In the thirteenth century, the great philosopher Maimonides writes: “Time is composed of atoms, that is to say of many parts that cannot be further subdivided, on account of their short duration.” The idea probably dates back even further: the loss of the original texts of Democritus prevents us from knowing whether it was already present in classical Greek atomism. Abstract thought can anticipate by centuries hypotheses that find a use—or confirmation—in scientific inquiry.
CARLO ROVELLI, The Order of Time.1
1 Introduction
For several decades, Leo Strauss was exclusively considered in scholarship as the political philosopher who claimed that political philosophy in modern times was undergoing a fatal crisis, which he attributed to radical historicism in contemporary philosophy or to Weber’s idea of science as “value-free.”2 This was thanks to his contemporaries’ initial and very partial study of the influence of his philosophical sources on his work as a whole. More recently, scholars have also considered him as the pessimistic alter-ego of Hannah Arendt, who, though disillusioned with the modern Western philosophical tradition, was still convinced that philosophy and politics are irreconcilable, unless the latter is seen as a necessary framework for the former (since the philosopher cannot be completely free within the polis).
Furthermore, Strauss has also been seen as an elitist and exoteric philosopher who paralysed both Jewish and non-Jewish interpreters of Maimonides, convincing them to read him only in terms of the dichotomy between Jerusalem and Athens, revelation and reason, a dichotomy that is impossible to overcome if not by means of a complex interpretation of the so-called secrets of the Bible.3 Interpreters of his work have resisted defining his philosophy, as it is frequently expressed in ambiguous propositions. Many of them have stated that his most famous writings—such as Die Religionskritik Spinozas (1930), Philosophie und Gesetz (1935),4 Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft (1936), and Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952)—contain no original thoughts, but are merely more or less philologically accurate studies in the history of philosophy that at best can guide us to a careful reading of the philosophers of the past.
Finally, many of Strauss’s contemporary interpreters today understand that none of these positions describes the core of his thought and therefore define his philosophical method as a zetetic scepticism.5 What this means is still unclear, and a more profound analysis of his philosophical or sceptical sources is required. Looking for an authentic rationalism—a rationalism capable of including irrational aspects without fearing or refusing them—Strauss attempted, with the help of Maimonides and his Islamic sources as well as that of other philosophers from the past, to understand it and its Greek origins. A central topic during Strauss’s epoch (similar to Eric Dodd’s 1951 thesis about the crisis of rationalism during the Hellenic period),6 his thesis of the crisis of rationalism during the modern period focuses on the tendency among modern thinkers to expel irrational elements without considering that, once expelled, these elements could become stronger and more dangerous to reason itself. In the earliest period of his university education, Strauss read philosophers such as Hermann Cohen and Edmund Husserl, the founders of the neo-Kantian school of Marburg and the phenomenological school, who were seminal to his subsequent work. Always critical of the philosophical attitude of the neo-Kantian philosophers—who, according to him, began their reflections “from the roof” (that is, from the scientific view of the world and reality), while phenomenology begins “from the foundation” (that is, “from our common understanding of the world, from our understanding of the world as sensibly perceived prior to all theorising”)—Husserl in particular influenced Strauss’s concept of philosophy more than is usually believed by Strauss scholars.7
2 Is Philosophy a Rigorous Science? Leo Strauss, Hermann Cohen, and Edmund Husserl
For the physicist Carlo Rovelli, scepticism seems to be the method that enables us to rethink reality again and again and induces us to continuously renew the language in which we speak of it (even if the abstract thinking of ancient philosophers like Maimonides was able to anticipate the results of future scientific discoveries).8 More than a century before Rovelli, Leo Strauss—one of the most important German-Jewish philosophers of the epoch of the [so-called crisis of the] Weimar Republic—described scientific scepticism as the basis of philosophy as a rigorous science and as a method that had already been used by the “classic” figure of Jewish medieval rationalism during the twelfth century: Maimonides.9 Strauss first published “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy” around 1961, in a festschrift for his friend Shlomo Pines in Jerusalem, but he had attended Husserl’s courses as a student in Freiburg as early as 1922. Husserl’s phenomenology is Strauss’s contemporary philosophical horizon, and he writes: “Phenomenology is essentially the study of essences and in no way of existence. In accordance with this the study of the life of the mind as practiced by the thoughtful historians offers to the philosophers a more original and therefore more fundamental material of enquiry than the study of nature.”10
