This concise and accessible introduction to Strauss's thought provides, for wider audience, a bridge to his more complex theoretical work. Editor Pangle has gathered five of Strauss's previously unpublished lectures and five hard-to-find published writings and has arranged them so as to demonstrate the systematic progression of the major themes that underlay Strauss's mature work. "[These essays] display the incomparable insight and remarkable range of knowledge that set Strauss's works apart from any other twentieth-century philosopher's."—Charles R. (...) Kesler, National Review. (shrink)

Leo Strauss's controversial writings have long exercised a profound subterranean cultural influence. Now their impact is emerging into broad daylight, where they have been met with a flurry of poorly informed, often wildly speculative, and sometimes rather paranoid pronouncements. This book, written as a corrective, is the first accurate, non-polemical, comprehensive guide to Strauss's mature political philosophy and its intellectual influence. Thomas L. Pangle opens a pathway into Strauss's major works with one question: How does (...) class='Hi'>Strauss's philosophic thinking contribute to our democracy's civic renewal and to our culture's deepening, critical self-understanding? This book includes a synoptic critical survey of writings from scholars who have extended Strauss's influence into the more practical, sub-philosophic fields of social and political science and commentary. Pangle shows how these analysts have in effect imported Straussian impulses into a "new" kind of political and social science. (shrink)

This article analyzes Leo Strauss’s early and mature political philosophy in unusual ways. It offers a new reading of known and unknown texts and documents and shows how Leo Strauss became Leo Strauss.

In this classic analysis, Leo Strauss pinpoints what is original and innovative in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.

Het is niet eenvoudig om door te dringen in het veelzijdige cultuurkritische denken van Strauss. Conservatisme speelt een sleutelrol in zijn verdediging van geestelijke waarden.

In this classic analysis, Leo Strauss pinpoints what is original and innovative in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.

Leo Strauss articulates the conflict between reason and revelation as he explores Spinoza's scientific, comparative, and textual treatment of the Bible. Strauss compares Spinoza's Theologico-political Treatise and the Epistles, showing their relation to critical controversy on religion from Epicurus and Lucretius through Uriel da Costa and Isaac Peyrere to Thomas Hobbes. Strauss's autobiographical Preface, traces his dilemmas as a young liberal intellectual in Germany during the Weimar Republic, as a scholar in exile, and as a leader (...) of American philosophical thought. "[For] those interested in Strauss the political philosopher, and also those who doubt whether we have achieved the 'final solution' in respect to either the character of political science or the problem of the relation of religion to the state." -- Journal of Politics "A substantial contribution to the thinking of all those interested in the ageless problems of faith, revelation, and reason." -- Kirkus Reviews Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago. His contributions to political science include The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, The City and the Man, What is Political Philosophy?, and Liberalism Ancient and Modern. (shrink)

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

In early modern philosophy the motive of logical creation emerged in reaction to the Greek-Medieval legacy of a realistic metaphysics. The dominant nominalistic trends of thought since Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant explored its rationalistic implications. The latter drew the radical (humanistic) conclusion that the laws of nature are present in human thought a priori (i.e. before all experience). The irrationalistic side of nominalism emphasized the uniqueness and individuality of events – thus leading to the historicism of the 19th (...) century and the subsequent linguistic turn. Kant influenced Husserl who, in turn, provided the point of departure for the ideas of Schutz, Berger and Luckmann – compare the joint work of Berger and Luckmann: Social construction of reality (1967). The contemporary “postmodern” idea that we create the world in which we live (either through thought, through language or through social practices) merely continues core elements of (early) modern philosophy. The underlying idea of autonomy highlights the difference between modern Humanism and a Christian view of reality, for in the latter human subjectivity is appreciated as being correlated with universal and constant principles that can only assume a positive shape through human activities of positivization (form-giving). The autonomy ideal of modern Humanism reifies the typical human freedom to positivize underlying principles. At the same time this reification on the one hand collapses the distinction between conditions and being conditioned and on the other it does not provide a basis for supra-individual standards of behaviour. (shrink)

