Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Strauss, Leo

  • Why the Collapse of Philosophical Studies in the Islamic World?

    Leo Strauss sketches an answer in his "How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. T. L. Pangle, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 221-222, bolding added: For the Jew and the Moslem, religion is primarily not, as it is for the Christian, a faith formulated in dogmas, but a…

  • Adeimantus, Machiavelli, Bloom, and Strauss

    Recent events make it clear that the West is on the wane. The sun is setting on the Land of Evening. As the West goes under, the philosopher, like the proverbial owl of Minerva, spreads his wings in the gathering dusk so as to attain an altitude from which to survey the passing scene.  He…

  • Roger Kimball on Roger Scruton (1944-2020) on Tradition, Authority and Prejudice

    Here: Sir Roger wrote several times about his political maturation, most fully, perhaps, in “Why I became a conservative,” in The New Criterion in 2003. There were two answers, one negative, one positive. The negative answer was the visceral repudiation of civilization he witnessed in Paris in 1968: slogans defacing walls, shattered shop windows, and…

  • The Philosopher and the Christian

    For Vito Caiati ………………….. George W. Bush once referred to Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher, thereby betraying both a failure to grasp what a philosopher is and who Jesus claimed to be. Jesus Christ is not a philosopher.  The philosopher is a mere lover of wisdom.  His love is desirous and needy; it…

  • Is the Christian the True Philosopher?

    Steven Nemes makes two main points in his Christian Life as Philosophy.  The first I agree with entirely: Jesus Christ is not a philosopher.  The philosopher is a mere lover of wisdom.  His love is desirous and needy; it is eros, the love of one who lacks for that which he lacks.  But Jesus Christ…

  • An Evolved Animal With a Higher Origin? Some Theological Speculation

    I just remembered this old post from the Powerblogs site, a post relevant to present concerns.  Written February 2008. ……………. I raised the question whether divine revelation is miraculous. I answered tentatively that it is not. Though revelation  may be accompanied by miraculous events such as the burning bush of  Exodus 3:2, I floated the suggestion that…

  • Why the Collapse of Philosophical Studies in the Islamic World?

    Leo Strauss sketches an answer in his "How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. T. L. Pangle, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 221-222, bolding added: For the Jew and the Moslem, religion is primarily not, as it is for the Christian, a faith formulated in dogmas,…

  • Leo Strauss on Reading and Writing

     Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing:      It is a general observation that people write as they read. As a     rule, careful writers are careful readers and vice versa. A careful     writer wants to be read carefully. He cannot know what it means to     be read carefully but by having done careful reading…

  • Athens and Jerusalem at Loggerheads Over the One Thing Needful

    The following is highly relevant to our Trinitarian/Christological discussions: For Leo Strauss, ". . . Western civilization consists of two elements, or has two roots, which are in radical disagreement with each other." ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, p. 245) These two elements are the Bible and Greek philosophy, Jerusalem…