Hi, welcome back to the new Thinkery. I'm David Barr, managing editor of the American Mind. With me, as always is my good friend Alex Priya. How's it going, Alex?
I'm all right. How are you doing, David? Good. And where are you calling in from?
I'm still in Boulder, Colorado. I'm at the University of Colorado Boulder for the last four or five months. I've been in my apartment. And you're also in Boulder.
This is the Herps program that you're working on. Herps program, yeah, for Engineering, Ethics, and Society. I teach small great book seminars to engineering students, usually on the something around the topic of the intersection of science and society. Excellent.
And Greg McRayer, how are you, Greg? Where are you calling from? I'm calling from Ashland, Ohio. Good to be with you guys again.
I'm here in North Central Ohio. It's been a lovely summer day. Looking forward to school, getting back started here. And I guess a couple of weeks.
Good. So today I'm extremely excited and grateful to have our particular guest, Charles Butterworth. He was a professor of mine at the University of Maryland when I was an undergraduate. He was on Greg's dissertation committee.
And he is a friend of Alex's. Charles is actually the link between the three of us on this podcast. So when I was an undergraduate, I was given special dispensation to take graduate courses at the University of Maryland. And I was sitting in one with another political theorist who will remain nameless, one of his graduate courses.
And I met Mr. McBayer and Greg and I became fast friends. And he said, listen, this course is fine, but there's really ought to try sitting in on a class with Charles Butterworth. I said, well, who's that?
And I thought of maple syrup or something like this. And he goes, no, no, no, no, you're going to love this class. And so I said in on a class where we I think began with the Plato's Minos, then the laws and eponymous and is extremely difficult way, way over my head. But it was wonderful.
And Charles was kind enough to allow me to keep sitting on his classes. And one thing I'll never forget is the after seminar gatherings that were encouraged by Charles, where we would each bring libations and other relishes and get to know one another. Greg and I formed a very serious bond over books and became a deep friendship. I went on to St.
John's again at the insistence of Charles where I met Alex Priu, who's my best friend, he officiated my wedding. I officiated his. Greg was at Alex's wedding. And it's just the kind of use this opportunity to point out that neither of you came to my wedding.
I just want to vote for invited. I wasn't invited to the first. I got your second leftover wedding, Greg. Yeah, Alex was married in Norway.
So I went to Norway to come to Kentucky, right, right, which is a kind of a foreign country in its own way. But so Charles is the he brought the three of us together. It's amazing. And it's a testament to how the love of learning really can engender this kind of deep friendship.
So you know, simply what Charles is one of the leading political scientists. I don't know if that's a fair designation, but studying medieval political philosophy today. If you're reading Islamic slash Arabic political philosophy and your political science or philosophy courses, you can likely thank three people. So Leo Strauss, Wusun Madi, and Charles Butterworth.
He's translated with accompanying interpretations, countless texts of medieval political thought. Most recently, he translated second volume of Alvarabi's works, the political regime in summary of Plato's laws, again, for Cornell University Press. My favorite translation just as an aside of his, however, is I think one of his earliest that of Rousseau's reveries of a solitary walker. And we'll go into his bio as this conversation progresses.
So I won't say too much more, but Charles, thank you so much for joining us today. Well, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. Yeah, so a little bit.
How did you get interested in medieval political philosophy? Can you tell us a little bit about feeling a little bit of your bio and what started you down this path? The story is really a story of serendipity. I was taking a class.
Well, let me let me go back a second. My introduction to political philosophy came in the second year of college at Michigan State University when I met a man by the name of Robert Horwitz. Robert Horwitz, who was a student of Leo Strauss and had come to Michigan State. I think the best way to characterize him is if you ever went to a fair grounds and you saw the fellow who stands outside one of the expositions as a barker and tries to bring you in.
He has a long cane with a hook on it. He can get around your neck and pull you towards it. Well, Horwitz was precisely that kind of person. He was very interested in talking to students.
And he was interested in finding out what students wanted to do. It didn't take long before he explained to me that I had clearly been wasting my time at Michigan State. And the only thing that I should be doing was taking classes with him in political philosophy. And I did that.
I learned a great deal and he made it possible to attend seminars that would otherwise have been close to me, graduate seminars. But he saw a student who was interested and made it possible. Then I went off to France. I had received a Fulbright to go to France.
And his parting words were that I should not forget when it came time to do graduate study, it was only one place to go. Chicago, and only one person to study with, Leo Strauss. I forgot. I spent a couple of years in France and worked on Jean-Jacques Rousseau at that time, did an advanced degree.
And it was just another case of Theron Deputy. One of the persons I worked most closely with while I was in France was a member named the name of Fronçois Burricault, a sociologist, and a prize student of Raymond Aron. Only because it came time for me to think about graduate school. And I was starting to hesitate about whether I should go to graduate school or go to law school, did Burricault intervene and insisted that I meet a friend of his by the name of Alan Bloom.