Reorienting the Political examines the reception of two controversial German philosophers, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, in the Chinese-speaking world. This volume explores the powerful resonance of both thinkers in Chinese political thought from a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.3 (2005) 195-198 [Access article in PDF] Implicit and Explicit Temporality Thomas Fuchs Keywords implicit/explicit temporality, embodiment, intersubjectivity, desynchronization, melancholia, schizophrenia Since Minkowski (1970), Strauss (1966), v. Gebsattel (1954), and Tellenbach (1980), temporality has been a main subject of phenomenological psychiatry. Drawing on philosophical concepts of Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger, these authors have analyzed psychopathologic deviations of time experience, mainly from an individual (...) point of view, for example, as a slowing down or inhibition of lived time in depression or obsessive–compulsive disorder. Their analyses are still most valuable today, but may be carried further by introducing concepts such as embodied and intersubjective temporality into psychopathology. Martin Wyllie (2005), by opening up a wide scope of temporal phenomena and related concepts, makes a laudable effort to contribute to such a progress.In my commentary, I would like to propose a distinction that is suggested by much of Wyllie's analysis and may shed further light on psychopathology, namely between implicit and explicit temporality. If we look at a child while obliviously playing with his toys, lost to the world, we may assume that there is no sense of the time passing. Lived time runs with the movement of life, implicit in the child's experience of being engaged in his play and directed toward his goals. It "unfolds through the processes of bodily activity" (Wyllie 2005). Future and past do not stand out against the pure presence of "becoming." This implicit mode of temporality is retrieved every time that we are absorbed in what we are doing, and may even reach the climax of "flow experiences" (Csikszentmihalyi 1988) where the sense of time is lost in unimpeded, fluent performance.However, this changes when a gap arises between need and satisfaction, desire and fulfillment, or plan and execution. Now the future appears as a "not yet" or "yet to come," experienced as the temporality of awaiting, striving, or longing for. Time is felt as passing by and refusing the desired fulfillment; it becomes conscious or explicit. A similar gap arises between the present and something irretrievably lost, bringing the past to consciousness as a "no more." Again time is experienced explicitly, but now as moving on relentlessly and separating us from the lost object. The gap to the past may not be bridged any more: this is the temporality of missing or mourning. In both cases, explicit time arises as a negation of implicit or lived time (here my use of the term is a bit divergent from Wyllie's); it is experienced as a "not yet" or "no more," often with a component of displeasure or suffering (Fuchs 2001a, 2003)."Implicit" versus "explicit time" thus come near to another distinction well known in phenomenology, namely between the "lived" and [End Page 195] the "corporal body" (Leib versus Koerper). The first term refers to the body functioning in the tacit mode, as the medium of everyday performance. The second term points to the body as turning into the object of attention, for example, when it puts up resistance to our purposes, or is used as an instrument deliberately (Fuchs 2001b). In fact, implicit temporality and tacit performance of the body are nearly synonymous: Lived time may be regarded as a function of the lived body, opened up by its potentiality and capability. The more we are engaged in our tasks, the more we forget time as well as the body; we are, as it were, "inside time." On the other hand, in explicit temporality the body often appears in the corporal or explicit mode as well. For example, when falling ill, we experience our body no more as a tacit medium but rather as an object or obstacle, while we notice the slowing down of time and may even feel excluded from the movement of life. Thus, embodiment and temporality have a parallel background–foreground structure.I now try to carry these considerations further by including the intersubjective dimension of time. In an earlier paper, I describe the attunement of the living being to its environment as a continuous synchronization on the biological as... (shrink)

