Thomas Boyd (T2008)
Thanks for welcoming me to The Reading Odyssey. My friend and music mentor Pat Wictor invited me to join, and I’m looking forward to the books and the lively exchange of ideas. I’m currently writing and performing songs, producing concerts, finishing the script of a stage play with music, and enjoying visits with grandchildren and dogs. I got to this wonderful place on a path that included a U.S. Senate staff position, a White House consultancy, management of charitable giving and community assistance for Wall Street firms, serving as dean of an experimental college, and similar adventures. My undergraduate and graduate degrees are in English, fine arts, media and political science. New York City has been home for 28 years.
Dan Gabree (T2008)
I have been involved in IT Software and Services for close to 30 years. Currently, I am a Sr. Solution Strategist for CA’s Wily Technology Division, helping clients solve and prevent performance problems and proactively manage their customers’ experience for mission critical web applications.
Prior to joining CA Wily, I worked at Sybase, Perot Systems and Litton Enterprise Solutions, among others. I directed a Consulting Practice for Coopers & Lybrand in Fairfield County CT and Westchester County NY for several years.
I have experience with various industries, including Financial Services, Insurance, Manufacturing, Pharmaceutical, Retail and State & Local Government. I have a deep understanding of all IT organizational levels and am able to advise my clients and partners both strategically, as well as tactically. Most importantly, I enjoy helping people solve problems.
I studied Philosophy at St. Anselm College (NH), Trinity College (CT) and Schiller College in Heidelberg, Germany. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy. I live in CT with my wife and two youngest children, and I still consider reading one of my favorite pleasures.
Schedule for Aristotle
All calls are Tuesdays at 8pm NYC time at this call-in number
1-888-350-0075
code: 9281912#
Tues, Jan 13
Tues, Feb 10
Tues, Mar 24
Tues, Apr 7
Tues, May 12
Tues, Jun 9
Tues, Jul 7
Tues, Sep 8
Tues, Oct 6
Tues, Nov 10
Tues, Dec 8 – reading group dinner
5 pages a day slowed down; great dinner last night
Folks,
Quick note to say that at the end of Book V my reading slowed down to one or two pages a day.
That may be because the material was more difficult or because I’ve been so tired with everything going on in my company and in the broader world.
I’d like to hear how you are doing with the reading and with your world.
Also – and I’ll send a separate note later today – we had a wonderful dinner last night with philosopher Susan Neiman and the New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff.
Thanks to Kendall and Pat for co-hosting the dinner with me. More on that soon – including photos!
Best,
Phil
Imaginary interview of Plato, Munger, New Yorker, Neiman…
Welcome to the Philosophical Cable Network. It’s Tuesday, September 23 and we have a wonderful morning conversation.
Our guests are the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger, philosopher Plato, New Yorker cartoons, and, at the end of the show, a few comments from this evening’s guest, Susan Neiman.
PT. Welcome to our guests. Let’s get started.
PT. Charlie – let’s start with this financial crisis that has been top of mind for everyone. What has gotten us into this financial crisis?
Munger: The amount of knavery and folly that has been revealed in the last nine months is almost unbelievable…greed was part of it, envy was part of it, and so was a lack of honesty.
PT. The New Yorker cartoons. What do you think about Charlie’s comments?
PT. Let me bring Plato into this conversation.
PT. Plato – yesterday Charlie Munger talked about the moral duty of the top business people to be *underpaid* and to practice more virtue of all kinds – and that their bad example is terrible for the system. What do you think Plato?
Plato: Once you have the means of life, you must practice virtue.
Thrasymachus jumps out of the audience like a wild beast and forces himself onto the stage
Balderdash. You naive simpletons. Don’t you know I predicted this would happen 2,500 years ago. When a bank robber robs not just a bank but the whole country “he is happy and blessed.” In your modern parlance he’s become “too big to fail.” So you have it upside down – the more powerful you become, the more people are happy for you not to just rob them but to enslave them.
PT. Uh…I’d like to return to Charlie Munger for a moment. Weren’t banks at one time more careful?
Munger: If you run a nice conservative bank and some other guy has a bank and a lot of testosterone – and he does a lot of very aggressive things that appear to work, and he reports higher and higher profits – the pressure to join the crowd on the guy at the lagging bank is *huge.*
PT. Charlie don’t you have a joke to tell about this?