I did at a cafe on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris. And Bloom reiterated the message there's only one place to go, Chicago, only one place to study with. So I did. I made my way to Chicago.
I think that all of these teachers were absolutely correct. That was the place to be. And so somewhere in the first year that I was at Chicago doing a course probably on Plato with the Austros, he mentioned at the end of the class or somewhere in the end that in order to understand the history of philosophy, one really had to understand medieval philosophy, not just Latin medieval philosophy, but also the medieval philosophy that was written in Arabic and to a certain extent in Hebrew. When I went to question him about that after class, he gave what I now understand is the typical University of Chicago answer.
Well, I can't really answer that question for you. What you need to do is to go across the street to the Oriental Institute and talk to Muslim Matty who understands these things much better. Students in those days were much more willing to follow advice, I guess. And so I did.
And Matty, after a few moments, said, well, in order for you to grasp what's going on, you really have to study Arabic. And by chance, this summer, there's an intensive Arabic class being taught at Harvard. Why don't we see if we can't get you into that? So off I went to Harvard that summer.
And supposedly, in eight weeks, studied the equivalent of one year of Arabic. It wasn't one year. And when I returned to Chicago and told Matty that I had this under my belt, and it would, I hoped that he had a class in second year Arabic, so I could fit into it. He asked me to read a couple of things.
And after about 10 minutes, he said, okay, you're going to have a very easy three weeks in my introductory Arabic class. And indeed, I was shocked, but obedient. Indeed, I did have a very easy three weeks. The very first day we went to class, Matty explained what the Arabic alphabet was all about, and dutifully wrote it on the blackboard in English letter or Latin letter with an Arabic letter.
And then he said, this is the last time that you'll see the Latin alphabet. I want you to go home tonight, get the Arabic alphabet under your belt, and we'll start working seriously on the grammar that we had the next time we met. The class had about 30 people in it. By the end of 10 weeks, there were four students who decided to go on to the next quarter.
Two of them were Pakistani, and therefore had an understanding of Urdu, and were making the transition from Urdu to Arabic. And there was another man a bit older who had spent a lot of time in the Middle East, had some kind of basic familiarity with what is going on in the Middle East, and wanted to learn Arabic, and myself. We did that grammar in one quarter, and Matty explained that now that we understood the basic principles of Arabic grammar, we would read some selections from a book of different kinds of Arabic literature. It was a German book called Christomatia of Arabic literature.
And then when we got done with that, we would read a very simple little treatise by Al-Franabi called the... No, I'm sorry, and we did that. We did that the whole quarter. And by the end of the quarter, three of us showed up for the spring, the two Pakistanis and myself.
Maybe seals or something. I think that we're Matty alive today that he would have a very difficult time convincing his dean that he was doing what is important for keeping up admissions. But those were different times and certainly a different place. So we might need to get in touch with these Pakistanis to confirm this.
It's not Fable. So I go on. And so then he said that we would read a little book by Al-Franabi called The Philosophy of Plato. We did that.
We spent the 10 weeks doing that. It was very hard going, but it worked. And that summer there was another... This was back in the early 60s, and the government was very interested in having languages that could...
The knowledge of which could contribute to the national defense, to have these languages taught. And therefore, there was a very intensive summer course on Arabic that the three of us took. But when the fall began, the only person to come to Matty's seminar was a young woman, an undergraduate whom I had not seen before. And our task was to read the political regime, Al-Franabi's political regime.
So after one year, literally after 10 weeks of grammar and a little bit of reading selections to see how different people used the language, the immersion was complete immersion into political philosophy and reading philosophic texts. That persuaded me that there was something here to be studied. And of course, as I went back and spoke with Leo Strauss about these things, and he shared more about what he was interested in, I saw how very much there was. We should go ahead.
Sorry, can I just ask you to expand on what that something was, what it is you noticed? Because it's been something of a fascination of mind that you translated the reveries, and then you get into the devil Islamic philosophy. And you don't really see many people with that those two interests. So what was the something that you noticed in those classes when reading the political regime and reading Farrabi with Matty?
What was the something that convinced you this was worth going in further? Yeah, Charles, if I could just piggyback off Alex's question. It's at the time, aside from Matty, had any of Strauss's students really gone down and perhaps earned his Fortin, I don't know the dates well with these people who your predecessors quite were, but it would have seemed that a safer bet, of course, would be in ancient or the moderns, but the medievals were out kind of on their own island. Is that fair?
I was certainly a lunar. There was a man a little bit older than I am by the name of Ray Weiss, Raymond Weiss. He had already been ordained as a rabbi, and he was very interested in my monadies. He learned enough Arabic to be able to read those writings of my monadies written in Arabic, but he was coming at this from the perspective of the Hebrew tradition.
