NEW YORK, NY.- The college lecturer, in a uniform of rumpled khakis and corduroy blazer, paces on a small stage, head down. “The lectures you’re about to see,” he says in introducing a series of talks, videotaped in somewhat hokey lo-fi style in 1992, “cover the last 3,000 years of Western intellectual history.”

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

But that same year, in the depths of the pandemic, 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 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.

“The only matter of concern to a wise and philosophic individual is the things completely under your control,” Sugrue lectured, iterating Stoic thought. “You can’t control the weather, you can’t control other people, you can’t control the society around you.”

Sugrue, who became an internet phenomenon through word-of-mouth — without publicity or viral links from social media — after an academic career spent in near obscurity, died Jan. 16 in Naples, Florida. He was 66.

His death, in hospice care, was not widely reported at the time. His sister, Kate Kavanagh-Scheuer, said the cause was complications of prostate cancer.

Sugrue received a bachelor’s degree in history in 1979 from the University of Chicago, where he studied under classicist Allan Bloom, and went on to earn his master’s and doctorate in history at Columbia University. Throughout his career, he jumped outside the lanes of academic history departments to teach what he called “landmarks in Western culture,” which to him included philosophy, Shakespeare, Dickens, Freud, the Bible and even John Coltrane.

“His command of the Western tradition was just off the charts, and he also understood global history in a profound way,” Roger W. Nutt, the provost of Ave Maria University in Florida, where Sugrue taught late in his career, said in an email. “He knew and loved often neglected ancient and modern thinkers and had an incredible gift of familiarity with thinkers and texts separated by years — sometimes thousands.”

In 1992, Sugrue was hired to contribute lectures to a series called “Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition.” The talks, for the Teaching Company, were originally sold as VHS tapes and as audio recordings aimed at commuters in their cars.

Sugrue’s contributions to the “Great Minds” series were so successful that the Teaching Company had him lecture on other topics: the Bible and Western literature, the Platonic dialogues. He uploaded 56 of his talks to his YouTube channel, where they spread his small reputation to a somewhat-less-small audience.

In the lectures, delivered on a poorly lit makeshift set years before the era of slick TED Talks, he speaks fluidly and passionately without notes for 45 minutes at a stretch. In total, they have been viewed about 2 million times.

“He’s an incredibly charismatic lecturer,” Darren Staloff, a colleague from the Columbia doctoral program who also contributed to the “Great Minds” series, said in an interview. “He had two skills: One is the ability to summarize in a very cogent way the main points for a general audience. The second point is that he wants the audience to know why they should care. This is about how you should live your life and what things mean.”

Sugrue presented a wide breadth of moral and intellectual viewpoints — from sources including Plato, the Old Testament prophets, Karl Marx, Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism and Nietzsche — without judgment. In explaining Kant’s view that the human mind is not a tabula rasa receiving impressions of the world but, in fact, constructs reality in the act of perception, he quoted a line from a T.S. Eliot poem: “The roses had the look of flowers that are looked at.”

“Isn’t that beautiful?” Sugrue said. “That just gets it all together.”

At a time when ascent of the academic rungs is tied to scholarly output and when liberal arts departments face cratering enrollment, Sugrue pursued the often-maligned art of classroom teaching. Ian Fletcher, an adviser to a nonprofit group representing U.S. manufacturers, who took courses from Sugrue at Columbia in the mid-1980s, said in an email that Sugrue was “the best teacher anyone he ever taught ever had.”

Sugrue’s pedagogic method was “truly astonishing,” John Byron Kuhner, an author and bookstore owner who was a student of Sugrue’s at Princeton in the 1990s, wrote in a reminiscence for National Review. He would begin classes, Kuhner recalled, with eight blackboards full of cryptic notes. Seated on a desk, he led his seminars of more than 150 students by posing a series of Socratic questions.

“Sugrue would get through almost all his blackboard notes every class, proceeding entirely on audience initiative,” Kuhner wrote.

Sugrue was never on a tenure track at Princeton. Over the course of his dozen years there, beginning in 1992, he was a Behrman fellow, a lecturer for the interdepartmental Humanities Council and a fellow in the politics department.

In 2004, he became chair of the history department of Ave Maria University, a startup Roman Catholic institution near Naples that was founded by the creator of Domino’s Pizza. He taught there for nearly two decades.

Michael Joseph Sugrue was born Feb. 1, 1957, in the New York City borough of Queens, the eldest of four children of Michael Sugrue, an Irish-born owner of pubs and restaurants in New York, and Margaret Mary (Clancy) Sugrue, who managed the home. The family lived in Lynbrook, New York, on Long Island.

Besides his sister, Sugrue, whose one marriage ended in divorce, is survived by a brother, Christopher, and three daughters, Thalia, Pamela and Genevieve.

After Sugrue was discovered online, he continued to offer new lectures on his YouTube channel, on subjects including Dostoyevsky, “Don Quixote” and “Othello,” as well as recording conversations with his old colleague and friend Staloff.

The circa-1992 academic in large square glasses had metamorphosed, in the recent lectures, into a bearish man with untamed white chin whiskers. But the low-tech look of the original videos persisted into the Zoom era — in one, a stray Croc can be seen behind his desk — and he lost none of his passion for explicating ideas, or his indifference to publishing.

“I’ve been working intermittently on a history of the world,” he revealed in a recent talk. “I’ve a chunk written, but even more to go.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.