For Strauss, what Cohen and Husserl have in common is that they are both interested in the study of the mind or consciousness, and they are both philosophers in the Kantian horizon, even if they diverge in their interpretations of his philosophy. In his essay, he states that Husserl’s most important contribution to philosophy is that he conceives of it as a rigorous science, as opposed to a Weltanschauung. According to Strauss, Husserl almost reaches the point of understanding that the philosopher, while conceiving of a rigorous scientific philosophy (which is a potentially infinite task), must assure peace in society, carefully and consciously dealing with the conflict between philosophy and Weltanschauung:
No one in our century has raised the call for philosophy as a rigorous science with such clarity, purity, vigor, and breadth as Husserl. “From its first beginnings philosophy has raised the claim to be a rigorous science; more precisely, it has raised the claim to be the science that would satisfy the highest theoretical needs and, in regard to ethics and religion render possible a life regulated by pure rational norms. This claim … has never been completely abandoned. [Yet] in no epoch of its development has philosophy been capable of satisfying the claim to be a rigorous science … Philosophy as science has not yet begun … In philosophy [in contradistinction to the sciences] everything is controversial.”11
Strauss seems to take Husserl’s idea so seriously that he seeks to develop it in a more consequent way. In his interpretation, this means underscoring the underestimated problem of the conflict between philosophy and Weltanschauung. Had Husserl done this, he would have regarded Weltanschauung as necessary for society, but at the same time as something from which philosophy, as a rigorous science, should remain separated. The conflict between Weltanschauung and philosophy is unavoidable, but if the philosopher is aware of this unavoidable conflict, he can still practice philosophy as a rigorous science:
“Already in the beginnings of philosophy persecution sets in. The men who live toward those ideas [of philosophy] are outlawed. And yet: ideas are stronger than all empirical powers.” In order to see the relation between philosophy as rigorous science and the alternative to it clearly, one must look at the political conflict between the two antagonists, i.e. at the essential character of that conflict. If one fails to do so, one cannot reach clarity on the essential character of what Husserl calls “philosophy as rigorous science.”12
As Rovelli observed, physicists and philosophers cannot stop looking for the truth even if they know that this is an asymptotic activity; that although the ultimate truth may not be found, philosophy and science will continue to look for it and to transform the language that should help this enquiry. There is something anti-sceptical in Strauss’s thought, in the sense of a polemic against the philosophical scepsis that questions the very possibility of finding the truth.
3 Zetetic Scepticism or Exotericism? Leo Strauss’s Response to the Crisis of Rationalism
As Jeffrey Bernstein has stated regarding Strauss’s philosophy:
As a zetetic activity (i.e., one that proceeds by means of inquiry), Strauss holds that philosophy is concerned with articulating the fundamental questions, problems, and responses to such problems (which responses exceed the purview of ultimate practical resolutions). […] The philosopher cannot, in principle, take those provisional responses to be destinations without transforming his way of life into a sect.13
While some of these interpreters, who are themselves scholars of ancient philosophy, have studied the influence of ancient zḗtēsis in Strauss’s writings—especially on his reinterpretation of Plato’s philosophy, his lessons on Socratic sources, or his writings on Greek literature and history—these same interpreters have not devoted the same attention to the Jewish sources of his scepticism. It is in his reading of some of the most important Jewish philosophical sources that Strauss becomes aware of the crisis of modern rationalism and of some alternatives to it. He begins to read Spinoza, who in both his Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being and the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect criticises the sceptics among the philosophers (that is, those philosophers who deny that human beings can find any truth at all and whose position ends in a sort of aphasia).14 It was on Spinoza’s