The Northern California Chapter of the St. John's College Alumni Association has the pleasure and honor of inviting you to the following text seminar at the DSPT, thanks to its president and staff, on the evening of Thursday, April Eighth, 2010, from 7:30 to 9:30 PM: Two brief, closely linked texts by Jacob Klein (1899, Libau, Latvia [then Russia] - 1978, Annapolis, Maryland), the lecture text "Modern Rationalism" (9 pp.) delivered to a class on rationalism and capitalism in the US sometime in 1938-1940, and "Phenomenology and the History of Science" (19 pp.) first published as ch. III in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. Marvin Faber (Harvard University Press, 1940). Both can be found in Jacob Klein: Lectures and essays, ed. Robert B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (St. John's College Press, 1985), pp. 53-84. Seminar will be led by Reynaldo Miranda, President of the Northern California Chapter. RSVP to reynaldo.miranda@gmail.com at your earliest convenience as participation is limited, and he will send you the two texts in PDF.
How might rationalism be distinctly modern, if there is such a thing: How can modern rationalism be different from ratio? What can some of the basic relations between science and philosophy be, by way of phenomenology? Why did Husserl think European science had reached a crisis long-latent in that science? How does Husserlian phenomenology and de-sedimentation of thought provide a unique way out of this impasse. Please join us in discussing these two important texts written 70 years ago on issues that still press upon us.
Jacob Klein, PhD 1922 by University of Berlin under Nicolai Hartmann; visiting lecturer in the history of mathematics, University of Prague, 1934-35; fellow of the Moses Mendelssohn Stiftung zur Fordering der Geisteswissenchaften, 1935-37; Tutor, St, John's College at Annapolis, 1938-1978, and Dean, St. John's College at Annapolis, 1949-58, considered the re-founder of the New Program at St. John's. His books include: A Commentary on Plato's Meno (University of North Carolina Press, 1965, and University of Chicago Press, 1989), perhaps the best commentary on that dialogue written in any language; Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (MIT Press, 1968, kept in print by Dover), a translation by Eva T. H. Brann of his "Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra" published in two parts in the Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik in 1934 and '36 (the first part was his Habilitation thesis that would certainly have taken place at the University of Berlin in October 1932 had it not been for the political changes in Germany, a pioneering work in that field that is still required reading); Plato's Trilogy: Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman (University of Chicago Press, 1977); and, the above mentioned Jacob Klein: Lectures and essays. Other important contributions include: "The Idea of Liberal Education" in The Goals of Higher Education, ed. W. D. Weatherford, Jr. (Harvard University Press, 1960); "Aristotle, An Introduction" in Ancients and Moderns: Essays on the Tradition of Political Philosophy, in honor of Leo Strauss, ed. Joseph Cropsey (Basic Books, 1964), perhaps the finest general introduction to Aristotle available in English; "On Liberal Education" in The Bulletin of the Association of American Colleges, vol. 52, no. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1966), text of a lecture first delivered to a Colloquium held at St. Mary's College of California in Moraga; "A Note on Plato's Parmenides" in Orbis Scriptus, Dimitrij Tschizewskij zum 70. Geburstag (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1966); and, many articles in journals such as Interpretation, Claremont Journal of Public Affairs, Cesare Barbieri Courier, Independent Journal of Philosophy, and The Saint John's Review. His younger colleagues, students, and grand students who have carried on his work include Eva T. H. Brann, Br. Sixtus Robert Smith FSC, the Rev. J. Winfree Smith, Simon Kaplan, Robert Sacks, Robert Goldwin, David R. Lachterman, Robert B. Williamson, Curtis Wilson, and Joshua Kates.
Jacob Klein, Jasha to his friends, was educated at gymnasia in Lipetsk, Brussels, and graduated from the Friedrichs Realgymnasium, Berlin in 1917. He studied mathematics, physics, and ancient philosophy in the universities of Berlin and Marburg/Lahn. He met Leo Strauss at Marburg in 1920 and the two became life-long, close friends. He and Strauss audited Martin Heidegger's lectures at Marburg from 1923. Klein never became a Heideggerian but credited Heidegger with showing him how to read Aristotle, confident of understanding Aristotle's intentions. His devoted his life's scholarship to the recovery of classical thought, to inquiring into how the classical mode of thought had been transformed into the modern mode--one of his themes was the sedimentation of thought. His teachers and colleagues in Germany had included Jaeger, Husserl, Scheler, Hartmann, Cassirer, Heidegger, Arendt, Stein, von Hildebrand, Gadamer, Schmidt, Lowith, Jonas, Marcusse, and Levinas.