It is understandable that Ewen Whitaker developed an interest in the history of mapping and naming the moon. As a participant in the Apollo missions and a member of the Task Group of Lunar Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union, he was himself directly involved in conflicts between representatives of different countries over naming newly discovered lunar features. In an effort to understand the passions surrounding current controversies more completely, his book examines their origin and development from the seventeenth century (...) to the present.Whitaker's account, written without footnotes for the general reader, proceeds in a strictly chronological fashion. As he makes clear, the key event in the history of lunar mapping and nomenclature was the discovery and application of the telescope to increasing knowledge of the moon's features. Mapping and naming thus became important issues in the wake of Galileo's observations. Accordingly, the first part of Whitaker's study, which deals with the period from prehistory to 1651, is the longest and most important of its four sections. By 1651, with the publication of Francesco Grimaldi's map and the application of Giovanni Riccioli's nomenclature, a fairly detailed and accurate picture of the moon's surface features had become available.The second part of Whitaker's account carries the story to the beginning of the Victorian period and features the creation of a new lunar map based on the work of Johann Mädler and Wilhelm Beer. In Parts 3 and 4, which together are shorter than either of the first two sections, Whitaker focuses on such key developments as the emergence of photography and the creation of international organizations to settle disputes over nomenclature. By 1935, a committee of the International Astronomical Union had reached agreement on a map and the naming of surface features. However, the further explorations of the space age dramatically increased the work of mappers by providing the first photographs of the far side of the moon and revealing new features on the near side.The most compelling facet of Whitaker's study are the 112 reproductions of drawings and photographs of the moon from the seventeenth century to the present, which, taken together, constitute a rich visual history of efforts to portray lunar features for the public and for scientists. In addition, detailed appendixes, arranged in chronological order, provide lists of new names of lunar features as assigned by the most influential mappers of the lunar surface from Michiel Van Langren to the NASA Catalogue of Lunar Nomenclature.While Whitaker limits himself strictly to matters of mapping and nomenclature, his study has already been useful to other historians of lunar exploration, including Scott Montgomery and William Sheehan and Thomas Dobbins . Montgomery seeks to explain how political and aesthetic factors shaped the portrayal of lunar features and thus the drawing of maps and the naming of surface features up to 1651, while Sheehan and Dobbins move beyond mapping and nomenclature to consider controversies over the possible existence of life on the moon and the conflict surrounding the origin of lunar craters by volcanic activity or meteor impact. Whitaker's study, however, provides a unique record of the development of our image of the moon's surface over a period of more than three centuries. (shrink)

Blick zurück auf die antike Polis. In diesem Buch wird erstmals im Zusammenhang untersucht, wie sich das politische Denken im 20. Jahrhundert im Rückgriff auf aristotelische Denkfiguren erneuert hat - von den frühen Vorlesungen Martin Heideggers über Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss und Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Joachim Ritter und Dolf Sternberger bis zu Alasdair MacIntyre und Martha Nussbaum.

Though the relationship between Goethe, Cassirer and Levi-Strauss has been explored extensively, the focus usually lies on questions of genealogy. This article aims for a different course: Building on the notable similarities between Goethe’s discussion of morphology, Levi-Strauss’ structuralistic approach and Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms we will investigate the epistemological similarities between the three authors. They can be found in a specific form of humanism (or anti-humanism) which connects questions on the conditions of the world and its (...) accessibility with the more global question of humankind and its place within the natural world, thus, by virtue of a specific interpretation of the concept of transformation, opening the door for new approaches which have recently been discussed as ontological turn. (shrink)