critique of religion and on Cohen’s essays on Spinoza’s biblical exegesis that Strauss wrote his first works, particularly his 1930 book Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft. Untersuchungen zu Spinozas Theologisch-politischem Traktat,15 in which he examined the confutation of orthodoxy contained in the Theological-Political Treatise. According to Strauss himself, his realisation that the philosophers of the past used techniques for concealing truths, or a kind of writing strategy, in order to face the above-mentioned conflict between philosophy as a rigorous science and a Weltanschauung began from his examination of Spinoza’s rationalism (which was at the same time modern and medieval, as Henry Austryn Wolfson had noted).16 After a careful analysis of the relationships between the doctrine contained in the Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order and the Theological-Political Treatise, Strauss began to see Spinoza as a philosopher concerned not only with the theoretical issues of philosophy, but also with the practical issues. Far from being detached from a political dimension and from political themes, an understanding of the Ethics requires the introduction contained in the Treatise as an essential complementary. As Strauss wrote in a letter to his friend Jacob Klein, the historian of mathematics and interpreter of Plato:
Philosophy is the attempt to replace opinion with knowledge; now, opinion is the proper element of the polis; consequently, philosophy is subversive […]. In other words, while the proper character of the philosopher’s thinking is a kind of mania [madness], the philosopher’s public discourse is sophrosyne [moderation].17
Strauss’s ideas finally found systematic form in his Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952),18 in which he interprets Spinoza and Hobbes, as well as Maimonides (whom he had already studied during the 1930s in his book on Spinoza and in Philosophie und Gesetz) and the Arabic and Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages, as careful writers of philosophical treatises that reveal nothing at first sight, but carefully address their respective audiences. The historian Carlo Ginzburg, in his essay “Virtue, Justice, Strength. On Machiavelli and Some of His Readers,” quotes Strauss when describing the relationship between writing and persecution and stresses that the influence of persecution on literature consists precisely in pushing all those writers, who think heterodoxically to develop a very precise literary technique: that technique to which we allude when we speak of “writing between the lines.” His claim seems to condense the value of Ginzburg’s research, as he in fact comments on Strauss’s words by observing that research also consists of the attempt to grasp something that is written between the lines, “in invisible ink, on the fragmentary evidence of the past.”19
In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss focuses on the distinction between the esoteric aspect of philosophy (that is, the part that pertains to philosophy as a rigorous science in Husserlian terms) and its exoteric aspect. The discovery of this distinction, which, according to Strauss, was recognised by ancient and medieval philosophers as well as by Spinoza, should be considered a modern discovery. In his view, this can be attributed to the German and Spinozist philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the author of Nathan der Weise and other seminal works (who, as Strauss himself writes, inspired a change of orientation in him regarding his way of reading past philosophers). In 1939, when Strauss was writing about Lessing, he was about to face the most terrible years of his life: he was to lose his entire family to the Nazis’ persecution, and later also his brother-in-law, Paul Kraus, who was found dead in Cairo in 1944 (and with whom he conducted a fruitful collaboration, as the footnotes of their unpublished studies reveal).20
In fact, starting from the rediscovery of the figure of al-Fārābi, who is understood as the thinker who traced the development of Arab-Islamic and Jewish philosophy up to Averroes and Maimonides, Strauss was able to arrive at a complete understanding of the falāsifah and a new interpretation of the Platonism of the Arabic philosophers. In recent years, various essays and monographs have been published that recognise the value and originality of Strauss’s interpretation of medieval Islamic philosophy. Indeed, it is significant that both the contributions dedicated to Strauss’s relationship with Arab-Islamic philosophy and the works that deal with his life and thought in general sideline or completely omit, with few exceptions, Kraus’s importance for his intellectual evolution, as if it were important to downplay his philological skills or his seriousness in order to advance instead an image of a philosopher who manipulates ancient texts to demonstrate a controversial theory based on suspicion and elitism.
