Professor Paul Woodruff on Philosophy, War and Justice
The Daily Stoic
Daily Stoic | Backyard Ventures
4.5 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 28 January 2023
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ryan speaks with Paul Woodruff about his book The Ajax Dilemma: Justice, Fairness, and Rewards, the ancient purpose of justice, reflections on a lifetime of studying philosophy, what serving in Vietnam taught him about justice, and more.
Paul Woodruff is a classicist, professor of philosophy, and dean at The University of Texas at Austin, where he once chaired the department of philosophy. Before starting his career at the university in 1972, Paul served as an officer in Vietnam. His work deals with the translation, study, and analysis of works of ancient philosophy, with his best-known offerings focusing on Marcus Aurelius, Socrates, Plato, and philosophy of theater. His books include First Democracy; The Challenge of an Ancient Idea, The Necessity of Theater; The Art of Watching and Being Watched, and Reverence; Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. The first book of philosophy that Paul ever read was The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Paul’s new book is Living Toward Virtue: Practical Ethics in the Spirit of Socrates.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation |
| 0:09.9 | inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues |
| 0:15.2 | of courage, justice, temperance and wisdom. And then here on the weekend we take a deeper |
| 0:21.3 | dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we explore at length how |
| 0:28.7 | these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. |
| 0:36.3 | Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, |
| 0:41.6 | be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal and most |
| 0:47.4 | importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. |
| 0:52.8 | Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. I got a |
| 1:01.2 | random email from a reader. He gets the reading list email, which I send out every month, |
| 1:06.1 | just my favorite book recommendations. You can sign up there at ryanholiday.net. But |
| 1:12.2 | um, this guy just sent me a note. He said, I wanted to recommend a book that I think you'd |
| 1:16.9 | like by Paul Woodruff, a classics professor at UT Austin. He said, I'd heard you on the |
| 1:22.6 | doctor drew podcast and you mentioned your struggles in researching for your upcoming |
| 1:26.7 | book about justice. So sometimes people ask me in the reading list, how do you find these |
| 1:30.8 | books? What do you recommend? Well, I have a very fortunate advantage which is people |
| 1:34.4 | like Daniel just shoot me these unexpected notes. And I looked it up and it turns out |
| 1:43.0 | that professor Paul Woodruff is not just based in Austin, but is an absolutely fascinating |
| 1:49.2 | character. Professor Woodruff has been a philosopher, writer and translator at the University of |
| 1:54.4 | Texas at Austin since 1973. This is a guy who has dedicated his life to these topics. It's |
| 2:01.1 | just absolutely fascinating to me. He was an officer in the US Army in Vietnam. He's |
| 2:07.8 | written a number of books about ancient philosophy. He's translated a number of works of ancient |
... |
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