Munger: The teacher asked the class, ‘If there are nine sheep in the pen and one jumps out, how many are left?’ And everybody got the answer right except this one little boy, who said, ‘None of them are left.’ And the teacher said, ‘You don’t understand arithmetic.’ And he said, ‘No, teacher. You don’t understand sheep.’
PT. So Munger, like Plato, there is responsibility or justice at a city or “systems” level?
Munger: Yes. If we don’t then we create the conditions for almost unbelievable, ridiculous behavior. For example, for the last several years, people were distributing stuff that they wouldn’t have bought in a minute for themselves. Systems are responsible in proportion to the degree in which the people making the decisions are living with the results of those decisions. So like the Romans, if you built a bridge, you stood under the arch when the scaffolding was removed.
PT. Ah, yes. The New Yorker again would like to make a comment.
PT. Plato what do you think about this?
Plato: I also think justice can be found in systems or, as I say in Republic, in cities. And if you create the right environment including the equality of men and women, then you can create a just city.
PT. Munger – don’t you also believe women might be not only equal but better leaders in some cases?
Munger: I do not think that we would have this mess if women were running all the financial institutions.
PT. The New Yorker would like to agree
PT. Plato I have a follow-up question for you. But first can I ask you something that countless generations have pondered. Why do you only have one name? Is that some kind of ancient celebrity thing? You, Socrates, Herodotus?
Plato: I didn’t have just one name. But I won’t tell you the others. I have to control my brand.
PT. Well, back to my guestion. Don’t you also have something to say about suffering injustice vs. perpetrating it?
Plato: I would choose suffering over doing what’s unjust to others everyday and twice on Sunday.
PT. So then what is your solution to the mess we find ourselves in today?
Plato: Until we create the environment for leaders – and all people – to genuinely and adequately philosophize then cities will have no rest from evils.
Thrasymachus rushes the stage again.
What nonsense you have been talking…justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger. Everything else is commentary.
PT. Susan Neiman our guest tonight has a few important comments to add. Susan?
Neiman: A commitment to justice cannot be coherently maintained so long as you even suspect that Thrasymachus is right.
PT. You take that, Thrasymachus. Susan don’t you also want to talk about the importance of ideas – and what ideas mean?
Neiman: Yes, thank you. There’s something that has not yet been brought up in the discussion – and it’s one of the most important points in Plato. The most important task of the The Republic is to show that ideas themselves are real. Plato was the first idealist and idealism has taken a bad bashing lately.
PT. Go on.
Neiman: In fact, the easiest way to get non-partisan agreement is to float a demand for realism. Herodotus quotes Pindar saying “custom is king” but if ideas like justice can make no general claims, but only rests on tradition and habit, then all appeals to ideas are either for fools or for those who want to dupe them.
PT. And that’s why you wrote your book?
Neiman: Yes. That’s why I wrote my book – it’s a defense of ideas and a challenge to those who believe in justice to not give up the philosophical (and practical) ground to the heirs of Thrasymachus.
PT. Great. Thank you everyone. Great way to start the morning Tuesday, September 23. I look forward to tonight’s program at the Harvard Club. Tune in 6pm sharp!
Phil
P.S. The attire tonight? Range from business casual to business – it’s up to you. As host, I’ll be wearing a suit and tie but don’t expect anyone else to wear a tie.
Interview with Sarah Ruden about “Aeneid”
Hi everyone,
I wanted to share an interview that Sarah Ruden did about her translation of “Aeneid” on NPR’s “Here and Now.”
Here’s a link to the full show:
http://www.here-now.org/shows/2008/09/20080916.asp
Enjoy!
Deena
FYI – my HS Latin teacher and the terrible train crash in LA
Folks,
My high school Latin teacher, also an Anglican priest in Los Angeles, was injured in the terrible train crash in LA last week. But despite that he gave last rites to crash victims.
He did so out of respect.
“As a priest, he has a tool in his professional toolbox that he drew upon to help comfort people,” Myers said. “He was not trying to convert people. He was trying to show them a level of respect.”
He taught me Latin in high school where I was also for a year President of the Latin Club. I haven’t spoken to him since 1982.