Although al-Fārābi and Maimonides were the philosophers through whom Strauss seems to have discovered the problem of esotericism in premodern philosophy, it is in fact a modern philosopher, Lessing, who, as mentioned above, probably represents the most important initial source of his ideas. As Hannes Kerber pointed out,21 it is in his 1939 essay “Exoteric Teaching” that Strauss makes his first attempt to explain the concept of esotericism in general terms. Moreover, compared to essays published at the end of the 1940s collected in Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss, in discussing the question of esotericism, does not focus on the medieval world, but rather presents the issue from a “Western” perspective. In fact, “Exoteric Teaching” focuses mainly on Lessing, a non-Jewish German philosopher, and on the Protestant theologian Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (especially on his interpretation of Plato). Other big names in European philosophy are also mentioned in the text, including Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Now, why is it that this essay, which is Strauss’s first essay devoted entirely to the question of esotericism, lacks any mention not only of the falāsifah, but also of Maimonides? If his intention was to circumscribe the esotericism of medieval Islamic and Jewish thinkers as a phenomenon of little importance on the world stage, then his own writings devoted to the Guide from 1941 onwards would be no more than “minor” texts. However, as Kerber explains, things are more complicated:
Even more perplexing is the fact that, while Maimonides is left out of the typescript, he is mentioned in an early handwritten plan of the essay. In this plan, the title for the penultimate section of the essay’s first part is: “Lessing—Leibniz—Hobbes (vera-pia dogmata)—Spinoza—RMbM–‑.” In the corresponding section of the manuscript, which was written before the typescript, Strauss […] does mention Maimonides at the end of the sequence of exoteric writers.22
As if this were not enough, writes Kerber, in another version of the typescript, Hobbes has been replaced by Descartes, but Maimonides does not appear at all. Furthermore, in the last version of the essay, the title of the passage in question is slightly altered, though this change does not solve the problem: “Lessing—Leibniz—Spinoza(—RMbM).” What do the brackets mean? Did Strauss drop the reference to Maimonides after completing the manuscript, or did he want to emphasize the implicit presence of Maimonides in a section ostensibly devoted only to Western thinkers? This question leads to two hypotheses. The first is that it is possible to trace a history of Western esotericism without mentioning the falāsifah. The second, which is perhaps even more important, is that although Maimonides’s name was excluded from the actual text, this does not necessarily mean that it should also be excluded from a deeper reading of this plan. The differences between these hypotheses become secondary if one reads Strauss’s entire work on medieval Arabic philosophy as a step on the path backwards from modern philosophy and the radical Enlightenment (which Lessing also critiques) and towards a more authentic Enlightenment.23
In fact, Lessing attributed the distinction between exoteric and esoteric truths to all past philosophers. He did so as someone who does not simply accept this distinction as a strange fact of the past, but rather sees it as an intelligible necessity of all times and therefore as a principle guiding his own literary activity against the ideas of his contemporaries. Lessing did indeed break with the ideals of the Enlightenment. Strauss thought that Lessing’s intransigent classicism, his considered view that a close study of the classics is the only way in which a diligent and thinking man can become a philosopher, led him first to notice the esotericism of some ancient philosophers and later to understand the esotericism of all premodern philosophers. As a critic of the Enlightenment from within the horizon of the Enlightenment itself, Lessing disclosed to Strauss something that Strauss himself had already learned from Jewish sources like Spinoza and Maimonides, and, in another way, from his contemporaries such as Cohen and Husserl. For Cohen, it was important to consider Maimonides as the classic figure of rationalism in Judaism, to see himself as an enlightened thinker, and to confirm that the replacement of myth by science is also a Jewish need. However, he seemed not to fully grasp the political problem inherent in this replacement. As Strauss remarked during a conference dedicated to Cohen and Maimonides:
Socrates knows a lot … then how it is that he remains with the question? The answer is that he wants to remain with the question … because questioning matters. A life without questioning is not a worthy life. […] Questioning about life itself …. […] There is no doctrine of Socrates. […] Even this knowing about not knowing is no doctrine: Socrates is also not a sceptic. A doctrine, a philosophical doctrine at least, is an answer to a question. Socrates, however, answers nothing. The apparent answer that he gives (knowing about not knowing) is only the most penetrating expression of the question. Socratic philosophising means: questioning.24
4 Conclusion
If ancient philosophers like Socrates viewed their philosophical activity as questioning, as Cohen explains, then Husserl’s conception of philosophy as a rigorous science and an asymptotic inquiry towards truth can be seen as having been inspired by ancient philosophy, particularly Socrates. The most striking feature of Husserl’s and Socrates’s philosophy is their consciousness of method. As Michael Landmann put it in 1941:
The new direction which he gave to investigation through his peculiar method of questioning constitutes the real—and the influential—discovery of Socrates, much more than do the concrete answers he even denied receiving. In a similar way, while phenomenology is an investigation of the phenomenon, it is almost no less an exposition and defense of the method of this investigation, by the application of which “a new realm of being” shall be disclosed “which has never before been marked out in all its peculiarity.”25
Besides the influence of Socrates, also “the Skeptics’ epoché is revitalized by Husserl as a permanent way of challenging the dogmatic naiveté of life in the natural attitude”26 and can therefore be considered the first step in the philosophical method that phenomenologists were attempting to articulate. Strauss sees Husserl as a contemporary philosopher who, unlike others, does not view ancient philosophy through a historicist lens, instead learning from the ancients. While consciousness of method, the opening of unexpected horizons, and the will to be scientific are common to both Socratism and phenomenology, they are not peculiar to these two movements. Husserl himself, in a 1911 text titled “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” which Strauss read, placed the revolution of Socrates and Plato alongside those of Descartes and Kant, seeing them as attempts to return to the true beginnings and to clarity about the conditions of the proper method, and generally as akin to his own revolution in purpose.27 According to Strauss, Husserl could have been more radical in what Strauss once called das lesende Lernen [learning from the texts of the ancients]. In fact, he does not explicitly recognise the importance of a political philosophy that reflects on the relationship between philosophy as a rigorous science and a Weltanschauung (i.e., opinions or beliefs), as an ancient philosopher like Socrates or other premodern philosophers would have done. Even though the way in which Husserl describes philosophy as a rigorous science should imply a reflection on the inevitable conflict in which philosophy finds itself—caught between Weltanschauungen, or the different views of the world, ideologies, and opinions in which politics and societies are rooted. Similarly, the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen,28 one of Strauss’s most significant contemporary sources, also engaged in a peer-to-peer dialogue with ancient philosophers, although according to Strauss, he failed to recognise that ancient philosophers were much more aware of the constitutional and therefore unavoidable conflict between politics (or religion) and philosophy than modern thinkers.
