Fall 2016 Volume 43 Issue 1 1 Tributes to Hilail Gildin: Timothy W. Burns, Marco Andreacchio, Javier Berzal de Dios, Ann Hartle, David Lewis Schaefer & John F. Wilson Articles: 29 Giorgi Areshidze Does Toleration Require Religious Skepticism? An Examination of Locke’s Letters on Toleration and Essay concerning Human Understanding 57 Robert P. Kraynak Nietzsche, Tocqueville, and Maritain: On the Secularization of Religion as the Source of Modern Democracy 91 Benjamin Lorch Maimonides on Prophecy and the Moral Law 111 Christopher Scott McClure Sculpting Modernity: Machiavelli and Michelangelo’s David Book Reviews: 125 Allan Arkush The Love of God: Divine Gift, Human Gratitude, and Mutual Faithfulness in Judaism by Jon D. Levenson 129 D. N. Byrne The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence by David Bromwich 133 Christopher Colmo Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy by Aishwary Kumar 139 Alexander Duff Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting by Richard L. Velkley 145 David Foster Two Treatises of Government by John Locke, edited, with an introduction and notes, by Lee Ward 153 Martha Rice Martini Thomas More: Why Patron of Statesmen?, edited by Travis Curtright 159 Alexander Orwin Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy by Joshua Parens 163 Rene Paddags Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy, edited by Ewa Atanassow and Richard Boyd 169 Rene Paddags The Free Animal: Rousseau on Free Will and Human Nature by Lee MacLean 175 Jonathan W. Pidluzny Terrorism Unjustified: The Use and Misuse of Political Violence by Vicente Medina 183 Ahmed Ali Siddiqi Alfarabi: The Political Writings, Volume II, edited by Charles E. Butterworth 189 Vickie B. Sullivan Machiavelli’s Legacy: “The Prince” after Five Hundred Years, edited by Timothy Fuller ©2016 Interpretation, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the contents may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. ISSN 0020-9635 Editor-in-Chief Timothy W. Burns, Baylor University General Editors Charles E. Butterworth • Timothy W. Burns General Editors (Late) Howard B. White (d. 1974) • Robert Horwitz (d. 1987) Seth G. Benardete (d. 2001) • Leonard Grey (d. 2009) • Hilail Gildin (d. 2015) Consulting Editors Christopher Bruell • David Lowenthal • Harvey C. Mansfield • Thomas L. Pangle • Ellis Sandoz • Kenneth W. Thompson Consulting Editors (Late) Leo Strauss (d. 1973) • Arnaldo Momigliano (d. 1987) • Michael Oakeshott (d. 1990) • John Hallowell (d. 1992) • Ernest L. Fortin (d. 2002) • Muhsin Mahdi (d. 2007) • Joseph Cropsey (d. 2012) • Harry V. Jaffa (d. 2015) International Editors Terence E. Marshall • Heinrich Meier Editors Peter Ahrensdorf • Wayne Ambler • Marco Andreacchio • Maurice Auerbach • Robert Bartlett • Fred Baumann • Eric Buzzetti • Susan Collins • Patrick Coby • Erik Dempsey • Elizabeth C’de Baca Eastman • Edward J. Erler • Maureen Feder-Marcus • Robert Goldberg • L. Joseph Hebert • Pamela K. Jensen • Hannes Kerber • Mark J. Lutz • Daniel Ian Mark • Ken Masugi • Carol L. McNamara • Will Morrisey • Amy Nendza • Charles T. Rubin • Leslie G. Rubin • Thomas Schneider • Susan Meld Shell • Geoffrey T. Sigalet • Nicholas Starr • Devin Stauffer • Bradford P. Wilson • Cameron Wybrow • Martin D. Yaffe • Catherine H. Zuckert • Michael P. Zuckert Copy Editor Les Harris Designer Sarah Teutschel Inquiries Interpretation, A Journal of Political Philosophy Department of Political Science Baylor University 1 Bear Place, 97276 Waco, TX 76798 email [email protected] Book Review: Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy 139 Richard L. Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 208 pp., $52.00. Alexander Duff College of the Holy Cross [email protected] Emil Fackenheim, the great twentieth-century Jewish philosopher, once remarked that the time would come when the name Martin Heidegger would be most known for having made the thought of Leo Strauss possible. Should that ever be the case, Richard Velkley’s wonderful study Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy will be reckoned partially responsible. In this work, Velkley explores the possibility that “Strauss’s reflection on the basic philosophic questions has a radicality comparable to Heidegger’s” (2). Strauss’s contribution to the revival of political theory has to some extent obscured his understanding of political philosophy as first philosophy, the designation long held by metaphysics. Treating political philosophy as first philosophy is warranted because the