"Make your house into a meeting place for scholars”
Colloquium honors Professor Israel Scheffler, Mandel Center Scholar-in-Residence
The Talmudic injunction, “Make your house into a meeting place for scholars,” may not mean that “you should try to get scholars to your home,” suggested Professor Israel Scheffler at a recent colloquium honoring his life and work. Rather, “where the scholars meet, go there, make it your home.” With this interpretation, Scheffler offered his thanks to his several scholarly homes, including his present home, Brandeis University and the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education, where he serves as Scholar-in-Residence.
Professor Israel Scheffler thanks the speakers and audience in his remarks. Photo: D.J.Weinstein
The occasion for the colloquium, held on December 14th, 2005 at the Hassenfeld Conference Center, was the publication of Scheffler’s 17th book, Gallery of Scholars: A Philosopher’s Recollections. Five prominent philosophers and educators offered presentations, discussing the book and Scheffler’s work as a philosopher, colleague, and teacher.
In Gallery of Scholars: A Philosopher’s Recollections (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2005) Scheffler shares stories of scholars he has known and worked with in his long and distinguished career. These stories are both amusing and meaningful, shedding light on the personalities of noteworthy scholars, as well as the contexts they worked in and helped to create. Gallery of Scholars follows an earlier work by Scheffler in this genre, Teachers of My Youth (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995).
Jon A. Levisohn, Assistant Academic Director of the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education, and Assistant Professor of Jewish Education in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, opened the discussion of the book. “Like Is himself,” he remarked, “the book is suffused by humanity, or rather humaneness – or perhaps better, with menschlichkeit.”
Read the remarks of several of the colloquium presenters:Read the Brandeis Reporter article about the event:
“You can’t do good education without being in the company of good philosophers,” said Director of the Mandel Center and Mandel Professor of Jewish Education Sharon Feiman-Nemser in her presentation. With Israel “Is” Scheffler as Scholar in Residence at the Mandel Center since 2003, Brandeis has one of the preeminent philosophers of the 20th century. In addition to directing the Philosophy in Education Research Colloquia (PERC), Professor Scheffler leads study sessions for the Mandel Center, teaches and advises students, and pursues his ongoing research and writing.
Israel Scheffler taught philosophy as a member both of the Faculty of Education and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University from 1952 until his retirement in 1992. He founded the Philosophy of Education Research Center (PERC) at Harvard in 1983. When the research center was closed in 2003, the recently established Mandel Center invited him to Brandeis, where the colloquium program has “risen, phoenix-like,” in the words of speaker Stefania Jha, a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. “Is is irrepressible,” said Jha, Scheffler’s last doctoral student at the Harvard. “PERC [is] a gift from Is and a testament to the endurance of what philosophy means to him – and through him, to his former students.”
(left to right) Sandra Aliza Parker, Sharon Feiman-Nemser, Stefania Jha, Israel Scheffler, Jerry Samet, Hilary Putnam, Ruth Anna Putnam, Daisy Igel, Jon A. Levisohn. Photo: D.J.Weinstein
Jha was joined at the Hassenfeld Conference Center by another former doctoral student of Scheffler’s, Sandra Aliza Parker, Professor Emerita in the Department of Education at Northeastern University; as well as Hilary Putnam, Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, and a colleague of Scheffler since 1965; Sharon Feiman-Nemser, Director of the Mandel Center, and Mandel Professor in Jewish Education at Brandeis; and Jerry Samet, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis, and former chair of the department.
PERC (Philosophy of Education Research Colloquia) offers a series of public colloquia at Brandeis that deal broadly with educational matters from a humanistic, comparative and historical perspective, exploring connections between arts and sciences, symbolism and learning, accumulated knowledge and research into the new. Recent colloquia have featured Kurt Fischer, Charles Bigelow Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Program; and Sandra Aliza Parker, Professor Emerita in the Department of Education at Northeastern University. Future presenters will include Jon A. Levisohn of the Mandel Center; Ellen Winner, Professor of Psychology at Boston College and Senior Research Associate at Harvard's Project Zero; and David W. Rudner, Ph. D., Research Associate at Washington University, where he teaches courses in the Department of Anthropology. Learn more at www.brandeis.edu/centers/mandel/PERC.html.
The Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education was founded in 2002 as a partnership between Brandeis University and the Mandel Foundation. The first academic center of its kind, the Mandel Center is dedicated to transforming the quality of teaching and learning in Jewish education settings by supporting innovative research initiatives and pioneering new approaches to developing Jewish educators. Learn more at www.brandeis.edu/mandel.