A priest, Ashman leads a small congregation at the Anglican Church of Our Saviour on the Westside of Los Angeles, where he has been for a quarter of a century. He also teaches Latin and world history at Hoover High School in Glendale.
See the story below.
Phil
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-priest18-2008sep18,0,6551252.story
Despite his own injuries, priest gave last rites to crash victims By Anna Gorman Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 18, 2008
Still in a daze from the crash, Donald Ashman walked over to the first body. Ashman knelt down and lifted a corner of a white blanket covering the body, placed his hand on the man’s forehead and said the words he had said so many times before, almost always at a hospital:
“May God Almighty have mercy upon thee, forgive thee thy sins and bring thee to everlasting life.”
The prayer took just a few seconds. Ashman returned the blanket and turned to the next victim, not far from the mangled Metrolink train.
He didn’t know their names, their ages, their stories. He knew only that they had died and that they had probably been heading home to their families, as he was, after the workday.
Reflecting on that day now, Ashman also knows, as surely as he has known anything in his 62 years, why he was on that train and why he survived.
He was there to administer their last rites.
“I was where God intended me to be,” Ashman said in an interview Wednesday from his home in Thousand Oaks.
A priest, Ashman leads a small congregation at the Anglican Church of Our Saviour on the Westside of Los Angeles, where he has been for a quarter of a century. He also teaches Latin and world history at Hoover High School in Glendale.
At the time of the Chatsworth crash Friday, he was sitting facing backward in the last train car and talking on his cellphone to his wife of 37 years. The jolt pushed Ashman against his seat, and he immediately felt pain and pressure on his back. He heard moans and screams and saw bodies fly down the stairs. One injured man landed at his feet. He looked out the window and could see that there had been a collision with a freight train.
Ashman climbed out of the car and asked a firefighter if there were fatalities. Yes, the fireman answered.
Then Ashman said he was a priest and asked permission to pray for the deceased.
At first, he said, he didn’t think the firefighters believed him — he was wearing a blue polo shirt and jeans. But as soon as he began to pray, he could see their faces change. A few even joined him in prayer.
“It was spiritually moving, amid all that sadness and tragedy,” he said.
As firefighters pulled out survivors and paramedics treated the injured, Ashman stayed with the dead. He continued to pray, asking God to welcome them. The firefighters brought him more victims. Ashman said he felt an odd sense of calm.
The helicopters flew overhead and news cameramen filmed nearby. Ashman said he was careful not to lift the blankets too far, lest relatives recognize loved ones, bloodied and bruised, on television.
At one point, a firefighter asked him to come with him to pray for the engineer, whose body was still trapped in the wreckage. That blanket wasn’t white. It was blood red. Ashman touched his arm, made the sign of the cross and said a quick prayer.
“I don’t remember the words I said, but I became acutely aware that prayer doesn’t always consist of words,” he said.
Authorities have not determined the cause of the crash. But whatever the involvement, if any, of engineer Robert Sanchez, it doesn’t matter, Ashman said.
“Whatever he did or intended to do, that’s irrelevant,” he said. “Everybody is treated the same in God’s eyes.”
At the time, Ashman said, he didn’t think too much about the religion of the victims, figuring that a short prayer couldn’t hurt if they were Jewish or Muslim. Ashman’s church is part of the Anglican Province of Christ the King, an Anglican Church committed to what it describes as traditional forms of doctrine and liturgy.
Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Ron Myers said that the priest was one of dozens of people who helped the afternoon of the crash, lifting people out of the train cars, administering first aid, comforting the injured.
“As a priest, he has a tool in his professional toolbox that he drew upon to help comfort people,” Myers said. “He was not trying to convert people. He was trying to show them a level of respect.”
After he administered last rites to eight or nine people, Ashman said, exhaustion began to set in and the shock began to subside. So when a fire chaplain arrived, Ashman decided that it was time to go home. A police officer drove him to a nearby intersection, where his family picked him up and took him to a hospital so he could be treated for back injuries.
James Provence, the bishop at Ashman’s church, said he wasn’t surprised by the priest’s actions.
“The thing that we are trained to do is be prepared to hear confession, to administer last rites, to minister to people at a moment’s notice,” he said. “Not everyone has the need to do that, but it’s something you do prepare for.”
