with your life?

Love these lectures. Bravo Sir, you have made the world a better place by educating us in these historically significant topics.

this is awesome, I already watched 3 45 min lessons and learned a lot

42:23 Not gonna lie, this made me burst into laughter. Nietzsche is absolutely based. LMAO.

I’ve pronounced oxymoron incorrectly my entire life, wtf

Thank you for this upload!

This is the most essential Nietzsche I have ever had. Now I began to understand how great Nietzsche was and found the modern western society as we see now. Cheers from 🇹🇭

38:11 such irony.. Nietzsche _really_ missed the “other side” of Christian truth