L' « École de Tübingen » de l'interprétation de Platon a fait ces quinze dernières années beaucoup d'émules hors d'Allemagne. On commence à reconnaître que le rejet antérieur de la position « ésotérique » a eu pour prix une entorse massive aux règles fondamentales méthodologiques reconnues et une critique insuffisante des sources. En outre, l'interprétation « ésotérique » et le travail de ses représentants ont fait l'objet de beaucoup de dés-information, à laquelle il sera ici remédié. On insiste ici sur (...) la différence par rapport à la position de Leo Strauss. On montre ici que Platon avait une conception particulière de l'ésotérisme; et la critique que Frédéric Nietzsche a faite dès 1891 de la conception fautive (anti-ésotérique) de Schleiermacher fait l'objet d'une brève discussion. In the last fifteen years, the so-called « Tübingen School » of platonic interpretation has found not a small number of sympathizers in several countries. Platonic scholars begin to realize that the reasons for opposing the « esoteric » view are far less well-founded than hitherto assumed. Some of the current misconceptions about the nature of the « esoteric » interpretation are discussed in this paper, some of the popular misinformations are corrected. It is shown that Plato does have an own concept of esoterism. Nietzsche's criticisms of Schleiermacher's mistaken approach is discussed briefly. (shrink)

The present work studies for the first time the important discussions of the period from the debate between Leo Strauss and Julius Guttmann, Alexander Altmann s contribution to Jewish theology, to the reception of the work of Franz ...

This article offers a historical perspective on the emergence of narrative as a major area of research, with a sampling of the range of possible approaches. Key early figures, including Propp, Levi-Strauss, the French structuralists (Greimas in particular), and the linguist Labov are discussed. It aims to provide a framework in which some key concepts can be examined, in particular the term narrativity, which regards narrative as a semiotic structure that transcends the verbal domain. The work of Metz in (...) cinema is discussed. Another area is painting; it is noted that the conjunction of the notion of narrative with painting has a long history. (shrink)

"Kant, Kantianism and Idealism" presents an overview of German Idealism, the major movement in philosophy from the late 18th to the middle of the 19th Century. The period was dominated by Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, whose work influenced not just philosophy, but also art, theology and politics. The volume covers not only these major figures but also their main followers and interpreters. These include Kant's younger contemporary Herder, his early critics such as Jacobi, Reinhold, and Maimon, and his readers (...) Schiller and Schlegel - who shaped much of the subsequent reception of Kant in art, literature and aesthetics - as well as Schopenhauer, whose unique appropriation and criticism of theories of cognition later had a decisive influence on Nietzsche. The "Young Hegelians" - such as Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and David Friedrich Strauss, whose writings would influence Engels and Marx - are also discussed. The influence of Kant and German Idealism also extended into France, shaping the thought of such figures as Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Proudhon, whose work would prove decisive for subsequent philosophical, political, and economic thinking in Europe in the second half of the 19th century. (shrink)

The essays in this volume honor the work of political scientist and Eric Voegelin scholar, Barry Cooper, by considering how political philosophy (a form of hunting) and empiricism get "woven" together (to borrow a metaphor from Plato). In other words, they consider how science needs to be conducted if it is to remain true to our commonsense experience of the world and to facilitate political judgment. Several of the essays cover Eric Voegelin, including his understanding of consciousness, a comparison of (...) him and Leo Strauss, and his self-understanding as a scholar. Other essays consider terrorism, technology, religion and the modern world, the divided line in Plato's Republic, and the political significance of hope. The volume also includes a number of essays that consider different aspects of Canadian politics, including its strong regionalism, political culture, public law, and the infamous "Calgary School" of political science. These essays are united by the concern that political science must "weave" together political philosophy and empiricism. This task was what Aristotle meant when he characterized political science as a matter of practical wisdom. It is an insight that was also central for Voegelin's restoration of political science in the twentieth century, and that these essays continue into the twenty-first century. Political analysis begins in whatever contemporary crisis the analyst has found himself. The analyst sifts through competing claims of political meaning asserted by the partisans in the crisis. From there he ascends to greater luminosity concerning the human condition by viewing those claims in light of the "major questions in the history of political thought." They inform one another, as the search for order is necessarily the search for order that is conducted by a particular individual's consciousness in the context of a particular community in space and time. This volume will be of special interest to scholars of political philosophy as well as citizens and statesmen interested in how an engagement in the history of political philosophy can facilitate political judgment in particular political circumstances. Publisher's note. (shrink)