There was one person who had preceded me in working on Arabic with Matty, a mamba name of Hiram, Keaton. I heard the other day that he's no longer living. Keaton was a remarkably gifted man. He knew German very well, and other modern European languages.
He had a good grasp of and learned enough Arabic to write a master's thesis on Avi Senna. For some reason, that didn't interest him. So he was more in philosophy. In fact, he was simply in philosophy.
He did his PhD in philosophy. When he went off to teach, he became specialized in Descartes, and went to the University of Pennsylvania, where we've had a lot of news recently because of football problems. Penn State. Penn State.
Penn State. Penn State. Okay. So, and at Penn State was Richard Kennington, a very distinguished student of Strauss.
Keaton and Kennington clashed ferociously over the interpretation of Descartes. There was nobody else interested in what most of the other students who were in my vintage at Chicago, one Walter Nagorski, who is now retired from Notre Dame, specialized in Latin philosophy, especially Cicero. A few years ahead of me was Marvin Kendrick, who was an exceptionally gifted student and wrote on Xenophon. Kendrick somehow just disappeared.
He taught for a few years at Yale and then became lost somehow in life. And Fortune was a visitor to Chicago from time to time, but didn't have any students there. I, and I don't know of anybody other than David DiPascuale, who studied with Fortin at Boston College. I don't know anybody else who, from that period of time, was guided by Fortin.
Of course, we now know somebody else by name of Douglas Crease out in Washington at Gonzaga University, who was a Fortin student. You and I spent the summer out there with 2014. That was a great summer. Yeah.
And Alex, I apologize. I didn't need to hijack your question. You had something a little bit deeper. I was just, well, because Charles, you said that when you were in Mati's class and you were reading the political regime, there was something that stood out to you while reading.
I was wondering if you could elaborate on that a little bit. What you noticed? It's not that it stood out because one of the problems, of course, was trying to make your way through a very difficult language, but what I discerned was a whole new approach to ancient philosophy and a very deft handling of both Aristotle and Plato, one that I had seen nowhere else. So it was intriguing and certainly interesting enough to try to learn more.
But at that point, I guess it's probably still true, in order to understand what's happening with this one author, you also have to try to understand what's happening in all of the other authors surrounding him, ones that he admits reading and being influenced by, and others whom you need to know about so you understand the cultural context in which all of this is taking place. What is remarkable about most of Mati, who could be said to be the person who put Arabic philosophy on the map for the contemporary period, what's remarkable about him is that he learned to work his way back through what was happening among professors in the Arab world who were a little bit ahead of him, to what was truly interesting and what everybody said that they were studying. And what I mean by that, that's a very vague way to put it. What bothered me when I was in Europe and when I was studying there was that we didn't study philosophy, we studied the history of philosophy, we didn't study an author, we studied whom, who might have influenced that author or how that author might be a voice of his period of his cultural milieu.
The same thing was going on to a certain extent among the big figures in the history of contemporary Arabic learning in the Middle East, and what happened was that Mati was able to see what was worth preserving from these people, what was worth respecting, and how to redirect to the extent possible the students who were coming into contact with him. And I think it became clear to him that the best place to be was something like the United States, where he could reach out to people but not be bogged down in the politics of the day. Moson Mati was born in Kabbalah, Iraq, educated by the Iraqi government. He did his BA at the American University of Beirut, and even though he was sent to study public administration, he ended up with a double degree in public administration and in philosophy.
And then when he went to Chicago, he was sent to study economics. But after a short period of time in the economics department, he found his way over to the Oriental Institute and to a woman by the name of Nabiya Abbot, where he learned about the proper way to study history. And then with Abbot, with the O'Strouse, with Eve Seemo, and other remarkable people at Chicago, he wrote this outstanding dissertation on Ibn Khaldun. The Piper came to Moson Mati many, many years later.
The Piper, the Piper Strauss, you mean? The Piper meaning the person you have to pay. The Iraqi government found out that he had a distinguished career. They wanted him to come back and teach at the University of Baghdad.
When he demurred, they explained to him that in that case, they expected him to repay student loans with interest. Thank goodness they weren't that onerous, and he was earning a good enough salary that he was able to do it. But there is no free lunch. But Charles, I have a quick one, so I didn't mean interrupt you.
No, no, that was a, let me say one thing. I've been dropping a number of names, but there's one other name that has to be mentioned here. And that's the name of Paul Crouse. Paul Crouse is by chance the brother-in-law of Leo Strauss.
But Paul Crouse was a remarkable orientalist, and I use that word in a special way. I mean that he was trained in studying the Orient, and he acquired languages with an incredible flair. He became very interested in the Ismaelie doctrines and in alchemy in things that were not completely rational, but that he could approach using rational methods and forged a remarkable path in teaching us how to study texts. So, and his influence on Strauss was important in that Strauss recognized just how brilliant Crouse was and drew on him whenever he needed work.
