Nature, Law, and the Sacred: Essays in Honor of Ronna Burger (Video)
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- Hi everyone. I'm Ronna Burger. I'm a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Tulane,
- and I teach in the Jewish Studies program, and I'm the Director of the Religious Studies minor.
- I'm so pleased to say a word today about this book,
- Nature, Law, and the Sacred. To clarify the outset, aside from the bibliography at the end and
- references throughout, this is not my own writing but a collection of essays that was published in
- my honor. It belongs to the old German tradition of a Festschrift, a volume put together usually for a
- professor or a mentor meant to show the influence of that scholar's work. It's a treat especially
- to present the book here and now because it was edited by my first PhD student, Evanthia Speliotis
- at Tulane, and many of the contributors along with colleagues and friends are my graduate students
- from many cohorts over four decades. I came here for one year and it somehow turned into forty.
- I think it was especially Katrina when so many of our colleagues left that I realized this was
- my intellectual home. I was able to flourish here, writing and teaching, and I felt committed to it.
- So the title, Nature, Law, and the Sacred, expresses the central themes that run through
- all the essays in the collection. Things that can be encapsulated, I think, in the formula,
- Jerusalem and Athens, or bible and philosophy- bible and Greek philosophy.
- Those two roots of the whole western tradition lie at the core of all my writing and
- all my teaching. And looking back I realized they guided, mostly inadvertently, my own intellectual
- development. So maybe I can say a word about that. Early on I was really fascinated by
- what I found to be the puzzling stories of the bible and the pleasures of trying to interpret
- them. I think that was my way into philosophy and when I got to college I knew right away I wanted
- to be a philosophy major and I was especially attracted to Plato. That passion eventually drove
- me to graduate school and my dissertation is an interpretation of Plato's Phaedrus.
- That's the dialogue in which he most explicitly shows why he did not write philosophic treatises
- of dialogues. And therefore nothing is- Plato writes nothing in his own name, but invites the reader
- to discover the underlying argument by interpreting the drama as a whole.
- As I'm sure many of you know, Socrates never wrote anything. Socrates, who's represented in
- Plato's dialogues, did not write at all. He believed that philosophy has to be pursued
- by a live conversation with particular individuals. And writing, he claims, doesn't
- know when to speak and when to remain silent. It doesn't know how to adjust its speeches to souls.
- That Socratic claim though, we learn of it through the representation in Plato's written
- work. It took a while for that paradox to sink in for me. When it does, you realize that Plato
- discovered an art of writing that overcomes all the particular criticisms he puts into the
- voice of Socrates. And that enables him, through his written work, to reproduce with his reader
- the experience of a live Socratic conversation. With that insight I went on to write a book on
- Plato's Veto, the dialogue that takes place in prison on the last day of Socrates life,
- where he's presenting a series of arguments for the immortality of the soul.
- Now most commentators have found those arguments very flawed. What I tried to do was demonstrate
- that exactly those flaws are the deliberate keys that Plato provides for his reader
- to reconstruct the teaching of the work. And that is basically an affirmation
- of Socrates' understanding of the goodness of the philosophic life, the life that he's led.
- From Plato the natural step to move on would be to Aristotle, his student. That took me many
- years. You know, I think many of us experience Aristotle's treatises as rather abstract and dry.
- So it was a while before I really came to develop my deep appreciation of how
- much those treatises are actually in the inquisitive spirit of a Platonic dialogue.
- And that was mostly through teaching, especially Aristotle's ethics,
- where I started getting a stronger and stronger feeling of how Aristotle engages his reader
- in the questions he's raising: What is happiness? What is human virtue? What is
- friendship or pleasure? Above all, the Socratic question: What is the good life for a human being?
- From Aristotle I was led to Maimonides, the medieval Jewish thinker, who really wrestled with
- the problem of the possible conflict between the bible and Greek philosophy, as did most medieval
- thinkers. Is there a way to interpret the bible that's compatible with philosophy and science?
- Maimonides finally really led me back to my original fascination with the bible
- and I've been teaching a series of courses, Bible and Philosophy, with a different topic every term.
- This time I'm doing women in the bible. Last semester I did the political world of the bible.
- And discussions with students in these classes have stimulated me to be working
- on philosophic readings of the bible that are presented at public lectures or in articles.
- So these themes in my own work, Nature, Law, and the Sacred, in this collection
- are displayed in range far beyond my own competence. The chapters of the volume
- interpret foundational texts starting from antiquity, but not overplayed on Aristotle.
- Also the tragedians, Sophocles and Euripides, the common poet, Aristophanes, the writer, Xenophon,
- who also wrote up Socratic recollections- not well enough known- I'm teaching him this semester.
- The book moves on to medieval thinkers: Maimonides, also Boccaccio, and Dante. And
- then to the modern philosophers: from Descartes and Montesquieu, to Kant, Lessing, Hegel, and Kierkegaard.
- Although the pieces are written independently, put together as parts of a whole they display
- such really intriguing connections, I think, that show how the problem of the relations among
- nature, law, and the sacred show up both in works of literature and in philosophy over centuries.
- For me, each of these chapters represents the starting point of future conversations.
- Sometimes exciting projects of writing or teaching now.
- Other readers, I hope and expect, will be inspired to pursue their own exploration of the classic
- works analyzed here. They're very rich treasures and they've, I think, endured for thousands of years
- only because of the way they probe fundamental questions about the human condition that help us
- understand our own times and our lives. Something really especially important for us now. Well,
- would love to continue the conversation. Feel free to get in touch with me and bye for now.
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