Strauss’s scepticism is at the same time an anti-scepticism; that is, a non-dogmatic scepticism, which consisted of an attitude that treats philosophy as an infinite inquiry and questioning about the truth—one that nevertheless cannot be grasped as a definitive truth. It was influenced and/or inspired by Husserl’s distinction between philosophy as a rigorous science and a Weltanschauung, as well as by Cohen’s original interpretation of critical idealism. If we are correct, we may conclude that from these two very different contemporary philosophers, Strauss learned to engage with ancient and premodern thinkers who better understood the first and fundamental problem of philosophy: freedom, or, as Spinoza would have put it, the lack of freedom within various societies.
Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, trans. Erica Segre and Simon Carnell (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018), 55.
According to Strauss, classical political philosophy had not survived the rise of political science and of Max Weber’s ideal of the ethical neutrality of social sciences and had thus become incapable of dealing with ethical values, of discerning the bad from the good, for example. See Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), published in a new German translation in Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 4: Naturrecht und Geschichte, ed. Heinrich Meier (Hamburg: Meiner, 2022), 332.
Warren Zev Harvey, “How to Begin to Study Strauss’s ‘How to Begin to Study the Guide of the Perplexed,’ ” in Interpreting Maimonides: Critical Essays, ed. Charles. H. Manekin and Daniel Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 228–246.
Leo Strauss, “Philosophie und Gesetz” (1935), in Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 2: Philosophie und Gesetz—Frühe Schriften, ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), 9–27.
Carlo Altini, Una filosofia in esilio. Vita e pensiero di Leo Strauss (Rome: Carocci, 2021), 366; Mauro Bonazzi, “Sul platonismo di Leo Strauss. A proposito di uno studio recente,” Rivista di storia della filosofia 4 (2015): 817–827; Alessandra Fussi, La città nell’anima. Leo Strauss lettore di Platone e Senofonte (Pisa: ETS, 2012).
See Eric Dodds, The Greek and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951).
Leo Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” Interpretation 2 (1971): 1–9.
See Carlo Rovelli, Buchi bianchi (Milan: Adelphi 2023).
There is a consensus that Hermann Cohen (the founder of the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism and a predecessor of Strauss in studying Spinoza and Maimonides) and Strauss’s Doktorvater Ernst Cassirer (the author of a long history of knowledge and an essay on Einstein’s theory of relativity) did not have much of an influence on their younger reader and student Leo Strauss. For a different interpretation, see Chiara Adorisio, Leo Strauss lettore di Hermann Cohen. Dalla filosofia moderna al ritorno agli antichi (Florence: Giuntina, 2007), 260.
Leo Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” 7.
Strauss, 6.
Strauss, 9.
Jeffrey Bernstein, Leo Strauss on the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2015), 228.
During the seventeenth century, this was the position within so-called academic scepticism. On the other side, Spinoza, in his Theological-Political Treatise, likewise criticises the religious scepsis within Judaism, represented by the attitude of Judah Alfakar, who denies every certainty to reason and relies only on faith.
