Of course, we are not all Straussians, even now, and not just because Leo Strauss is virtually unknown outside the small circle of his followers. (Leo Strauss's name does not even appear in the first five works of philosophical reference we consulted.) Ignorance aside, many readers of Philosophy, along with many other intellectuals, academics, teachers and students, would in any case be appalled to learn that they have any beliefs in common with what is known to-day as neo-Conservatism. But neo-Conservatism is undoubtedly influential in contemporary American foreign policy, and its philosophical roots are Straussian in the very direct sense that many of those driving that policy would regard themselves as having been influenced by Strauss. And only the other day we heard an eminent member of the Conservative Shadow Cabinet in Britain declare that modern conservatism had just two options: to go backwards with Michael Oakeshott's inimitable brand of clubbable nostalgia or brightly forward into the twenty-first century with the neo-Conservatism of Leo Strauss.

To describe Leo Strauss as a neo-Conservative is itself an irony Strauss may have been appreciated. For Strauss was neither neo nor a conservative. He was not neo because he believed that the only way to understand our situation was to go back to the ancients, and to understand them on their own terms. We had to read Plato and Aristotle, and to understand them we had to read the Greek historians, Xenophon above all; to understand modernity we had to read Machiavelli, the first modern, and to understand him we had to read Livy, and so on and so on. And he was not conservative, if by conservative one means having an over-weening commitment to some local history or tradition or being nostalgic for an imaginary past. Strauss believed, as did the ancients, in a universal human nature, and he believed that from this nature followed certain things about the conditions necessary for human flourishing, now and in the future.

Strauss was born in Germany in 1899, into orthodox Jewry. His studies in Germany included a year in Freibourg as a colleague of both Husserl and Heidegger. He left Germany in 1932, and for most of the rest of his life he was a teacher in American universities, notably in Chicago and St John's College Annapolis.

What the ancients and his own experience further taught Strauss was this: ‘Liberal democracy is the only decent and just alternative available to modern man. But he also knew that liberal democracy is exposed to, not to say beleagured by threats, both practical and theoretical. Among those threats is the aspect of modern philosophy that makes it impossible to give rational credence to the principles of the American regime, thereby eroding conviction of the justice of its cause.’ The words are those of Allan Bloom, Strauss's pupil, taken from his obituary of Strauss in 1974, and in Strauss's view as well as in Bloom's the sources of that erosion included as well as Heidegger, Rousseau and Nietzsche.

Strauss himself had a horror of anything except thought. In Bloom's words he ‘was active in no organization, served in no position of authority, and had no ambitions other than to understand and help others who might also be able to do so.’

Nevertheless, despite Strauss's own reticence and his almost complete neglect in the academic world, some of those he helped, and some of their pupils are now influential in the highest political circles in the USA. They too believe in a universal human nature and that it is to be found in Africa and Asia and everywhere else in the world, as much as in the West. They believe that if you have the power to afford the benefits of liberal democracy in places where people have for decades suffered under tyranny or are locked into cycles of ethnic strife and slaughter, you should not turn your head away and pass on the other side of the road, as in different ways old Conservatives and modern cultural relativists might be inclined to do. You should actually intervene, even at cost to yourself.

These beliefs may be wrong, but they could well seem attractive to those seeking a better future for the world as a whole. They are not self-evidently absurd or wicked. They, and their best sources, deserve thought and study. It is time for the writings of Leo Strauss to appear on syllabuses of political philosophy.

A set of eight mini-discourses. 1. The conceivability of the physical world's running in the opposite temporal direction. 2. Augustine's reason for thinking this is not conceivable for the world of the mind. 3. Trying to imagine being a creature that lives atemporally. 4. Memory's need for causal input. 5. Acting in the knowledge that how one acts is strictly determined. 6. The Newcomb problem. 7. The idea that all voluntary action is intended to be remedial. 8. Haunted by the strangeness of the idea of the past qua past.

Though ‘evil’ is often used loosely as merely the generic opposite of ‘morally good’, used precisely it is the worst possible term of opprobrium available. In this essay it is taken as applying primarily to persons, secondarily to conduct; evil deeds must flow from the volition to do something evil. An evil action is one so horrendously bad that no ordinary decent human being can conceive of doing it, and an evil person is one who knowingly wills or orders such actions. Malignant evil—doing evil because it is evil—is not just possible but real, and is one of several kinds of evil delineated. There are incidental discussions of cruelty, Rosenbaum on Explaining Hitler, Baumeister on Evil, and Benn on wickedness.