I mentioned whenever he needed information about different things. So how, what was going on at Chicago at this time, and also to a certain extent? You said Monty was at Harvard, he split his time? Well, and that came to the University of Chicago as a student, graduated with his PhD in 1954.
Nothing was available at the time, so he didn't go back to Baghdad, and he spent two years in Baghdad teaching at a law school. Essentially, the kind of thing that too many of our friends are experiencing these days, what we would call something like an adjunct professorship at different universities in Baghdad. And then Gustav van Gunabam, who was in charge of Arabic studies at Chicago, decided to go to Los Angeles, and Chicago invited Matty to come back. So that was about 56 or 57.
Matty stayed at Chicago until 1969 when he accepted an offer from Harvard. Okay. So I guess the question I had was, is it fair to say that Chicago, what was going on in Chicago around Strauss and Matty, was that ahead of the curve in the study of medieval political philosophy, or had this been happening to a greater degree already in Europe, and the US was just playing catch up, if that's fair? What was happening at Chicago was unlike anything that was happening anywhere else.
People at Chicago, and mainly through the guidance of Strauss, were looking at texts seriously. Yes, there were some remarkable scholars throughout Europe, Germany and France and Italy. And also, for the years 1960, 1970s, even the 80s, not so much, but in the 40s and 50s in Spain, there had been remarkable scholars of Arabic texts. But there was something unique about Chicago.
A lot of it was helped by what Hutchins had put in place, and that continued on almost until the time, until the early 60s. It started to become attacked in the early 60s. And of course, now you won't find that remarkable Hutchins program, or even the interest in the great books that at that time characterized Chicago. Mr.
Butterworth, can I switch gears just a little bit? So a couple of weeks ago, we recorded an episode on a very, we decided to treat us using your translation. And Alex kind of asked me why I thought it was important that that texts at all, and why the Islamic thinkers in general. And my answer was, for me personally, these were texts that helped me to think seriously about religious questions about the political theological questions, and that the Islamic ones, the Islamic slash everything, are said in this more clearly than others.
And so I guess two questions for you. One would be, what is the, what's in it for young people today to turn to these texts? What's substantively is in there that's so important that they can learn from? And then the second, I believe that what texts would you recommend for someone who's reading these things for the first time?
So what's the substance in what books? The substance is trying to understand the appeal of religion, and the challenge that reason poses to religious faith on the best possible terms, terms that are fair to the claims of religion, and that are fair to the claims of philosophy. There's a remarkable essay in the last Claremont Review of Books issue by a tutor from St. John's Paul Ludwig.
I think it's called Spirited Republicanism or something like that. Public Spiritiness, public Spiritiness, and Ludwig makes a remarkable defense of philosophy, and the problem of the philosopher in politics. The philosopher needs to create holes in speech, W-H-O-L-E-S, but needs to do that in a way that remains faithful to the phenomena that are around us. That depends to a certain extent upon pointing out the shortcomings of faith claims, but also it shows that some faith claims and certainly some doctrines that people of faith hold dear can find sustenance in philosophy.
So that's certainly prevalent in Averui's. It's not prevalent in that way in Al-Farabi, but it's there. And if I had any truly sweeping criticism of other people, it would be that Avicenna tried too hard to make religious claims, took to marry religious claims with philosophical claims and confused both of them and invited the criticisms, I consider the mungest criticisms of Qazali. So what's remarkable is that Al-Farabi knew how to keep things in control, and then if that accusation is accurate, Averui's comes along to redress the contours of the debate and to make it possible for philosophy to function once again.
So this is a question I asked you once, a long time ago, I asked you for a good book that went over the history of medieval political philosophy. I said, what book do you recommend you said there is in one, which was somewhat discerning, but so I think it would actually be a good service. This is along the lines of Greg's question about what text people should read, but if you wanted to sort of give an account of, you've kind of given us it a bit backwards, right? You have Al-Farabi, Avicenna seems to blend the claims of religion, the claims of philosophy a little too much, this provokes Qazali's attack on Averui's does his best to try to rehabilitate philosophy.
Obviously the decisive treatise would be the a veristic text to read, but if you wanted to put together a kind of sequence and how that looks maybe in a little bit more detail, what would you suggest to a reader who may be is unacquainted with this, but wants to put in some serious time thinking and what should they expect from these books? If we were to go maybe for Averui, Avicenna, etc. What readings would you recommend? I would, I think that the best way to approach this is that remarkable book, the source book, source book of medieval political philosophy.
It does all three traditions, the Islamic, the Christian, and the Jewish tradition, and it's an excellent Joseph's. The, you know, it was originally done, is originated by Lerner and Matt D. And now Joshua Perrin's and Joseph McFarland have done an update with the blessings of the first two editors. And by the way, that name, Ralph Lerner, is another name that has to be mentioned in such a discussion.