Leo Strauss, Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft. Untersuchungen zu Spinozas Theologisch-politischem Traktat (1930), in Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 1: Die Religionskritik Spinozas und zugehörige Schriften, ed. Heinrich Meier, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 1–355. The volume also contains other essays Strauss wrote about Spinoza, such as “Cohens Analyse der Bibelwisseschaft Spinozas” (1924) (363–388), “Zur Bibelwissesnchaft Spinozas und seiner Vorläufer” (1926) (389–414), and “Das Testament Spinozas” (1932) (415–422).
Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning, repr. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
Leo Strauss and Jacob Klein, “A Giving of Accounts,” The College 22 (1970): 4.
Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1952).
In these lectures, in which Ginzburg focuses on the value and importance of philology for the work of the historian and in everyday life, he quotes Strauss frequently: see Ginzburg, Occhiacci di legno. Dieci riflessioni sulla distanza (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2019), 296; Ginzburg, La lettera uccide (Milan: Adelphi, 2021) xi–xii, 55, 103, 174, 228. On Ginzburg’s reading of Strauss’s interpretation of Machiavelli, see also Cristina Basili, “Leer entre líneas: Carlo Ginzburg, Leo Strauss y el problema teológico-político,” in Arcana del pensamiento del siglo XX, ed. José L. Villacañas, Roberto Navarrete, and Cristina Basili (Barcelona: Herder, 2021), 299–328.
For more on this relationship, see Giovanni Licata, “Leo Strauss, Paul Kraus e la riscoperta di Al-Farabi nella prima metà del XX secolo,” in Costruzione e distruzione di memorie. Riflessioni storiche e filosofiche, ed. Irene Kajon and Giuseppe Trotta (Rome: Lithos, 2023), 225–247.
Hannes Kerber, “Strauss and Schleiermacher on How to Read Plato: An Introduction to ‘Exoteric Teaching,’ ” in Reorientation: Leo Strauss in the 1930s, ed. Martin D. Yaffe and Richard S. Ruderman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 203–204.
Kerber, “Strauss and Schleiermacher,” 203. For an analysis of the importance of Lessing for Strauss’s writings, see also Michah Gottlieb, “Leo Strauss on Lessing’s Spinozism,” in German Jewish Thought between Religion and Politics (Festschrift in Honor of Paul Mendes-Flohr on the Occasion of His Seventeenth Birthday), ed. Christian Wiese and Martina Urban (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 291–317.
Kerber, “Strauss and Schleiermacher,” 204.
Leo Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni” (1931), in Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 2: Philosophie und Gesetz— Frühe Schriften, ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 1997), 413; my translation.
Michael Landmann, “Socrates as a Precursor of Phenomenology,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2, no. 1 (1941): 15.
See Dermot Moran, “Husserl and the Greeks,” The Journal for the British Society for Phenomenology 52 (2021): 98–117. Husserl would remain fascinated by the figure of Socrates as an ethical reformer until the [late 1910s and early 1920s/late nineteenth and early twentieth century], especially in his “Introduction to Philosophy” (1916–1920) and his “First Philosophy” lecture series. He also presents the Platonic and Socratic effort as an attempt to defend scientific philosophy against the relativism and scepticism of the Sophists. Later still, in the 1930s, Husserl read Helmut Kuhn’s study of Socrates (Kuhn, Sokrates: Ein Versuch über den Ursprung der Metaphysik [Berlin: Die Runde, 1934]), which he acknowledged as the first philosophy book in a long time that he had read from cover to cover. Strauss himself had a dialogue with Kuhn on ancient philosophical dogmatisms and scepticism: see Strauss, Naturrecht und Geschichte, 333–340.
Edmund Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” Logos. Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur 1 (1911): 292; recently republished in Husserl, Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft, ed. Eduard Marbach (Hamburg: Meiner, 2009), 87.
For Cohen, there was no difference between the doctrine of Plato and that of Socrates; According to Strauss tis fact prevented Cohen from seeing the inevitable conflict between philosophy and politics: see Strauss, Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections (New York: City College, 1967). Strauss refers to Cohen’s essay “Das Soziale Ideal bei Plato und den Propheten” (1916), in Cohen, Hermann Cohens Jüdische Schriften, ed. Bruno Strauss, intro. by Franz Rosenzweig (Berlin: Schwetschke, 1924), 1:306–330, and Hermann Cohen, Werke, Band 17: Kleinere Schriften VI, 1916–1918, ed. Helmut Holzhey, Julius H. Schoeps, and Hartwig Wiedebach (Hildesheim: Olms, 2002).
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