Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editors' Introduction: The Question of Modernity Meets the Question of Leo Strauss
- Why Leo Strauss? Four Answers and One Consideration concerning the Uses and Disadvantages of the School for the Philosophical Life
- Leo Strauss and the Contemporary Return to Political Philosophy
- Philosophy as the Right Way of Life in Natural Right and History
- The Philosopher's Ancient Clothes: Leo Strauss on Philosophy and Poetry
- Leo Strauss as Erzieher: The Defense of the Philosophical Life or the Defense of Life Against Philosophy?
- Modern Challenges – Platonic Responses: Strauss, Arendt, Voegelin
- Karl Löwith and Leo Strauss on Modernity, Secularization, and Nihilism
- Remarks on the Strauss-Kojève Dialogue and its Presuppositions
- Carl Schmitt and his Critic
- Postmodernism and the Art of Writing: The Importance of Leo Strauss for the 21st Century
- Leo Strauss's Gynaikologia
- Contributors
- Name Index
- Subject Index
Why Leo Strauss? Four Answers and One Consideration concerning the Uses and Disadvantages of the School for the Philosophical Life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editors' Introduction: The Question of Modernity Meets the Question of Leo Strauss
- Why Leo Strauss? Four Answers and One Consideration concerning the Uses and Disadvantages of the School for the Philosophical Life
- Leo Strauss and the Contemporary Return to Political Philosophy
- Philosophy as the Right Way of Life in Natural Right and History
- The Philosopher's Ancient Clothes: Leo Strauss on Philosophy and Poetry
- Leo Strauss as Erzieher: The Defense of the Philosophical Life or the Defense of Life Against Philosophy?
- Modern Challenges – Platonic Responses: Strauss, Arendt, Voegelin
- Karl Löwith and Leo Strauss on Modernity, Secularization, and Nihilism
- Remarks on the Strauss-Kojève Dialogue and its Presuppositions
- Carl Schmitt and his Critic
- Postmodernism and the Art of Writing: The Importance of Leo Strauss for the 21st Century
- Leo Strauss's Gynaikologia
- Contributors
- Name Index
- Subject Index
Summary
There are good reasons to study Leo Strauss. Philosophical, existential, and political reasons. Those reasons existed before Strauss's star rose on both sides of the Atlantic on the media horizon in the year 2003, and those reasons will continue to exist long after the quarrel over Strauss's alleged influence on the foreign policy of the only remaining world power has become completely a thing of the past. I do not want to discuss that short-lived quarrel more closely here. Instead, I want to give an answer to the question “Why Leo Strauss?,” a question that can most definitely be separated from the latest Strauss boom. In fact, it was not only after Strauss came to be on so many people's lips that the question was put to me; no, I have come up against it as long as I have seriously studied his work and his thought. It may be appropriate for someone coming from Old Europe to address this question as the opening question at the first conference on Strauss taking place in what once was called New Europe.
The question “Why Leo Strauss?” can be the expression of either dismissive surprise or open-minded wonder. First of all and most often it is the result of insufficient knowledge. Strauss, who was born in Kirchhain, Germany in 1899 and died in Annapolis, USA in 1973, was long the great unknown among the thinkers of the twentieth century.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernity and What Has Been LostConsiderations on the Legacy of Leo Strauss, pp. 19 - 32Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2010