The Philosophy of Leo Strauss

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In this lecture we explain the philosophy of Leo Strauss, especially as found in his great works: Natural Right & History, On German Nihilism, The Three Waves of Modernity, and The City and Man.

0:00-1:10 - Leo Strauss
1:10-9:20 - Athens & Jerusalem
9:20-17:24 - Natural Right & History
17:24-37:10 - Three Waves of Modernity
37:10-43:23 - Strauss and the Revival of Athens
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Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is a political philosopher, literary critic, and classicist. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, politics, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous publications in the English-speaking world. He is the author of Finding Arcadia (2023), The Odyssey of Love (2021), and the Politics of Plato (2020); he has also contributed to The College Lecture Today (2019) and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters (2022).

[peterchen-efmd]

Thank you. Do you have this in a book that I can Buy?

[Sparx]

Bruh, that explainer of why the Marxist project calls itself scientific socialism between 31:22 & 31:51 hit hard

[JC-qhwl]

Great video. The idea of religion (church) vs. philosophy (state) is interesting and you can see the influence of Greek rationalist philosophy on modern philosophy, but I just find it hard to accept that this is a time of politics-as-God. I think if anything, the defining feature of modernity is the subordination of the theological and the political both to science (theological methods applied to nature) and commerce (economics over politics). This man-as-political-animal is not the way we view man currently. We see man-as-natural-animal with nature-as-God and in this view has constructed the most unnatural life imaginable.. This is the real danger of modernity imo, but that view is collapsing into skepticism and scientism in real time, which is a potential danger in itself. So I think Strauss was wrong about Greek philosophy in modernity. We don’t really have it as it was, but as the perfect caricature of a Marxist’s bourgeois thinks it should have been. The politics revolutions of the 18th century are relevant here. If man really is a theological and/or political animal then the philosophies of modernity are downstream of the changes that took place in those arenas during the dawn of modernity. Strauss sort of just forgets that real politics happened and matters, that it’s not just a change of ideas, but who is pushing them. I think he also ignored the influence of Hegel and idealism, which is in truth of neither Jerusalem nor Athens.

[saimbhat]

I have a feeling that you get very womanly hysterical when you see someone disagreeing with you.