 Hi everyone, I'm Maronne Berger. I'm a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Tulane and I teach in the Jewish Studies program and I'm the director of the Religious Studies minor. I'm so pleased to say a word today about this book, Nature, Law and the Sacred. To clarify the outset, aside from the bibliography at the end and references throughout, this is not my own writing but a collection of essays that was published in my honor. It belongs to the old German tradition of a festschrift, a volume put together, usually for a professor or a mentor, meant to show the influence of that scholar's work. It's a treat, especially to present the book here and now because it was edited by my first PhD student, Ebontheus Belliotis at Tulane and many of the contributors along with colleagues and friends are my graduate students from many cohorts. Over four decades, I came here for one year and it somehow turned into 40. I think it was especially Katrina when somebody of our colleagues left that I realized this was my intellectual home. I was able to flourish here writing and teaching and I felt committed to it. So the title, Nature, Law and the Sacred expresses the central themes that run through all the essays in the collection. Things that can be encapsulated, I think in the formula Jerusalem and Athens or Bible and philosophy, Bible of Greek philosophy. They, those two roots of the whole Western tradition lie at the core of all my writing and all my teaching and looking back, I realized they guided mostly inadvertently my own intellectual development. So maybe I can say a word about that. Early on, I was really fascinated by what I found to be the puzzling stories of the Bible and the pleasures of trying to interpret them. I think that was my way into philosophy and when I got to college, I knew right away I wanted to be a philosophy major and I was especially attracted to Plato. That passion eventually drove me to graduate school and my dissertation is an interpretation of Plato's Fidrus. That's the dialogue in which he most explicitly shows why he did not write philosophic treatises, the dialogues. And therefore nothing is, Plato writes nothing in his own name but invites the reader to discover the underlying argument by interpreting the drama as a whole. As I'm sure many of you know, Socrates never wrote anything. Socrates, who's represented in Plato's dialogue did not write at all. He believed that philosophy has to be pursued by a live conversation with particular individuals and writing he claims doesn't know when to speak and when to remain silent. It doesn't know how to adjust its speeches to souls. That's a cratic claim though. We learn of it through the representation in Plato's written work. It took a while for that paradox to sink in for me. When it does, you realize that Plato discovered an art of writing that overcomes all the particular criticisms he puts into the voice of Socrates and that enables him through his written work to reproduce with his reader the experience of a live Socratic conversation. With that insight, I went on to write a book on Plato's Fido, the dialogue that takes place in prison on the last day of Socrates life where he's presenting a series of arguments for the immortality of the soul. Now, most commentators have found those arguments very flawed. What I tried to do was demonstrate that exactly those flaws are the deliberate keys that Plato provides for his reader to reconstruct the teaching of the work. And that is basically an affirmation of Socrates' understanding of the goodness of the philosophic life that he's led. From Plato, the natural step to move on would be to Aristotle and his student. That took me many years. I think many of us experienced Aristotle's treatises as rather abstract and dry. So it was a while before I really came to develop my deep appreciation of how much those treatises are actually in the inquisitive spirit of a Platonic dialogue. And that was mostly through teaching, especially Aristotle's ethics, where I started getting a stronger and stronger feeling of how Aristotle engages his reader in the questions he's raising. What is happiness? What is human virtue? What is friendship or pleasure? Above all, the Socratic question, what is the good life for a human being? From Aristotle, I was led to my monities, the medieval Jewish thinker who really wrestled with the problem of the possible conflict between the Bible and Greek philosophy as did most medieval thinkers. Is there a way to interpret the Bible that's compatible with philosophy and science? My monities finally really led me back to my original fascination with the Bible. And I've been teaching a series of courses, Bible and Philosophy, with a different topic every term. This time I'm doing women in the Bible. Last semester I did the political world of the Bible. And discussions with students in these classes have stimulated me to be working on the philosophical readings of the Bible that are presented to public lectures or in articles. So these themes in my own work, nature, law and the sacred, in this collection are displayed in range far beyond my own competence. The chapters of the volume interpret foundational texts starting from antiquity, but not overplayed on Aristotle. Also the tragedians, Sophocles and Euripides, the common poet Aristophanes, the writer Xenophon who also wrote up Socratic recollections, not well enough known I'm teaching in this semester. The book moves on to medieval thinkers, my monities, also Boccaccio and Dante, and then to the modern philosophers from Descartes and Montesquieu to Kant, Lesson, Hegel and Kierkegaard. Although the pieces are written independently, put together as parts of a whole, they display such really intriguing connections. I think that show how the problem of the relations among nature, law and the sacred show up both in works of literature, in and philosophy over centuries. For me, each of these chapters represents the starting point of future conversations, sometimes exciting projects of writing or teaching now. Other readers, I hope and expect, will be inspired to pursue their own exploration of the classic works analyzed here. They're very rich treasures and they've, I think, endured for thousands of years only because of the way they probe fundamental questions about the human condition that help us understand our own times and our lives, something I think really especially important for us now. Well, I would love to continue the conversation. Feel free to get in touch with me and bye for now.