Lerner has done a great deal to make Averui's and Averui's political teaching better understood by his excellent translation of Averui's commentary on Plato's Republic, and also of Jewish authors by the work that he's done on Abravanel and on my monadies. I don't think, I stay as ignorant as I was when you first asked that question. I see no one volume, good history that I would send a student to for guidance. There is a very interesting history of medieval Arabic political philosophy, or me, I think the title is Islamic, philosophy, not political philosophy, Islamic philosophy, by Averui Corbat.
But it's, it comes from a particular perspective, and Corbat is, and he stops it at Averui's. He doesn't carry it any further. Instead, what I think needs to be done is that students need to start with the authors that comprise this, this group of, let me just speak about the Arabic people. Zakari Elrazi is very important, and he has a marvelous little kind of autobiography called The Philosophic Life.
Paul Krauss had translated that into French. Strauss was not happy with Krauss's translation, and he mentioned it so often that I finally thought as a gesture of goodwill I would translate it into English. And so that's been translated by me, but it's not easily available. It's in an addition of interpretation from several years ago.
This is the, this is the text that's on Socrates, right? And Strauss refers to in Socrates and Aristophanes. It's a remarkable, it's remarkable because it sounds so much like Strauss's writings, you know, the problem with Socrates and in the beginning of Socrates and Aristophanes. It has that same sort of focus on the, you know, what Plato and Santa Fean were responding to.
Precisely. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah.
And then I would, I would look at some of the shorter treatises by AlfaNabi. The enumeration of the sciences, which is a, confessively or admittedly public work, AlfaNabi, it makes that clear on the very first page in the introduction and the account that he gives of political science in that work, the book of religion and also this very strange text of his called the selected aphorisms there. Short pithy statements that take the best that he can distill from the ancients. I think there's a pattern to the work.
I think that it's an attempt to link ethics and politics if you, if you try to put the, the text together. There's that. And then certainly in politics for AlfaNabi, there are two fundamental texts, the political regime and the principle of the opinions of the citizens of a virtuous city. It exists now in a very poor English translation, but hopefully that's going to be remedied.
Oh, and there's one other strange book that has just been published that is very helpful. David di Pasquale, who is indeed the last student of Mossimadi, just published with Cambridge University Press, his translation of AlfaNabi's dialectic book of dialectic. And in that book, one understands, one learns to appreciate what AlfaNabi is trying to do with philosophy. A wife philosophy remains a tentative or zetetic enterprise.
For AlfaNabi, there are some good writings that have been translated in the source book on medieval political philosophy. And I think those are sufficient for somebody not, willing to spend a great deal of time in the, in the forest that is this culture. And then for Averoese, the decisive treatise is very, very important. The decisive treatise is part of a trilogy.
There's an introductory essay. There's the decisive treatise. And then there's a final piece of work called The Uncovering of the Sign Post for the Beliefs of the Religious Community. That exists also in a problematic English translation, but it is available.
And that needs to be read. And then finally, I think that there are two big, but important texts, Maimonides guided the perplexed and Imchalun's introduction to the study of history. That's great. Yeah, I think Greg wanted to ask you now a bit about your teaching history, or what was your question, Greg?
Yeah, I mean, given that we, this is like a good transition, you were talking about maybe you were sort of loosely sort of outlining a syllabus for students who might be interested in pursuing studies. I'll just mention, I mean, I took the class with you every semester. I was at University of Maryland, so my graduate studies, I sort of headlocked David into coming to take a class with you. I learned so much.
I was wondering if you speak a little about teaching. I'll just say, having said it on your graduate seminars, I've tried to imitate your patients. I was now at my room and teaching for some time. But I will have to say one of my favorite experiences in the classroom with you was your undergraduate class.
I attended an undergraduate class. You talked on medieval Islamic thought. I think that I learned more in that than some of the other times. But in any event, I just wanted you to tell us a little about your teaching style, your teaching method, how you chose books.
If you have some favorite moments or favorite classes or books, you really liked teaching books. You'd like to return to books you didn't teach what you had? Well, indeed, there's when I stopped teaching, there was a promise of working on Hegel with the small group of graduate students, which you were one of them. And that never came to pass.
Right. Yes. That was a great point in that. But it's funny what you say about the undergraduate class in Islamic philosophy, because the memory that I have of that class is there was a woman who forced away into the class after had been going for I think for three or four sessions.
And it was clear that she was interested in the class because it was at a good time for her schedule. And she had the ignorance or the audacity to sit literally with an arm length of me and to text. She thought she was being clever in doing it below the little counter on which you could take notes. And when I called her out on it, simply denied it and said that I didn't know what I was talking about.
I remember that. And then I remember on the other hand, go ahead. Go ahead. No, go ahead, Charles.
