Mindscape 135 Shadi Bartsch on Plato, Vergil, Confucius, and Modernity
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- čas přidán 27. 07. 2024
- Patreon: / seanmcarroll
In our postmodern world, studying the classics of ancient Greece and Rome can seem quaint at best, downright repressive at worst. (We are talking about works by dead white men, after all.) Do we still have things to learn from classical philosophy, drama, and poetry? Shadi Bartsch offers a vigorous affirmative to this question in two new books coming from different directions. First, she has newly translated the Aeneid, Vergil’s epic poem about the founding myth of Rome, bringing its themes into conversation with the modern era. Second, in the upcoming Plato Goes to China, she explores how a non-Western society interprets classic works of Western philosophy, and what that tells us about each culture.
Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer received her Ph.D. in Classics from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, and multiple teaching awards. She has served as the Editor-in-Chief of Classical Philology, and is the Founding Director of the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. She is developing an upcoming podcast.
Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: www.preposterousuniverse.com/...
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I have no idea how you find such a varied group of people to talk with but this was a great episode. Helps that she sounded so upbeat about everything too.
Hi, Prof.
"以铜为鉴,可以正衣冠;以人为鉴,可以明得失;以史为鉴，可以知兴替"
this is a famous quote from a wise and powerful emperor in Tang dynasty China. it roughly can be translated into "copper mirrors can help you look tidy and decent, treating others as mirrors (eg. social learning) can help you learn gain and loss, treating history as a mirror can help you see the rise and fall of societies."
Yikang Zhang
East China Normal University, Shanghai
look back at my comment, this is very meta😅
Well, now we need another podcast with an expert on the Chinese classics!
Would love to see michael Puett. Hes a harvard professor of chinese anthropology and philosophy. There are some talks of his on youtube about confucius and daoist philosophers that are great
Hmmm, why did I get a degree in Classics? When in the Marines I'd planned on becoming an astronomer. When enrolling at CU Boulder I became a Physics major, and had to take 4 courses in the humanities & 4 in the social sciences, so I took overviews of ancient Rome & ancient Greece, and got hooked, and after years of trying, I had to stop trying to double major and focus on one, the one I found easy to remember and analyze, the one that made sense to me. So I enrolled as a hopeful physicist / astrophysicist and eventually ended up a MS/HS Latin teacher ....
What I am always impressed are the razor sharp questions Sean is asking and the huge portfolio of intellectual tools Sean owns.
Talking about how how Plato is being seen in China opens a huge bag of worms because it covers
- the condensed wisdom of some of the greatest thinkers
- the view onto this wisdom from a modern perspective
- the view from a different culture
- the view of two different types of scientists, Sean and Ariel
In order to intellectually follow such a condensed 90 minutes interview, you need a lot of knowledge and thinking paradigms. With thinking paradigm I mean a quick rule to give the entanglement of associations the right levels of magnitude. Only when you get this level of entanglement right, the associative thinking brain can grasp whether a statements made e.g. in the interview make sense and how it makes sense.
What I am referring to is that serial words are intended to transfer structured information from one brain to the other brain. With a huge probability that the transferred information with be received COMPLETELY different in the other brain.
This is actually the first concrete comment I want to make:
Chinese language vs. Western languages.
The Chinese language is based on pictures. So if I hear a Chinese sentence in Mandarin, it is the serialization of a picture here in Mandarin. In other spoken Chinese languages this serialization would sound completely different.
Being based on pictures , the Chinese language is more powerful to transmit concepts from one brain to the other.
But the western languages transmit “instructions on how to do something”.
What is the meta knowledge I can extract or condense from this? Well, in order to have a powerful brain, you should use both concepts.
To be continued...
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Great use of examples and various interpretations. Thank you.
Top end video. Thanks Sean.
I'd greatly appreciate an audio/video experience, even it's half screen with a person on each side. Not seeing body language and the personal interactions between the speakers takes away so much from the aim of communication.
I love your science "episodes" Dr Carroll! Thank you so much for those! I watch them often. And thank you for the books you write! From Eternity to Here and Something Deeply Hidden are my faves. I appreciate you narrating the audiobook versions, as well. Lastly, the classes you teach for The Great Courses are such a gift! Thank you for effectively sharing info on this amazing universe with the rest of us. Now we just need video in your podcasts 👍🏻
Great stuff!
such a delightful conversation by two intelligent people
About time Sean got Bart Simpson on the podcast! 😂😂
I can not unhear Bart now.
