Institute of Humanitites and Social Sciences

Gregory Sadler is a philosopher, educator, content producer, philosophical counselor, and president and co-founder of .  He completed his doctorate in philosophy, writing on Maurice Blondel’s works, at Southern Illinois University in 2002, then taught for six years in Ball State University’s four-year degree program at Indiana State Prison.  From 2008 to 2011, he taught at Fayetteville State University, where he designed and ran a pilot Reading Across the Curriculum Program, oversaw university-wide assessment of student learning, and wrote portions of FSU’s 10-year institutional Quality Enhancement Plan.  In 2011, he relocated to New York, where he teaches for Marist College and the GCAS, provides workshops and public lectures, and works on several research projects.

In his popular , which has over 20,000 subscribers and two million views, he provides lecture videos on thinkers, texts, and topics ranging across the history of philosophy.  One of his current video projects is (with 65 installments completed), in which he leads viewers through Hegel’s Phenomenology paragraph by paragraph, ultimately intending to comment on the entire work.

In addition to publishing his first book in 2011, Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: the 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France, he has published dozens of articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries on thinkers including Aristotle, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Hobbes, G.W.F. Hegel, Max Scheler, Maurice Blondel, Jacques Lacan, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jacques Derrida, and Adriaan Peperzak.  You can see many of his publications in .

His current research deals with moral theory, rationality, emotion, virtues and vices, the metaphysics of the human person, and interpersonal relations.  One of these research projects is focused specifically on reconstructing an Aristotelian account of anger.  He has been an Erasmus Institute Faculty Fellow (2005), a Charles Chesnutt Library Fellow (2009-2010), and a Visiting Scholar at European Graduate School (2014).  He has also held a Summer Research Residency at the Institute for Saint Anselm Studies (2023), and is a member of the Center for Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics.

The Institute of Humanitites and Social Sciences Sciences (IHSS) provides high-quality online undergraduate courses, curricula, and programs for the Global Center for Advanced Studies. As the single Institute of GCAS focused specifically upon undergraduate education, the IHSS performs three vital roles.

• First, the Institute carries out the mission of making an excellent, affordable, and progressive online education accessible for students, lifelong learners, and professional development worldwide.
• Second, as an Institute tasked with providing a well-designed, systematic foundation in the disciplines, the IHSS helps to prepare GCAS students for more advanced, graduate-level courses of study provided within all of the other Institutes.
• Third, the IHSS will progressively develop into an entire undergraduate school, providing a comprehensive, well-designed, fully accredited college education, culminating in degree programs.

The first discipline program being developed within the IHSS is Philosophy. A substantive Philosophy curriculum is slated to be offered for the 2023-2016 year, and the first recipients of the GCAS Certificate in Philosophical Studies are projected to complete that program in Spring 2016. Plans are being set in place to build out undergraduate curricula and programs progressively into other disciplines in the Humanities and the Social Sciences during the following years. As central to GCAS’s core mission, ethos, and goals, the discipline of Philosophy will always remain a robust presence within the IHSS.

The outstanding faculty developing courses and teaching students within the Institute are recruited on a number of bases. Devotion to their disciplines and to the art of teaching, demonstrated scholarly work and competence in their fields, passion for promoting learning through innovative pedagogy, years of successful experience inside but also outside of the classroom – all of these are factors in selecting the cadre of educators on the Faculty in the IHSS are provided with professional development opportunities and training, ranging from best practices of online education to intentional course design, from authentic assessment of student learning to high-impact pedagogical strategies. Faculty collaborate across the disciplines to strengthen their own programs, learn from each other, and build a cohesive GCAS educational experience for students worldwide.

Students taking courses in the Institute can expect not only to learn extensively within their discipline, but also to acquire a broad and deep background in the Humanities and Social Sciences, developing competencies needed for 21st century cultural literacy and citizenship. Students progressively develop a body of skills, dispositions, and knowledge generally applicable their lives, communities, and workplaces, with particular emphases upon critical thinking, problem solving, ethics and moral reasoning, written communication, research and information literacy, and information analysis.

The Certificate Program in Philosophical Studies:

The IHSS Certificate in Philosophical Studies is awarded upon the completion of coursework providing a solid foundation in the discipline of Philosophy.  The coursework required includes three Core classes:

• Philosophical Foundations (3 credits)
• Argumentation and Critical Inquiry (3 credits)
• Moral Theories and Applications (3 credits)

The certificate also requires an additional 6 credits of coursework from within the Philosophy curriculum.