This collection of essays aims to explore fundamental questions about God, human nature, and political life through careful readings of the Greek poets, the Hebrew Bible, and Shakespeare. The volume investigates the abiding tension between the Hebraic and the Hellenic dimensions of the Western soul through an examination of profound literary, philosophic, and theological reflections on topics as various as friendship, marriage, tyranny, sovereignty, sin, forgiveness, comedy, tragedy, and contemplation. Offered in honor of Mera J. Flaumenhaft, the essays reflect the intellectual rigor, moral seriousness, and disciplined imagination of her scholarship and teaching.

This impressive collection of previously unpublished essays examines the relationship between competing conceptions of 'nature' and 'woman.' By looking historically and comprehensively at the problems and questions associated with human thinking about nature and woman, the contributors strive to gain the proper vantage point from which to assess modern virtues and vices. Also taking note of important religious and literary contributions to thought on nature and woman, these essays present a broad range of claims from classical Greece to the present intended to stimulate modern thinking. Nature, Woman, and the Art of Politics will prove indispensable to scholars of philosophy, political science and womenOs studies.

This volume brings together Seth Benardete’s studies of Hesiod, Homer, and Greek tragedy, eleven Platonic dialogues, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The Argument of the Action spans four decades of Seth Benardete’s work, documenting its impressive range. Benardete’s philosophic reading of the poets and his poetic reading of the philosophers share a common ground, guided by the key he found in the Platonic dialogue: probing the meaning of speeches embedded in deeds, he uncovers the unifying intention of the work by tracing the way it unfolds through a movement of its own. Benardete’s original interpretations of the classics are the fruit of this discovery of the “argument of the action.�

What is the good life for a human being? Aristotle's exploration of this question in the "Nicomachean Ethics" has established it as a founding work of Western philosophy, though its teachings have long puzzled readers and provoked spirited discussion. Adopting a radically new point of view, Ronna Burger deciphers some of the most perplexing conundrums of this influential treatise by approaching it as Aristotle's dialogue with the Platonic Socrates.Tracing the argument of the "Ethics" as it emerges through that approach, Burger's careful reading shows how Aristotle represents ethical virtue from the perspective of those devoted to it while standing back to examine its assumptions and implications. "This is the best book I have read on Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics." It is so well crafted that reading it is like reading the "Ethics" itself, in that it provides an education in ethical matters that does justice to all sides of the issues."--Mary P. Nichols, Baylor University

What is the good life for a human being? Aristotle's exploration of this question in the "Nicomachean Ethics" has established it as a founding work of Western philosophy, though its teachings have long puzzled readers and provoked spirited discussion. Adopting a radically new point of view, Ronna Burger deciphers some of the most perplexing conundrums of this influential treatise by approaching it as Aristotle's dialogue with the Platonic Socrates.

Tracing the argument of the "Ethics" as it emerges through that approach, Burger's careful reading shows how Aristotle represents ethical virtue from the perspective of those devoted to it while standing back to examine its assumptions and implications.

"This is the best book I have read on Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics." It is so well crafted that reading it is like reading the "Ethics" itself, in that it provides an education in ethical matters that does justice to all sides of the issues."--Mary P. Nichols, Baylor University

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 Bernadete who were to become major figures in the academic and intellectual life of twentieth-century America. We glimpse the student days of Allan Bloom, Stanely Rosen, and George Steiner, and we discover the life of the mind as lived by such well-known scholars as Daivd Grene, Jacob Klien, and Benardete's mentor, Leo Strauss. We also encounter a number of other learned 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 Plato, Homer, and Heidegger, as well as on the relations between philosophy and science and between Christianity and ancient Roman thought.
The closet thing we will have to an autobiography of one of the twentieth century's leading intellectuals, "Encounters and Reflections" brings Benardete's thought to life to enlighten and inspire anew generation of thinkers.

This volume is a tribute to the thought of Seth Benardete by contributors who had the rare good fortune of studying with him or those who discovered the treasure of his writings. Benardete’s classical scholarship and remarkable knowledge of Greek served his philosophic quest to understand the nature of things, which he pursued through a brilliant practice of interpretation of texts. He found in the Platonic dialogue—in the action through which the argument unfolds—the key to philosophic thinking, and this enabled him, in turn, to read the poets philosophically. He was fully immersed in the world of the ancients, starting with Homer, but their works opened up for him a way to the fundamental questions—about justice and love, nature and law, the city and the gods. Seeing, as he once put it, that “the problem of the human good is grounded in the city, and the problem of being in god,� he came to the conclusion that “Political philosophy is the eccentric core of philosophy.� Benardete wrote this statement reflecting on the political-theological issue in the work of his teacher, Leo Strauss; but the paradoxical notion of an “eccentric core,� which gives this volume its title, expresses the characteristic way his own thinking so often moves from an off-center observation to disclose, unexpectedly, the unifying focal point of a whole.      This collection had its origin in a small conference organized by Patrick Goodin in the spring of 2005 at Howard University. It expanded to include papers from an earlier memorial conference for Benardete at the New School for Social Research in December 2002 and a reflection just after his death, in November 2001, as well as reviews of his books published over the years. The essays about or inspired by Benardete’s thought—on the Bible and Homer, the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle and the Roman writers—suggest the remarkable range of his teaching and studies. The centrality of Plato is evident not only in these essays but also in the reviews, by readers who appreciate the importance of Benardete’s work, its subtlety and its depth. The volume closes with three of Benardete’s previously unpublished essays and a bibliography of his writings. Harvey Mansfield, Ronna Burger, Laurence Lampert, John Blanchard, Olivia Delgado de Torres, Heinrich Meier, Michael Davis, Robert Berman,  Patrick Goodin, Richard Velkley, Holly Haynes, Steven Berg, Bryan Warnick, Stanley Rosen, Will Morrisey, Arlene Saxonhouse, Abraham Anderson, Martin Sitte, Steven Berg, Edward Rothstein, Mark Blitz, Vincent Renzi, Svetozar, and including Seth Benardete. Patrick Goodin is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Howard University, where he has taught since 1996.  He received his PhD from the New School for Social Research in 1996 after writing his dissertation, under Benardete’s supervision, on Aristotle’s de Anima. His research and teaching interests include Ancient Greek Philosophy, Africana, Afro-Caribbean and African American Philosophy. Ronna Burger is Catherine & Henry J. Gaisman Chair and Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University. After completing her dissertation on Plato’s Phaedrus, directed by Benardete, she went on to write The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth (Yale 1985, St. Augustine’s Press, revised edition 2016). She is the author of Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago 2008) as well as co-editor with Michael Davis of two collections of Seth Benardete’s writings, The Argument of the Action (Chicago 2000) and The Archaeology of the Soul (St. Augustine’s Press 2012).  

This volume brings together Seth Benardete's studies of Hesiod's "Theogony, " Homer's "Iliad, " and Greek tragedy, of eleven Platonic dialogues, and Aristotle's "Metaphysics." These essays, some never before published, others difficult to find, span four decades of his work and document its impressive range. Benardete's philosophic reading of the poets and his poetic reading of the philosophers share a common ground that makes this collection a whole. The key, suggested by his reflections on Leo Strauss in the last piece, lies in the question of how to read Plato. Benardete's way is characterized not just by careful attention to the literary form that separates doctrine from dialogue, and speeches from deed; rather, by following the dynamic of these differences, he uncovers the argument that belongs to the dialogue as a whole. The "turnaround" such an argument undergoes bears consequences for understanding the dialogue as radical as the conversion of the philosopher in Plato's image of the cave.
Benardete's original interpretations are the fruits of this discovery of the "argument of the action."