Jacob Howland
speaker
188 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Jacob Howland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I got interested in the Talmud. It's a lot like the Platonic dialogues. And you have this fictional colloquy. That's the only way to describe it. Rabbis who maybe lived centuries apart are brought into debate and discussion.
What happens in a universe where finite beings try to find some meaning and encounter something or are afflicted by infinity in some way.
Yes, yes.
There is a question that I know to be absolutely fundamental because it shows up both in the Hebrew Bible and in Plato.
And the question is...
How far back do you want me to start?
Great, sure. So, well, I'll start with my parents. My father was a biology professor at Cornell University. My mother was a writer. First... nine, ten years of my life. I live with my mother. I have an older brother. My parents were divorced before I have any recollection of them being together. So I was just maybe a year old.
During that period, my mother was a struggling writer and lived in poverty. We lived in Chicago, and I had the unfortunate experience of being in Chicago public schools in 1968, 69, and a lot of tension. Things became very difficult because my mother was quite poor and couldn't sort of make ends meet.
I was born in 1959, end of 1959, yeah. So let's see. My mother comes from a Jewish background. Her whole family was from Chicago. Blue collar. My grandfather graduated from the 10th grade and worked with his hands making nuts and bolts in a big factory. And my father, who's not Jewish, actually we're descended from a John Howland who came over on the Mayflower.
And his side of the family were all scientists. His father was an engineer. at Purdue University, who designed the sewer system of Lafayette, Indiana. His older brother was a genius who graduated from Purdue at the age of 17 and was an engineer, optical engineer, just had 20 patents. And actually, both of those guys are still alive. But in any case, so...
As a child, I had strong influences on my mother's side, let's say literary and cultural influences. One of my earliest memories was being in Iowa City when I was a kid. My mother was reading me a story by Tolstoy called How Much Land Does a Man Need?, And my older brother got me up early in the morning, and I don't know, I was probably four or five.
He was a couple of years older, and he finished reading the story to me. So we always had, she always took us to, you know, see ballet and museums and things like this. Anyway, fast forward, we moved in with my father. I graduated from Ithaca High School at the age of 16 because my dad...
said, well, I'm going to go on a sabbatic leave, and I don't want to take you with me, and so you can graduate early, which I did. Went to Swarthmore College, took a philosophy course. I initially thought I was going to be a physics major.
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, and I was very – I'm not a mathematician, but – I did very well in mathematics. But I found that the physics was frankly too challenging. And I took an English course and some other things. And I finally took the philosophy course with a very brilliant man named David Lockerman. And he's one of these people that anyone who knew the guy said, this is the most brilliant person they'd ever met.
I was very fortunate too.
No, that was at Swarthmore College when I was undergraduate, yeah. And so I studied philosophy, history, and English. Those were my sort of three big influences. I got to read a lot of great literature, Russian lit, Latin American literature, American literature, studied history, in particular African history, I think, which was quite interesting.
But I fell in love with Plato, went to graduate school at Penn State University. And David Lacherman came to Penn State then. And that was great because he was on my dissertation committee. My main professor there, I suppose, besides Lacherman, was a man named Stanley Rosen, who was a student of Leo Strauss. And I studied Greek and wrote a dissertation on Plato's political philosophy.
Got a job at the University of Tulsa, which was great, for about three decades. I was the first chairman of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. They put these two departments together. And I had written a book on Plato's Republic, and then I had published my dissertation, and then decided I really wanted to get to know my religion colleagues.
So I started studying Kierkegaard and wrote a book on Kierkegaard and Socrates. Then I also, when we got to Tulsa, see, I had Jewish experiences as a child. For example, I remember Passover at my grandfather's house, where he'd grab my hand and take me to a shoal when he was saying Yartzeit for a relative, which is on the anniversary of their death, you say prayers.
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