Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland | EP 536

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Jordan Peterson sits down with author, professor, and Dean of Intellectual Foundations at the University of Austin, Jacob Howland. They discuss man’s finitude and his grasping for the infinite, how orientation can provide limitless abundance or a bottomless fall, where Socrates and the Talmud overlap, and why God offers Abraham adventure as the covenant.

Jacob Howland is the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Dean of Intellectual Foundations at the University of Austin. Previously he was McFarlin Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Tulsa, where he taught from 1988 to 2020.

Howland has published five books and roughly sixty scholarly articles and review essays on the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Kierkegaard, the Talmud, the Holocaust, ideological tyranny, and other subjects A past winner of the University of Tulsa Outstanding Teacher Award and the College of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award, he has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Littauer Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, and the Koch Foundation, and has lectured in Israel, France, England, Romania, Brazil, Denmark, Norway, and at universities around the United States. His most recent book is Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato’s Republic, Paul Dry Books, 2018.

This episode was filmed on March 15th, 2025.

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For Jacob Howland:

Read Howland’s most recent publication “Glaucon's Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato's Republic”

Howland’s philosophy website and blog


| Chapters |

(0:00) Coming up
(1:16) Intro
(4:04) The path to becoming a celebrated professor: from Ancient Greece to the Talmud
(10:25) Where Socrates and the Talmud overlap
(14:18) What’s hidden in the root word of “Question,” spirit and aim
(20:56) “The Immortal” who only sought demise, man’s quest for infinity
(27:05) The relationship between finitude and abundance: the spam haiku archive
(32:03) The fundamental question that shows up both in Plato and in the Talmud
(34:42) Why there is such antagonism toward studying the holy books
(37:06) Exaltation of the man-god, slavery, and true worship
(42:30) Aristophanes and the infantilization of men - some cultural dilemmas are as old as our species
(47:44) Marx’s fatal error: a perfect society cannot be created by imperfect people
(52:11) The only healthy way for reason to function
(54:07) We cannot prove the laws of the universe to be true, we can only prove them false
(59:41) Ancient stories have deep utility in the modern world
(1:03:59) Returning to Plato and the Talmud: the highest good
(1:06:01) When your whims become your god…
(1:10:19) The purpose of your life is not happiness, the right questions to ask
(1:17:06) Abraham, Socrates, and confidence
(1:21:33) Aim and alchemy
(1:27:25) Douglas Murray and the negative depths of deconstructionism
(1:29:40) Marx’s favorite quote
(1:32:26) The age of AI will devolve quickly without a firm grasp of philosophy

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