Encounters and Reflections : Conversations with Seth Benardete

Rating:
Summary: Platonists in Rolls Royces
Review: A nice, chatty book. Benardete's insights into Plato, Homer, and Sophocles are beyond compare, and here you get to hang out with him for a while. Time ran out on these conversations, but one wishes both for a little bit more "behind-the-scenes" fun with the Rat Pack Straussians tooling around Chicago in antique Rolls Royces, drinking, and arguing (hardly Kingsley Amis stuff) and for some indications of Benardete's intentions. --Keep it next to your copy of Bellow's Ravelstein for handy reference when watching how the future unfolds.

Rating:
Summary: Platonists in Rolls Royces
Review: A nice, chatty book. Benardete's insights into Plato, Homer, and Sophocles are beyond compare, and here you get to hang out with him for a while. Time ran out on these conversations, but one wishes both for a little bit more "behind-the-scenes" fun with the Rat Pack Straussians tooling around Chicago in antique Rolls Royces, drinking, and arguing (hardly Kingsley Amis stuff) and for some indications of Benardete's intentions. --Keep it next to your copy of Bellow's Ravelstein for handy reference when watching how the future unfolds.

Rating:
Summary: The elements of style
Review: Encounters: Lady Beazley hates Germans. Peter Blanckenhagen hates hospitals. Leo Strauss is baffled by physics, Richard Rorty is diagnosed with Weltschmerz, Hilary Putnam welcomes the Maoist insurgency, and Eva Brann is oblivious to her own allure. Arthur Darby Nock bares it all; Jacob Klein reveals his divinity.

Reflections: St. Paul the Leninist, Plato the poet, Herodotus the philosopher. This is clearly where the meat lies, but it doesn't make for as many pithy headlines. A tip of the cap to anyone who can explain the reading of Apuleius.

Rating:
Summary: Good book, fascinating thinker, too slim
Review: I'm not going to review this book. (Well, not much, anyhow. Anyone who has come this far, and is looking at these reviews, is already going to be either sufficiently curious about Benardete -- meaning my review won't make a difference -- or already knowledgeable about his writings.) This generally excellent book deals with both Benardete's life and writings. Therein lies my complaint. I like the book and the format -- basically, two interviewers ask SB questions -- but I feel that the book could've provided more, and, moreover, that I deserved more (30$ being a hefty price tag for a book as slim as this one). Frankly, it was a tremendously enjoyable read, but I really do feel that the latter parts of the book (where SB touches on many interesting philosophical issues, and on topics he treats in his books) could have been fifty to one hundred pages longer. I would have been happier if the biographical section had been shorter, IF that had made room for a correspondingly larger 'intellectual' section: that is, more SB on philosophy. Benardete had an enviable ability to convey a lot in short pithy sentences, and greedily I simply wanted his thoughts and opinions on a myriad of topics.

Rating:
Summary: learning fan
Review: Two parts make this book. In the first part Benardete shares memories of his youth and family, education and professional preparation, friends and colleagues. This section is gossipy in the best of ways concerning the climate and personalities that made the University of Chicago and Harvard such dynamic places of learning during the last four decades or so. Bloom, Strauss, Grene, Rorty, Bellow, Dardan, Steiner, Rosen are some of the names named at the U of C alone. I loved reading that student members of the Committee for Social Thought pursued grand projects and perused authors in the voluminous reading time they were granted, allowing many to develop profoundly thick or curiosly sharp lenses with which to scrutinze the world. Benardete peppers most accounts with humour and sharp descriptions. I enjoyed to the Rolls Royce Road Trip.

The second part of the book presents formulation of the ideas and opinions that Benardete developed during his productive career as a scholar and teacher. The most frequently engaged authors are Plato and Homer, but the author smears the canon of classical works with his thoughts. I cannot say I am convinced by or necessarily in agreement with many of Bernardete's idiosyncratic readings, but I remain dazzled by the cleverness and intensity of the author's talent as a reader and interpreter of ancient writings.

The second part of the book is surely richer and more likely to engender rereading. The first part makes for excellent mind candy. On the whole the volume nicely circuits the career of Benardete, who seems to have been an admired teacher and thoughtful scholar. Funny and light, heavy and thoughtful, this book resembles its author.