The Eccentric Core: the Thought of Seth Benardete

edited by Ronna Burger and Patrick Goodin St. Augustine’s Press

After a long wait, our collection has finally seen the light of day!

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1. Harvey Mansfield, “Seth Benardete, 1930-2001” 2. Ronna Burger, “Definitional Law in the Bible” 3. Laurence Lampert, “Extending the History of Philosophy Back to Homer: Seth Benardete’s Odyssey” 4. John Blanchard, “Parmenides’ Truth” 5. Olivia Delgado de Torres, “Parmenides: The Envelope of Socrates’ Second Sailing” 6. Heinrich Meier, Preface to Seth Benardete, Socrates and Plato: The Dialectics of Eros 7. Ronna Burger, “The Thumotic and the Erotic Soul: Seth Benardete on Platonic Psychology” 8. Michael Davis, “Seth Benardete's Second Sailing: On the Spirit of Ideas” 9. Robert Berman, “The Socratic Principle and the Problem of Punishment” 10. Patrick Goodin, “Aristotle and the Politics of Slavery” 11. Richard Velkley, “Being and Politics: Seth Benardete on Aristotle’s Metaphysics” 12. Richard Velkley, “Prelude to First Philosophy: Seth Benardete on De Anima” 13. Holly Haynes, “Empire as Wasteland, or Seth Benardete with Ronald Syme” 14. Steven Berg, Review of Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero 15. Bryan Warnick, Review of Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero 16. Michael Davis, “On the Being of The Being of the Beautiful” 17. Stanley Rosen, Review of The Being of the Beautiful: Plato’s Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman 18. Will Morrisey, “Thirty-nine Reasons for Reading Benardete on the Republic, Review Essay on Socrates' Second Sailing” 19. Arlene Saxonhouse, Review of Socrates’ Second Sailing: on Plato’s Republic 20. Abraham Anderson, Review of The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy 21. Martin Sitte, Review of The Bow and the Lyre 22. Steven Berg, Review of The Argument of the Action 23. Edward Rothstein, Review of The Argument of the Action 24. Mark Blitz, Review of Encounters and Reflections 25. Vincent Renzi, Review of Encounters and Reflections 26. Steven Berg, Review of The Archaeology of the Soul 27. Svetozar Minkov, Review of The Archaeology of the Soul 28. Seth Benardete, “The Bed and the Table” 29. Seth Benardete, “Two Paradigms” 30. Seth Benardete, “Herodotus’ Understanding of Barbaros” Selected Works by Seth Benardete Philosophy $26.00 R P a o t n

This volume is a tribute to the thought of Seth Benardete by contributors who had the rare r n good fortune of studying with him or those who discovered the treasure of his writings. Be - i c a nardete’s classical scholarship and remarkable knowledge of Greek served his philosophic k

B quest to understand the nature of things, which he pursued through a brilliant practice of G interpretation of texts. He found in the Platonic dialogue—in the action through which the u o argument unfolds—the key to philosophic thinking, and this enabled him, in turn, to read r d o d the poets philosophically. He was fully immersed in the world of the ancients, starting with e r

i The Eccentric Core Homer, but their works opened up for him a way to the fundamental questions—about jus - tice and love, nature and law, the city and the gods. Seeing, as he once put it, that “the prob - n lem 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 The Thought of Seth Benardete wrote this statement reflecting on the political-theological issue in the work of his teacher, T 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 ob - h

servation to disclose, unexpectedly, the unifying focal point of a whole. e

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 E conference for Benardete at the New School for Social Research in December 2002 and a re - flection just after his death, in November 2001, as well as reviews of his books published c over the years. The essays about or inspired by Benardete’s thought—on the Bible and c

Homer, the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle and the Roman writers—suggest the remarkable e

range of his teaching and studies. The centrality of Plato is evident not only in these essays n 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 t

essays and a bibliography of his writings. r

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Patrick Goodin is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Howard Uni - versity, where he has taught since 1996. He received his PhD from the New School for Social C 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- o

Caribbean and African American Philosophy. r e Ronna Burger is Catherine & Henry J. Gaisman Chair and Professor of Philosophy at Tulane Uni - versity. After completing her dissertation on Plato’s Phaedrus, directed by Benardete, she went on to write The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth (Yale 1985, St. Edited by Ronna Burger and Patrick Goodin ,I!S7BINB: 957I8-71-5d8b73f1i58a0a0 ! : P $;m26;Q.0;0 k;k

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