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

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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Education, Science, Society & Culture

4.6 • 34.5K Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2025

⏱️ 95 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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. | Links | For Jacob Howland: Read Howland’s most recent publication “Glaucon's Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato's Republic” https://a.co/d/7EGH57y Howland’s philosophy website and blog https://www.jacobhowland.com/?_sm_nck=1

Transcript

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0:00.0	One of the things I figured out recently, the significance of the fact that the root word of question is quest.
0:06.5	You have a question, which is your plea to the gods, let's say. You await a revelation. And then the
0:12.7	critical process is something like internalized dialogue. I got interested in the Talmud. It's a lot like
0:18.5	the platonic dialogues. And you have this fictional
0:21.5	colloquy. That's the only way to describe it. Rabbis who maybe lived centuries apart are brought
0:26.7	into debate and discussion. If we lose touch with those ancient stories, we lose our ability to
0:32.3	actually understand what's going on. Elijah, you mentioned Elijah. Elijah's foes are the nature worshippers. That's kind of relevant in today's society, given the
0:42.2	rise of nature worship. Something will attain the pinnacle point.
0:45.8	What happens in a universe where finite beings try to find some meaning and encounter or are afflicted by infinity in some way.
0:59.2	This is a terrifying thought, I think.
1:00.9	You said you saw a similarity with the dialogues.
1:03.4	So what else caught your attention?
1:06.3	There is a question that I know to be absolutely fundamental, because it shows up both in the Hebrew Bible and in Plato.
1:13.6	Okay.
1:14.6	And the question is...
1:15.6	So I had the opportunity today to speak with Dr. Jacob Howland,
1:34.5	and I wanted to speak with him for a variety of reasons.
1:37.9	He's a philosopher, longtime academic,
1:40.9	integrally involved with the new University of Austin,
1:43.7	which is one of a handful of
1:45.1	institutions that are attempting to reorient, traditionally reorient modern higher education.
1:55.0	He's also interested in the interface between modern technology, AI, for example, and philosophy,
	...

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