135 | Shadi Bartsch on Plato, Vergil, Confucius, and Modernity

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 22 February 2021

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

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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.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Minescape Podcast.
0:02.9	I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:04.4	And I don't know about you, but I've always been fascinated by the classics, by which
0:08.7	I mean the good old classics, the works of ancient Western literature and philosophy and
0:14.4	thought that are associated with both Greece and Rome 2,000 years ago and more than that.
0:20.5	And fascinated in a couple different ways.
0:22.0	On the one hand, I'd like them on the philosophical or scientific side.
0:25.7	I'm constantly referring back to the Cretus or Aristotle or whatever as part of the founding
0:31.8	tradition of how we think about the world around us.
0:35.4	And I have on the literary side great fond memories of listening to audiobook versions of
0:41.0	the Iliad and the Odyssey while taking long cross-country road trips.
0:45.6	But on the other hand, there's also fascination because it seems weird that those particular
0:50.2	works are given such attention in our society, right?
0:54.2	But I once saw a 2CD collection.
0:56.5	Remember, there used to be CDs where you could put data on.
0:59.8	So this one CD was all of the works of ancient Greek literature and philosophy.
1:05.2	And the other CD was all the works of ancient Latin literature and philosophy.
1:09.1	And the point is that literally everything that we have remaining from that era can fit
1:14.3	on 2CDs.
1:15.3	It's not that much.
1:16.3	Why are we giving so much attention to so tiny a corpus of work?
1:21.6	But I think there's a reason why we do that.
	...

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