Nussbaum attempts to undermine the sharp distinction between literature and philosophy by arguing that literary texts (tragic poetry particularly) distinctively appeal to emotion and imagination, that our emotional response itself is cognitive, and that Aristotle thought so too. I argue that emotional response is not cognitive but presupposes cognition. Aristotle argued that we learn from the mimesis of action delineated in the plot, not from our emotional response. The distinctions between emotional and intellectual writing, poetry and prose, literature and philosophy, the imaginative and the unimaginative do not cut along the same lines. That between literature and philosophy is not hard and fast: philosophy can be dramatic (eg Plato's dialogues) and drama can be philosophical (eg some of Shakespeare's plays), but whether either is emotional or not, or written in poetry or prose, are other questions.

The idea of an original contract is, ironically, inherently narrative in form; although tautological in essence, it nevertheless portrays events occurring in sequence. In response to Filmer's provocations that the idea of an original contract lacks historical veracity, Locke tries and repeatedly fails to establish a direct historical substantiation of his position in the early chapters of the Second Treatise. The most important of these various miscalculations concern the role of consent in his account of the origins of government, the tension between logical and historical evidence in describing the development of prerogative in the English monarchy, and the inescapable conclusion that conquest and not consent was the likely origin of most states. In these places, the Locke's deductive argument is forced to slow, hesitate, and change direction. The general concept of individual transgression, as it emerges from Locke's depiction of the state of nature, war, and slevery, later transforms itself into the basis of governmental injustice and tyranny. These, in turn, work to generate a sort of secondary and “political” state of nature in which now “historical” people, by means of concrete acts of resistance and revolution, enact the hypotheses of the consensual theory in their own actual time and place.

The idea of an original contract is, ironically, inherently narrative in form; although tautological in essence, it nevertheless portrays events occurring in sequence. In response to Filmer's provocations that the idea of an original contract lacks historical veracity. Locke tries and repeatedly fails to establish a direct historical substantiation of his position in the early chapters of the Second Treatise. The most important of these various miscalculations concern the role of consent in his account of the origins of government, the tension between logical and historical evidence in describing the development of prerogative in the English monarchy, and the inescapable conclusion that conquest and not consent was the likely origin of most states. In these places, the Locke's deductive argument is forced to slow, hesitate, and change direction. The general concept of individual transgression, as it emerges from Locke's depiction of the state of nature, war, and slavery, later transforms itself into the basis of governmental injustice and tyranny. These, in turn, work to generate a sort of secondary and “political” state of nature in which a now “historical” people, by means of concrete acts of resistance and revolution, enact the hypothesis of the consensual theory in their own actual time and place.

Frank Ebersole's extraordinary investigations of certain key philosophical ideas behind problems in epistemology and metaphysics are the subject of this article-review. I have resisted providing what many readers will expect me to provide, namely, a critical examination of his philosophical methodology. I do question his unwilligness to say why his investigations only yield I negative results, and I do have something to say about classifying him as an ordinary language philosopher. However, my main focus is on trying to engage critically with what he actually does in his work. To this end, I provide a narrative of the investigation he carries out into the possibility of comparing the objects of perception and dreams, and I cite other works of his in support of my understanding of that investigation. Although one of his lengthiest essays seems to be devoted to an anticipation of an objection to his approach, I explain why even there he is not concerned with the question of why he always seems to get negative results. After suggesting why some of his later essays seem to be so hard to read, I conclude by saying something about what I take to be his achievement.

In this paper, I critically discuss a number of arguments made by John Kekes, in a recent article, against the claim that those of us who are relatively affluent ought to do something for those living in absolute poverty in developing countries. There are, I argue, a variety of problems with Kekes' arguments, but one common thread stems from Kekes' failure to take account of the empirical research that has been conducted on the issues which he discusses.

‘Reply to Horton’ gives four reasons why Horton's attack on Kekes' earlier article fails. In particular Horton fails to make the case that we have a moral obligation to do more than we already do towards relieving poverty through the taxes we already pay.