Foreword

Teaching is a universal human activity carried out by human beings in every culture, time, and place. It takes many forms and has been characterized by many metaphors, some complimentary and some derogatory. Juxtaposed to teacher as artist, as mentor, as guide, as nurturer are teacher as banker, as filler of empty vessels, as disciplinarian. In Western literature, for every Socrates-like teacher engaging students in thought-provoking dialogue, there is a Dickensian Mr. Gradgrind demanding meaningless definitional recitations. How teachers “see” teaching determines to a large extent how they act as teachers.
In this book, David Blacker explores a highly unusual image of
teaching as immortality in a new way. Living on in one's students by having given them something of oneself is not an uncommon idea. Nor is the idea of helping students and oneself approach the eternal by engaging in the pursuit of Truth. But Blacker treats these ideas as dialectical and seeks a Hegelian synthesis of them by developing
the image of immortality as an atemporal, mythic, meaning-making, relational enterprise. Teaching as immortality is a difficult and complex concept to grasp, but Blacker takes the reader through Greek and Roman philosophers, Judeo-Christian beliefs about immortality, Heideggerian existentialism, and Gadamer's hermeneutics with a
graceful, engaging, and illuminating writing style that makes sense of this rich image.
This is a book for anyone who wants to enlarge their view of teaching and who appreciates the contribution that a nontechnical treatment of relevant philosophy can make to our understanding of perennial aspects of everyday life.

Jonas F. Soltis
Series Editor