Hoover High Principal Kevin Welsh said he saw Ashman on television praying for the victims. “When you see those little clips, it’s so poignant it really gets you,” he said. “It is so gripping and touching.”
Welsh marveled that Ashman ministered to others even as he was injured himself. “That he reverted to that under those stressful, trying and traumatic circumstances,” he said, “speaks to the core of the man as an educator and as a man of personal belief and faith.”
Ashman said he plans to return to preaching this weekend. He doesn’t know if he’ll talk about the crash but expects to talk about healing, of both body and soul.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
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Schedule, edition for Thucydides
We are reading The Landmark Thucydides, by Robert B. Strassler, next.
Get the edition here: The Landmark Thucydides
This version has GREAT maps and wonderful summaries in the margin (each paragraph is summarized in plain English in the margin).
All calls are Mondays at 8pm NYC time at this call-in number
1-888-350-0075
code: 9281912
Intro call – Mon Nov 3
Book 1 – Mon Dec 1
Book 2 – Mon Jan 5
Book 3 – Mon Feb 2
Books 4 & 5 – Mon Mar 9
Book 6 – Mon Apr 6
Book 7 – Mon May 4
Book 8 – Mon June 15
Herodotus Rocks!
Team,
I really enjoyed learning from our sessions together. I really did take away some perspective changing concepts to reflect on for my life, and that was an important goal for me. I regret that I couldn’t make the last call, but I just listened to the recording. I really want to jump into the discussion while listening to the recording. ;-D I see that as evidence of a good call. I was in Sequoia National Park at the time, and didn’t make it out of the park to cell phone coverage in time for the call. The interesting thing is that I was visiting the General Sherman tree, which is estimated to be 2,500 to 2,700 years old and it is considered the largest living organism on the planet. Interestingly enough, that means the tree was alive when Herodotus was alive. It reminded me when Xerxes became emotional and commented about how none of his people would be alive in 100 years. I wonder what trees I may have contacted during my hike that will be alive 3,000 years from now.
I’m looking forward to Thucydides next. 🙂
All the best,
Jim
FYI: my statement on the financial crisis: anger and responsibility
Here’s what I’d like a reporter somewhere to write on the financial crisis:
I’m angry, you are angry. We are justified in being angry. As Charlie Munger said at his annual meeting this year, so much “knavery and foolishness” and greed is behind this mess.
Ordinary Americans are right to be angry at how badly they have been treated – no real rise in incomes for years contrasted with a wealthy elite which keeps making more and more money, increased debtedness (in part to blame on manipulation by mortgage brokers and credit card companies) and now we – the ones with the least amount of money and blame – are being asked to clean up the mess?
In a word, “yes.” Americans (and other people) have cleaned up messes not of their making. Some might make the case (and many did in 1941) that World War II and the fight against fascism was not our fight. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. But fight we did. And that was after 10 years of the Great Depression and all the deprivations that had been wreaked on the American people.
We cannot now use our anger to tear the whole system down and hurt everyone including ourselves.
That’s the moral challenge we face. As ordinary Americans we now have to take responsibility for this mess. We cannot be motivated by the need to punish those who have hurt us.
We have been hurt. We deserve to be angry. But it would be a terrible mistake on *our* part to be vengeful. If we are vengeful, then we risk bringing down the whole economic system. Yes, vengeance would hurt the bankers. It would probably hurt the home buyers who lied about their incomes. It may hurt the mortgage brokers (though they are hurting pretty badly now) and some hedge funds. But, we’d also hurt our mothers and fathers. We’d hurt our colleagues at work. We may lose our jobs. We may lose our savings. Everything will be impacted.
We now have to be *responsible* for the whole country in the ways that no one has through this whole mess. We have to stand up and say “yes, we are hurt. yes, we are angry. But, yes, we will take responsibility for protecting our entire economy.”
We are a strong people with a proud history. We have been through many challenges before and we have a moral reservoir we can call on now to do the right thing and not act out of vengeance but out of a moral responsibility to take care of and look out for everyone, including ourselves.
We may not have created this mess but we now need to lead the way out.
Phil
P.S. I know it’s hard to manage both of these things – anger and responsibility – but this is what we need to ask the American people to do. I have yet to see any writer really give full credence to the anger out there AND make a strong statement about the moral responsibility we need to take to look out for our whole country.
01. October 2008 by Arrian
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