William H.F. Altman

In suggesting that its last chapter’s purpose is to provoke the reader to begin reconsidering and thus rereading the book they have just read, this article attempts to negotiate the interpretive quarrel as whether Xenophon’s Cyropaedia deserves a “sunny” reading—in which Cyrus straightforwardly embodies Xenophon’s own political ideals—or a more critical “dark” one, that separates the author from his protagonist. To help us get the most advantage from the paideia his book was intended to provide, Xenophon made a “sunny” first reading plausible, but he also sowed in his text the kind of clues—especially with respect to pleonexia—that would reveal his full intentions only to those who reread his book.

In order to move past the kind of thinking the author calls “post-War,” it is necessary to reassess the causes of the FirstWorld War. This chapter argues that German post-war cultural pessimism can only be understood adequately if we understand the justified anger and scorn for liberalism and modernity Germans felt at being assigned exclusive guilt for the Great War. He argues that this cultural pessimism can only be overcome if, on the basis of this understanding, we reassess the Western cultural legacy, holding it divided, not broken or wholly irredeemable, and containing within it resources capable of reorienting the struggles of today against the politics of despair or rage.

No livro Plato’s Philosophers, Catherine Zuckert olha para o Timeu de Platão de maneira renovada e revive implicitamente a tese de A. E. Taylor, segundo a qual Timeu não fala por Platão. Taylor devotou seu escrupuloso comentário de 1927 para construir esse argumento, o qual, porém, encalhou diante da questão colocada dez anos depois por F. M. Cornford, no livro Plato’s Cosmology : “Qual poderia ter sido o seu motivo?” O motivo de Platão era tanto pedagógico quanto parmenídico: assim como a deusa expõe o peregrino à “Via da Opinião” depois da revelação da “Verdade”, assim também o Timeu de Platão expõe o leitor a um relato poético de uma cosmologia baseada na visão – outro kosmo/j e0pe/wn a0pathlo/j – depois da revelação, feita na República V-VII, da ontologia platônica puramente inteligível.

Tarán’s case against the authenticity of Epinomis depends on the claim that it is incompatible with Plato’s Laws. Behind this claim is the uncritical assumption that the Athenian Stranger of Laws speaks for Plato. While the Athenian Stranger of Epinomis clearly does not do so, the same is equally true, albeit more difficult to detect, of the Stranger in Laws. Once the Athenian is recognized as both ambitious and impious, a reconstruction of the last sentence of Epinomis — on which Tarán’s incompatibility thesis principally rests — reveals the theological-political continuity between the two dialogues: the Stranger is intent on bringing the city into being while securing divine sanction for his own code of laws and divine honours for himself. Plato appended the Epinomis to the Laws in order to make it easier for the student to recognize the Stranger’s intentions as well as to draw attention to Book VII of the Laws, the centre of the dialogue once Epinomis is recognized as its thirteenth book; it is here that the Stranger describes how a mathematical and astronomical man may become a god to other men.

In accordance with Leo Strauss’s ingenious suggestion, the Athenian Stranger of Plato’s Laws is best understood as an alternative ‘Socrates’, fleeing from the hemlock to Crete. Situated between Crito and Phaedo, Laws effectively tests the reader’s loyalty to the real Socrates who obeys Athenian law and dies cheerfully in Athens. Having separated Plato from the Stranger, a nuanced defence of Karl Popper’s suspicions about Laws confronts the apologetic readings of both Strauss and Christopher Bobonich. As hinted by his preference for wine, the antidote for hemlock, the Athenian Stranger repeatedly proves himself the opposite of Socrates, particularly with respect to piety. Once the Stranger is recognized as ‘an unreliable narrator’, this apparently ponderous product of Plato’s senility becomes the taut thriller of an innovative teacher at the peak of his powers.

Writing in 1935 as "Hugo Fiala," Karl Löwith not only connected Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt to an apparently contentless "decisionism" but drew attention to the fact that his correspondent Leo Strauss had attacked Schmitt—like Heidegger an open Nazi since 1933— from the Right in 1932. In opposition to the views of Peter Eli Gordon, Heidegger's bellicose stance at the Davos Hochschule of 1929 is presented as "political" in Schmitt's sense of the term while Strauss's embrace of Heidegger, never regretted, showed that he ceased to be Nietzsche's "Good European" in his thirtieth year. A more significant "change of orientation" is revealed in Strauss's 1932 version of the "second cave," a pseudo-Platonic image of Verjudung. Revelation had disrupted a nihilistic "natural ignorance" that could only be reversed by an elite's secret decision for a self-contradictory content: only an atheistic religion provides a post-liberal solution to "the theological-political problem."