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Encounters and Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete
By turns wickedly funny and profoundly illuminating, Encounters and Reflections presents a captivating and unconventional portrait of the life and works of Seth Benardete. One of the leading scholars of ancient thought, Benardete here reflects on both the people he knew and the topics that fascinated him throughout his career in a series of candid, freewheeling conversations with Robert Berman, Ronna Burger, and Michael Davis.
The first part of the book discloses vignettes about fellow students, colleagues, and acquaintances of Benardete's who later became major figures in the academic and intellectual life of twentieth-century America. We glimpse the student days of Allan Bloom, Stanley Rosen, George Steiner, and we discover the life of the mind as lived by well-known scholars such as David Grene, Jacob Klein, and Benardete's mentor Leo Strauss. We also encounter a number of other learned, devoted, and sometimes eccentric luminaries, including T.S. Eliot, James Baldwin, Werner Jaeger, John Davidson Beazley, and Willard Quine. In the book's second part, Benardete reflects on his own intellectual growth and on his ever-evolving understanding of the texts and ideas he spent a lifetime studying. Revisiting some of his recurrent themes—among them eros and the beautiful, the city and the law, and the gods and the human soul—Benardete shares his views on thinkers such as Plato, Homer, and Heidegger, as well as the relations between philosophy and science and between Christianity and ancient Roman thought.
Engaging and informative, Encounters and Reflections brings Benardete's thought to life to enlighten and inspire a new generation of thinkers.
The first part of the book discloses vignettes about fellow students, colleagues, and acquaintances of Benardete's who later became major figures in the academic and intellectual life of twentieth-century America. We glimpse the student days of Allan Bloom, Stanley Rosen, George Steiner, and we discover the life of the mind as lived by well-known scholars such as David Grene, Jacob Klein, and Benardete's mentor Leo Strauss. We also encounter a number of other learned, devoted, and sometimes eccentric luminaries, including T.S. Eliot, James Baldwin, Werner Jaeger, John Davidson Beazley, and Willard Quine. In the book's second part, Benardete reflects on his own intellectual growth and on his ever-evolving understanding of the texts and ideas he spent a lifetime studying. Revisiting some of his recurrent themes—among them eros and the beautiful, the city and the law, and the gods and the human soul—Benardete shares his views on thinkers such as Plato, Homer, and Heidegger, as well as the relations between philosophy and science and between Christianity and ancient Roman thought.
Engaging and informative, Encounters and Reflections brings Benardete's thought to life to enlighten and inspire a new generation of thinkers.
- GenresPhilosophy
240 pages, Hardcover
First published February 15, 2003
3 people are currently reading
54 people want to read
About the author
Seth Benardete
28 books9 followersSeth Benardete was an American classicist and philosopher, long a member of the faculties of New York University and The New School. In addition to teaching positions at Harvard, Brandeis, St. John's College, Annapolis and NYU, Benardete was a fellow for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung in Munich.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 28, 2012
Seth Benardete was a teacher of mine for several years at NYU. He was quite unique and had some amazing stories, anecdotes, and insights into ancient texts. I am a classicist rather than a philosopher so I find some of his argumentation a challenge and there are passages in the second half of this book I struggle to follow. The dialogue format helps me understand the thread of his arguments better in this book than in his others (it also recalls Plato nicely).
October 2, 2012
I have no idea how or why this book was published, but I am really glad it was. This definitely feels like a book that fell through the cracks or was done as a favor to somebody, because its audience is so narrow. I doubt they sold more than 500 copies.
That said, this book is awesome. It's a fascinating (and often hilarious) look at a generation of scholars and their teachers. If you're interested in what academia looked like in the 1950s, the first half of this book is riveting. I can't imagine what it would have been like to sit in class next to Allan Bloom or Severn Darden, listening to Leo Strauss lecture.
The second half of the book is more uneven. It is a series of conversations about reading Plato, focused on Benardete's (and Strauss') infamous methods. It would have been more interesting in Ronna Burger and the other interviewers had challenged him more, rather than agreeing with everything, but there are a lot of amazing insights here, if you have the patience to look for them.
That said, this book is awesome. It's a fascinating (and often hilarious) look at a generation of scholars and their teachers. If you're interested in what academia looked like in the 1950s, the first half of this book is riveting. I can't imagine what it would have been like to sit in class next to Allan Bloom or Severn Darden, listening to Leo Strauss lecture.
The second half of the book is more uneven. It is a series of conversations about reading Plato, focused on Benardete's (and Strauss') infamous methods. It would have been more interesting in Ronna Burger and the other interviewers had challenged him more, rather than agreeing with everything, but there are a lot of amazing insights here, if you have the patience to look for them.
June 6, 2022
An amazingly frank and insightful tour of Seth Benardete's life and thoughts about Plato, Homer, Herodotus, and many others. A good key to his more obscure and guarded academic commentaries. Sometimes one wishes the others present would shut up and let Benardete just speak, other times they do prompt him on to more delightful insights. This book is the next best thing to having a Straussian professor at your university.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews