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Throughout high school, I read philosophy persistently but erratically, starting with Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling/The Sickness Unto Death (Kierkegaard 1954) given to me by someone at my church in 1963, and then straying into the works of William James, Simone de Beauvoir, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Luther King, Susanne Langer, and Jean-Paul Sartre, along with Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers (Durant 1933). But when I applied to college, I didn't say I wanted to study philosophy, but rather that I wanted to study poetry and mathematics. This odd conjunction made sense at the University of Chicago (indeed, they offered me a scholarship), because undergraduate education there was still steered by the star of Robert Maynard Hutchins' College, a pedagogical structure built on the Great Books program. Because of my scholarship, during my freshman year I was enrolled in "Liberal Arts I," a special series of lectures that introduced me to the classicists James Redfield and Marc Cogan, and the philosopher Eugene Garver, who became lifelong friends.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-98231-1_3

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