I have another story about a bad class. I remember with you. I have two bad class stories. I remember one too.
The only one you ever walked down and was reading, I think, yes, don't want to use newspaper. Yeah, I'm a woman. That I don't remember. Oh, come on.
It was a sharp comet. No, no, you're quite in a fight much better than I would have handled it. You a woman opened up her newspaper and was reading a class and it was a huge lecture hall. I was a teaching assistant for the class and you said, you know, please, please put the paper away and she didn't.
But in any event, the other one I was remembering, the local paper for office. It was the other story. Yeah. Yeah.
The other story that's actually quite good is that you were teaching a seminar and who's that cooke that ran for office? I think he ran for president on an anti-Leo Strauss platform, which, you know, we'll get you all of 20 votes. And he, he, he, one of his supporters interrupted your class. LaRouche, I was talking about.
Yeah. LaRouche, I see. Yeah. That's right.
Yeah. And was seen. Yeah. Otherwise mild-mannered was seen.
Do you remember that, Charles? Vaguely. Okay. I'm not, I'm not focusing on it.
So what happened? I just let him have a say. Oh, which I just, it was funny that you were trying to teach in this gentleman came in gentleman being very nice, but came in with a prior class. And was seen, was seen by Reyes, who was a good friend of ours and a very mild-mannered man.
And I don't know that I've ever seen him raise his voice. He's so polite and proper, but he got up and just, just generally put his hand on the guy's back and said, you need to go now. You need to go. We have more important things to do.
So sorry, that was, that was a long. Yeah. I do remember that. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was more interested in sort of serious questions.
Sorry to have you railed us there, but I was more interested in sort of serious questions about your teaching. I know that we've talked a lot about your research and a lot about how you got interested in these things, but can you tell us what it is that you, you know, what were some of the classes you enjoyed teaching? What were some of your goals, methods, the kind of thing? But it's, it's, it's simple.
I, I, um, I had responsibilities like everybody, but to the extent, but I was also very inventive in interpreting those responsibilities. And I always thought at the beginning, when I was preparing a class, what would be the book that I would really like to read and get to know better? So I remember one semester, I was supposed to do a history of political philosophy course from somehow the medieval through the moderns. And I explained in the first couple of sessions, what happened briefly from the time of Aquinas up until the time of Montesquieu, and then suggested that we spend the rest of the semester reading the spirit of the loss.
And we did. I am not sure that all of the students appreciated it as much as I was in that class, and I greatly appreciated it. Yes. I was fantastic.
I learned a lot and I would say, I mean, it's very simplistic, but I would ask myself, what, what book do I want to, or what author do I want to get to know better? And I would organize it as best I could around that, and also drive home, if it had to be by lecture statements, the explicit attachment that these books had to politics and to what we need to understand about politics. I must say, I was truly blessed by what was going on at the University of Maryland at the time. There was not a great interest on the part of the faculty in political philosophy, but there was a notion that every teacher should be allowed to do his or her own course, and so there was never any interference.
Was that benign neglect, perhaps? But I was able to make the most of it. Yes, typically philosophers thrive in decadent contexts, they're permitted, right? So one thing, so we've talked about your education, your own work, and now a little bit your own teaching.
I thought maybe we could transition to how, and David, I think quite powerfully, but correctly stated that if you're studying medieval Islamic philosophy or political philosophy, rather, you owe it to Strauss and Buddy in Butterworth. So how would you say this tradition that's emerged within the study of medieval thought? This tradition initiated or promoted by Strauss, has been received or how it's grown, what its future looks like? I think its future is truly promising.
There's a scholarly organization, there are two scholarly organizations in Europe for the study of medieval philosophy. One embraces every aspect of it. Based in Belgium, in Luzane, and it's a huge organization, the Société Anturnas-Tunal Proglitude de la Felosophy Mediaval, International Society for the Study of Medival Philosophy. Is this through KU?
Is this through KU in Dovall? Is the Catholic University there? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's Luvain University, and what's going on here, I'm just not aware of where KU is.
That's what I was fighting for a number of years, the Flemish, French or Flemish, Valoné battle. And so at least 30 years ago, there was a split in Guvain, and there's Guvain-L'Nurth, which is a few kilometers outside of the town of L'Ouvan, and there's what I think you're referring to, the Catholic University of L'Ouvan, which is the old massive brick place. And what they decided to do when they split the library is to do it in the fairest possible way. So one volume stayed at L'Ouvan, and the other volume went too to do.
And so you have one here, volume one, volume three, volume five, that's a such a work. It's two, four, six, the other. That used to be a very bitter thing. I think it's this bitter now, and a man by name of Richard Taylor at Marquette University is doing a masterful job of walking on both of those rails.
