Will Strauss
Will Strauss
book two numbers
The most superficial fact regarding the Discourses , the fact that the number of its chapters equals the number of books of Livy 's History , compelled us to start a chain of tentative reasoning which brings us suddenly face to face with the only New Testament quotation that ever appears in Machiavelli 's two books and with an enormous blasphemy.
philosophy historical done
Nothing ought to be said or done which could create the impression that unbiased reconsideration of the most elementary premises of philosophy is a merely academic or historical affair.
men world creation
God's reasons for communicating with man must be subsumed under his reason for communicating to him his account of his creation of the world - and man.
mean dogma
Philosophizing means, then, to ascend from public dogma to essentially private knowledge.
views doe certain
Even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a salutary myth: one does not prove it to be true.
order political excellence
Education, they [philosophers] felt, is the only answer to the always pressing question, to the political question par excellence, of how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom which is not license.
ideas ifs no-idea
If God is One, and if there can be no other God, there can be no idea of God.
But the God of the Bible is not only One, but the only possible One.
men effort conservative
A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.
past views understanding
Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.
home men mind
By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the goodness of the world, whither we understand it as created or uncreated, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind.
rejection nihilism natural
The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism — nay, it is identical with nihilism,
fundamentals god-is-there premises
God is therefore unknowable. This is the fundamental premise of the Bible.
men past play
The facile delusions which conceal from us our true situation all amount to this: that we are, or can be, wiser than the wisest men of the past. We are thus induced to play the part, not of attentive and docile listeners, but of impresarios and lion-tamers.