Walker feels that his contention regarding the novelty of Machiavelli's method is in need of proof. He asserts that "the practice of considering negative instances was far more extensively used by St. Thomas Aquinas than it was by Machiavelli, who is but a tyro in this respect." "But neither St. Thomas nor any other mediaeval thinker... [proves his] theorems by citing similar instances taken from ancient and contemporary history," to say nothing of other differences between their procedure and (...) that of Machiavelli. Walker admits that "there are... similarities in method, some of them quite striking," between Machiavelli and Aristotle. But "there are also marked differences." "Aristotle's Politics contains at least as many, if not more, precepts or maxims than the Discourses of Machiavelli, but rarely does Aristotle cite even a single historical example to show that in practice they would work, whereas Machiavelli invariably cites several..." Furthermore, Machiavelli's method, in contradistinction to Aristotle's, is "essentially historical." It was "to his reading of ancient historians," and apparently not to his study of Aristotle, that "Machiavelli's interest in history and his realization of its significance to the politician was undoubtedly due". It would then seem that the new method emerged by virtue of a synthesis between Aristotle's political philosophy and "history," i.e. coherent records of past events. (shrink)

One of a handful of truly pioneering figures in visual semiotics, Jean-Marie Floch elaborated an approach that combined an analysis of the basic perceptual qualities and compositional strategies of the image, with a study of the cultural and historical significance of its representational dimension. A key collaborator of A. J. Greimas, Floch situated his project within the theoretical framework of Paris semiotics, which he helped to develop. He positioned his visual studies of familiar cultural objects in proximity to cultural anthropology (...) and the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. His five published monographs explore abstract painting, art photography, Russian icons, magazine advertisements, and comic books. (shrink)

One of a handful of truly pioneering figures in visual semiotics, Jean-Marie Floch elaborated an approach that combined an analysis of the basic perceptual qualities and compositional strategies of the image, with a study of the cultural and historical significance of its representational dimension. A key collaborator of A. J. Greimas, Floch situated his project within the theoretical framework of Paris semiotics, which he helped to develop. He positioned his visual studies of familiar cultural objects in proximity to cultural anthropology (...) and the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. His five published monographs explore abstract painting, art photography, Russian icons, magazine advertisements, and comic books. (shrink)

In much theory there is a tendency to place thought above action, or the opposite, action over thought. The consequence of the first option is that philosophy or scientific evidence gains the upper hand in educational thinking. The consequence of the second view is that pragmatism and relativism become the dominant features. This article discusses how different branches of the Aristotelian tradition can mediate between these two views. I argue, contrary to some other Aristotelian approaches, that thinking and action are (...) both separated and yet prerequisites for each other and point to some educational consequences of this way of thinking. To build this argument I draw on selected aspects of the philosophy of Hanna Arendt, Leo Strauss and John Dewey. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false ES-CO X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabla normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} This essay presents a reading of modern liberalism from Leo Strauss´thought. Starting with his analysis of Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political and its critique of liberal “neutralization and depolitization”, Strauss posits an affirmation (...) of the problem of natural right, for which it is a fundamental first step to study the political philosophy of Hobbes. In contrast with Schmitt and Hobbes, Strauss´ thought points towards a consideration of classical natural right as a riposte to the political nihilism or apolitical cosmopolitanism of late-modernity, both products of radical historicism as well as methodological positivism. Strauss considers the search of natural right qua representation of the idea of justice a distinct alternative to the affirmation of the will through sovereign power. Normal 0 21 false false false ES-CO X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4. (shrink)

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President, and the conservative revolution emerged. Who provoked this revolution? Author Shadia Drury provides a fascinating answer to the question, as she looks at the work of Leo Strauss, a German Jewish emigre and scholar, who was one of the most influential individuals in the conservative movement. Among his disciples are Chief Justice Clarence Thomas and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.