The other organization is one called the International Society for the History of Arabic and Islamic Sciences and Philosophy. I was founded back in 89 or 90, and it's much smaller, but it's truly devoted to Arabic and Islamic science and philosophy. I was at a conference in Naples last September, and I am very moved by the linguistic abilities and the promise of a number of graduate students who were there. Fortunately, a couple of them from the United States.
So I think that there is a future and things are looking up. And not only are these younger people well trained linguistically, they also have a very solid sense of how to go about research without getting bogged down in quarrels and things like that. Right. And the reception more generally, as a strawsian interpretation or approach been well received.
I know you were a little bit annoyed about some heuristic Frenchman. And Charles, I also remember there's a fellow at I won't repeat his name Yale some years ago. It's bizarre because I'll read these reviews and in English, the ones in the United States. They can't they'll praise the translation, the fidelity, but there's a stumbling block with the with the straw stuff.
They just can't get over it. It's a psychologically it's just upsetting for them. It says if they read not Norton's book, but who's the other book? This like Strauss.
Shadi Adjuri. Yeah. And they've just that's poisoned them just forever. Yeah.
Well, the man that you're thinking about from Yale University has a very it can be very simply he thinks that there is no such thing as Arabic philosophy until about the 17th century that before then it's all taking from the Greek predecessors. And so his whole goal, it can be summed up as Greek into Arabic. In fact, he has a book that has something like that title. He is a very learned man, but I think that he's also a very ignorant man.
He's a student of Franz Rosenthal. And he once told me quite proudly that Rosenthal accused him of not knowing how to read a text. I agree 100% with Rosenthal. And the other thing is there was this huge 700 and some odd page book that was published this last year in Paris, which is attempt to give a kind of a pre-see of where Arabic studies are today.
And it's there are a number of bitter attacks on Strauss, but there are also some very intelligent appreciations of Strauss. Strauss has received a great deal of attention in Europe, translations of his works into French, into German, into Italian. And of course, this huge, it's only three volumes, but it promises to become more than three volumes, collected works of Strauss in German by Heinrich Meyer. So he's very much on the minds of Europeans.
And of course, the thrust of going directly to the text and trying to try to entertain philosophic analysis with these texts, rather than look at them through the eyes of history is problematic. The man who had a very sharp or spirited critique of my work in this 700 page volume is simply moved by the notion that one has to take the cosmology that I would attribute to a neopatonic doctrine literally and recognize that we do attain our full humanity only when we can link up with the active intellect. He thinks that Al-Funabi was trying to train a group, a cadre of people to eventually rule the Islamic world with that perspective in mind. I argue that this is rhetoric on Al-Funabi's part.
So, it's a good meeting right there. Charles, go ahead Greg. Go ahead, Alex. Okay, well, you mentioned, sorry, I just have to jump on this, but so the active intellect, if we say that that's just rhetoric, is this somehow related to what you're saying about the book of dialectic, where it seems to be a more synthetic understanding of philosophy, as opposed to...
It's related to it in that my understanding is that the book of dialectic, let me rephrase that, my understanding is that the dialectic is as far as we can go. We are not going to demonstrate the best regime, any of the things that we would like to live by. It is not possible to demonstrate them. And what I mean by that, it's not possible to arrive at a scientific demonstration of their validity.
Right, before Greg jumps in, this is just one quick yes or no question. But I have to ask, would you say something similar is happening in the decisive treatise? It's not a simple yes. Well, yes, yes, something similar is happening.
I've now come to a different understanding of what Averoese is doing versus what Elphraabe is doing. Should I just say that quickly? Yeah, that's good. I'm content for now.
So, as you know, I'm in the throes of getting the book of letters ready to send to the publisher. That was supposed to be done by the end of August, but I had a disaster last week of my computer burning up. So I've been put back a few days. What I discover in the second part of the book of letters is that Elphraabe is trying to show the adherence of religion, that the adherence of philosophy are not opposed to them.
Both of them have to work together in order to live together in a society. It seems to be an attempt to, at a peace treaty of sorts, an attempted negotiation. What I thought, what I continue to think about Averoese and my monadies is that they're trying to assure the believers in their respective religious communities that philosophy doesn't pose a threat, but they're not trying to do this negotiated compromise that Elphraabe is doing. Well, Charles, maybe we can have you back when you finished the book of letters to have a conversation with us about that text.
In fact, I think we were hoping you'd come back a couple more times. Maybe they talk about nice to you. Maybe talk about Strauss and Mahdi, maybe do the book of letters. And we were also hoping maybe have you back into a deep dive into a short text, maybe, maybe Elphraabe's book of religion or something like that.
Great. I'd enjoy that. Great. So we're running a little out of time, or a little over time.
So maybe Alex can ask you. We have some questions from our faithful fans, our listeners, our Twitter followers. So maybe Alex will ask a couple of questions at this point. So one of the questions I think you've just about answered, but somebody wants to know when they can expect the publication of your translation of the book of letters.