Great guest, great show. Really appreciate you Dr. Carroll! 🥂🖖🏼
"Oh, my god, yes" .... YES YES YES .... just love this episode. And so relevant! Thank you.
Wow, Sean really clicked with this guest.
She looks like carter from Stargate
The ancient philosophers were more self aware than most modern people. This awareness gave them amazing insights into the transcend aspects of life. The classics have many timeless lessons for us to ponder a inact in our lives.
Nice reference to Morse.. just finished watching an episode of Endeavor 🤯
👍👍👍👍. In Italy I studied Vergil at school in Latin at high school, but I preferred other poets more similar to us, like Catullus, Ovidius..
Holy cow how good can life be.
Anyway, good podcast everyone. YES, that includes YOU, Ariel, oh my dear Ariel.
The reason they are important is that they are made so you must think and it also help you how to discuss stuff like this. Remember a society without writing for thousands of years know probably better how to communicate without letters. This was very early on after getting a rich written language.
And a 😃for the algorithm
I still find it sad that content creators have to themselves read sponsor advertisements during the podcasts. We need more science funding in all media aspects.
I was struck by the Michael Levin interview a few days ago and how the organization of, say, frogs, seems to have something to do with, for lack of a better word, a Platonic frog.
shadi like a melody
Listen to you.
There were a lot of comments about "problematic" Western history combined with rose tinted glasses and gushing about non Western tradition.... When do we stop needing to apologise for being Western? Where is this imaginary perfect culture that we judge ourselves against?
I think you missed the point. The point isn't that the West is evil and China is perfect, the point is that the West ISNT perfect and the way we do things isn't the only way it could be done.
When one attempts to be introspective personally, they are trying to understand themselves better in order to grow and develop, become better. Understanding other cultures and reflecting on our own culture can help us understand ourselves better and improve.
Thucydides is likely more influential in America than most might imagine. His works are assiduously studied in the military academies and thereafter by all rising officers. Sun Tzu's "The Art of War", of course, is the Chinese equivalent.
Great podcast. Man her microphone is sensitive though. I could hear the shape her mouth the whole time.
1:05:00 I would suggest that it is mainly our upper class that are influenced by these classics. The lower classes while able to read also have a different class of reading material. Most people only writing and reading short message services or the TV guide. Our middle classes writing and reading technical documents, science papers and the like. Lawyers and politicians reading, writing and arguing about the legal code.
Without the Classics would we have got the greatest English film of all time The Life Of Brian ?
remember "CD's".....wow actually yes haha, dam it
Spinning things way is a tactic that many soviet and ex-soviet states used. Westerners should look at their recent allies (Czechia, Poland, Romania) to understand how this process is used and with what potential purposes. Assuming chinese leaders aren't necessarily idiots (which might as well be the case, but for the sake of not underestimating a potential enemy), surely they [should] know that the end result can only be a strong cultural rupture with their maoist past and an acculturation process of the Chinese society, just like in formal Warsaw pact members that used the same annoying tactics. Not sure the leaders of those formal soviet republics knew what would be the end result, but the Chinese leaders should understand the precedent by now. It's very interesting that they're going this path (but also worrisome).
Last time I was this early Einstein was still a patent clerk.
56:00 Eeh. Sean said she taught herself manderine... by taking collage cources for 8 years...
You misspelled Virgil.
It is Vergilius in Latin, so some Classicists prefer to spell it Vergil in English.
Anyone out there managed to decipher Metatrons cube by any chance and can summarise under my comment...much appreciated 😂😂😂
6th!!!
Bruh you got SPANKED.
Smart & sexy AF
I am first today
Studying the classics of ancient Greece and Rome can seem "downright repressive" (oh... "at worst"), because "We are talking about works by dead white men, after all"
WTF?!
I think he was just giving a descriptive (emphasis on that) picture of a phenomenon where people with different cultural identities feel as though that sort of discourse does not include them or feel as though it is applicable to their own lives