Seth Benardete, Encounters and Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete. With Robert Berman, Ronna Burger, and Michael Davis. Edited by Ronna Burger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, February 2003. 216 pages; cloth. ISBN 0-22-604278-2. $30.00. Excerpt from the Publisher’s Description Encounters and Reflections presents a 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 Alan 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 figures, 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. Review Beginning in 1992, three of Seth Benardete’s former students met with the noted classical scholar and philosopher to record his stories and thoughts about teachers and writers he encountered and the various institutions through which he passed. These reflections are gathered together in this superb new work. In it, we read about Benardete’s days as a student at the University of Chicago in the 1950’s when he studied with, among others, Allan Bloom, Stanley Rosen, George Steiner, and a very young Richard Rorty. The conversations also turn to the immense influence of Leo Strauss, who was Benardete’s teacher and mentor. Benardete offers a fascinating and unique portrait of Strauss as a thinker, an individual, and a teacher. Benardete’s reflections are alternatively humorous, profound, occasionally critical, and always fascinating. Through these remembrances we get a sense of Benardete’s development as a thinker and the ideas and intellectual problems that defined his scholarly career. In the second half of the book, Benardete directly addresses the nature of reflection as it arises in the encounter with a work of poetry or philosophy. The recurrent themes of Benardete’s work — eros and punishment, the beautiful and the just, the soul, and the gods — also come up in these discussions as do reflections on Heidegger and the relationship between science and philosophy. In Encounters and Reflections, Benardete is erudite without being obscure, offering illuminating readings of Homer, Plato, and other Greek thinkers. There is a warmth and generosity in Benardete’s manner as he reveals the ways in which philosophy and classical texts remain crucial to our lives. In this volume, Benardete, who died in 2001, has left us with a captivating and engaging testament to his life and ideas. — Reprinted by permission of The Seminary Co-op Bookstore     January 2003 Back to Top Back to What’s New