I first came across Rick Roderick’s lecture series, Self Under Siege—Philosophy in the 20th Century, at the end of a long, disillusioning study session in graduate school. YouTube’s thumbnail image of the bearded, drably attired man crouching over a rigid dais suggested a mild tedium wildly incommensurate with the actual experience of watching the video. Rather than the lucid, studied intensity and sublime hilarity Roderick enacted in his talk, I expected something dryly informative that might compensate for the unwarranted neglect of proper book-learning I had assumed…