Today, the text that is being demanded of me, being requested of me, is what I would call a camera ready text. So if it goes in on the 15th of September, there'll be some probably copy editing that needs to be done. And I don't see any reason that this wouldn't be published either by the end of the year. That might be too optimistic, but certainly by the be first quarter of next year, first quarter of 2021.
Sorry. I hope that's the case. Yeah. We have a question from actually a student of your friend, Terry Cleveland from Central College, Christian Warner.
I think he's a student at Hillsdale now. He asked, how much medieval Arabic political philosophy remains untranslated? And what are the difficulties that are presented to an English speaking audience? The most important text that remains to be translated is being done, but in French, not in English.
And that's the Middle commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics by Averois. The other thing that needs to be redone is this virtuous city by Al-Farrabi. And there are negotiations that seem to be underway. David De Pasquale, a graduate student, my name is Tim McKeaner, and I hope to get that going very shortly.
And then I have this piece that's been a long time coming that I hope to turn to immediately after sending the book of letters off, the all of the shortcomings by Averois on Aristotle's logic. There really are not many other texts. I mean, we do need a new translation of the introduction by Imchaal Doon. Hi, Ibn Yaxan.
Thank you very much. We definitely need a new translation of that. I don't know of anybody who's doing it. And there is a French translation of Ibn Bajez, the regime of the solitary.
Somebody translated that into English would be quite worthwhile. So one last question, and this is just a small one from Tom Cleveland. He's a PhD from Boston College actually writes on Plato, and he works for the Jack Miller Center. But he wants to know what Al-Farrabi means when he says that philosophy is prior to religion in time.
Is it an easy question? Yeah. What he's trying, this occurs in the part two argument of the book of letters. And almost definitely, this part of the book of letters is prompted by chapter eight of metaphysics, lambda, and it's Al-Farrabi's attempt to talk.
It's Al-Farrabi's discussion of the genesis of religion and philosophy. Or let me put this differently, of the genesis of religions and the philosophies over time. There have been many religions, and as we all know from reading the attainment of happiness, there comes a time again and again when we have to start all over again with philosophy. Or if you prefer, as we know from reading Plato's laws, after the deluge, we have to start all over again.
It reminds me a little bit of the myth and play to statesmen as well. But I think Greg has now some quick questions, lightning crown questions. Greg's been chambing at the bit about this for weeks. Charles, we do this for all of our preeminent guests.
You hear just the first, everybody will get these questions. I also have a lightning round question, but for a little later. Yeah. All right.
Sounds that I should come to dinner. Are we going to be much longer? No, no, no, no. Real quick.
Just that first game that comes quickly to mind. All right. Favorite work of literature? Oh my.
These are lightning round shows. The Emil. The Emil. All right.
Best politician in your lifetime. No, I'm going to be for you. No, my favorite. Look, work of literature is the new Eloise, Julie, or the new Eloise.
The best politician in your lifetime. The person I look up to for guidance, every politician I can think about, who I look up to for guidance is flawed. But I certainly admire Charles De Gaulle, General De Gaulle. And I admire for that same vintage, the other two, Winston Churchill and Eisenhower.
I think that's it. I'm very taken with Jimmy Carter. I know that people have difficulties. But for me, he tried to live like a false human being, even in office.
Well, I'll appreciate that as a tailing from Georgia. All right. What was your first car? A little, you know, Dauphine.
Dauphine is even. It's a little bit bigger than a Duchavot and a forerunner of liquor. Very nice. A couple of small ones here.
Have you had any nicknames? Well, the nicknames have always been played. Please are my first name. But the one I had as a child was bumps because I had a tendency to fall and raise bumps on my head.
All right. Last one. Charles, I've always admired you for many reasons above all your intellect. But the other one, the other thing I always look to you for guidance on is you've taken great care of yourself.
You run some marathons and that kind of thing. So best physical accomplishment in your life. Well, the best physical accomplishment was a failure trying to climb a mond law and getting wiped out at the very last moment by your snowstorm. I feel like I've done a nice job asking questions.
Like these answers were way beyond anything. I expected that. Yeah, that's a good one. All right.
David, you want to take us out? Well, Alex has his final. Yeah. One last question.
Right. So the Bible says that the sins of the father are visited to the sons of the sons onto the third and the fourth generation. And I think it's fair to call David and Greg something of your intellectual children. I want to know whether you're responsible for all their sins.
No, it might be their sins that made them think there was something to learn by reading these good books with me. What a prudent answer. All right. I know Charles, thanks so much for spending time with us.
And we look forward to future conversations. If you liked what you heard, please follow us on Twitter at the new thinkery, visit our website, the newthinkery.com and do rate and review us favorably wherever you download your podcasts and follow us on Instagram and these other platforms. Thanks again, everyone. Thank you.
Thank you, Charles. Thank you, Charles.