Jacob Howland, the Chief Academic Officer and Director of the Intellectual Foundations Program at UATX, presents a lecture entitled, “Platonic Incommensurables: Reflections on the Unspeakable Wholeness of Socrates,” Friday, February 17, 2023
Plato twice compares human beings to incommensurable magnitudes. What are the implications of this comparison? Thinking through this problem leads me to suggest that the embodied soul is by its very nature a locus of incommensurability. The soul's work, exemplified by Socrates, is to hold together dimensions of reality whose coherence in human life is real but fundamentally ineffable. I develop this suggestion through considerations of the Republic and the trilogy Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman.
Prior to his position at UATX, commonly known as the University of Austin, Jacob Howland was the McFarlin Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa, where he taught for 32 years. He is the author of several books, including Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato’s Republic (2018); Plato and the Talmud (2011); Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Philosophy and Faith (2006); and The Republic: The Odyssey of Philosophy (1993). His articles on literature, politics, and the academy have appeared in many journals, including The New Criterion, Commentary, the Claremont Review of Books, the Jewish Review of Books, The Nation, and Quillette.
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