Right.

And, uh, taught a more natural science.

But as a result of some undergraduate teaching, uh, where I had to teach this book, uh, in a common core course I taught with my wife, uh, it suddenly occurred to me that, um, this book could...

That this book didn't require you to be a committed believer in order to read it with understanding or with, more importantly, with profit.

And that if I would suspend my disbelief about the truth of the matter and simply dealt with it and respected it as much as any other book, I might learn something from it.

Um, and gradually, gradually the stories just got ahold of me, and after five or six years, I got up enough nerve to offer a seminar for, for credit at the University of Chicago, though I wasn't a biblical scholar, and I justified it by saying I wasn't cheating the students.

We were gonna sit here, read it, and try to make sense out of it and see what we could-

I n- why do you think that is? I mean, is it because of the, the, the material nature of our life? Is it because that of, of the rapidity and the velocity of science and change, uh, that people are looking for something to hold onto in a world that is flashing, uh, in its brilliance and in its change?

Leon, it's all yours.

Thank you.

Uh, Rousseau was a giant not only of 18th century European thought and culture, but really of all of Western philosophy.

Born in the Republic of Geneva, 1712, dies in France, 1778.

A prolific political philosopher known for The Social Contract, a philosopher of education, famous for his Emile, w- author of a romantic novel, composer of seven operas, a theater critic, an author of the first modern autobiography, The Confessions, and even a scientist writing an- Elements of Botany.

He lived a colorful and checkered life with good relations with Voltaire, d'Alembert, Burke, Boswell, and Frederick the Great.

But he had a horrible public fight with David Hume, and he suffered political exile for his views.

... which are two kinds of self-love.