opinions with which philosophy begins in its quest to replace opinion with knowledge are decisively formed by the law. Because the law, in turn, is shaped by the political regime, understanding the political part of the whole was central to understanding the whole as such. Velkley brings this chief philosophic intention of Strauss’s work into clear focus by situating it in dialogical argument with the work of the man Strauss regarded as the greatest thinker of the twentieth century: Martin Heidegger. Velkley writes in part to correct an overly “political” understanding of Strauss that sees him as proceeding from intuitions circulating in com- mon sense or the cave of political life which are then distilled to express the natural law. Accompanying such an opinion of Strauss is the view that his main objection to Heidegger was the latter’s “relativism” and its corrosive © 2016 Interpretation, Inc. 140 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 43 / Issue 1 political effects. Far more frequent than his remarks condemning Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialists, Velkley notes, are Strauss’s qualified expressions of philosophic sympathy or admiration. As is appropriate to any serious discussion of these figures, Velkley’s purpose is not “an external comparison of two authors, nor is it to weigh influences” (5). Instead, to the tremendous reward of his reader, he enters into the shared matter of thinking. The arc of the book may be sketched very generally as clarifying the philo- sophic ground shared by Heidegger and Strauss, then describing the features of that ground which suggest their different paths of thought. Velkley appropri- ately treats Nietzsche at several points, owing to his influence on the way both Strauss and Heidegger formulated their philosophical situation. They followed Nietzsche in articulating the need for a return to the Greeks to comprehend and ameliorate our present philosophical distress. At a minimum, such a need implies a relationship of obscurity between our philosophic origins and what followed, hence Velkley’s subtitle, “on original forgetting.” Heidegger comes to understand our oblivion as grounded in the self- withdrawal and self-concealment of Being. Philosophy therefore interrogates the anguished experience of the abandonment and its remainder as a per- plexing question. The pursuit of this question, though it is always endeavored through the human, can never be properly apprehended in a merely anthro- pological way. Indeed, for this reason the character of political life is forever resistant to clarification. For Strauss, however, the sources of oblivion derive from the “duality of the human as both political and transpolitical” (15). What might appear as a tradition, upon inspection, is better comprehended as an ongoing quarrel or argument concerning fundamental problems. That is, the obscurity derives less from a necessary falling or failure of expression on the part of the philosopher, and more from a choice by philosophers to compose their public speech with artful discretion. Thus, in recovering the fundamental problems from the so-called philosophic tradition, Strauss sug- gests these problems have the same status as “opinion” in the Socratic sense, that is, that from which a dialectical ascent enabling the apprehension of the genuine problems as problems must be made. The extent of Strauss’s kinship with Heidegger comes through most plainly in his correspondence with several of Heidegger’s most brilliant students: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Löwith, Jacob Klein. At numerous points, Strauss defends Heidegger’s position against their criticisms of him. That perhaps raises a question: given Strauss’s attentiveness to his own manner of writing, why do his publications present a somewhat more explicitly critical (while never simply critical) stance toward Heidegger? The remarkable discussion of Heidegger in Book Review: Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy 141 What Is Political Philosophy?, for example, mentions 1933. Surely this is not merely obfuscation or dissembling on Strauss’s part; the political critique does, however, indicate something of the surface of Strauss’s thoughts on Heidegger. The record of Strauss’s correspondence gives heft to Strauss’s statement, in a late publication that discusses Heidegger quite openly, that he is of the view that none of Heidegger’s “critics and none of his followers” has sufficiently under- stood him. Velkley’s book gets even more exciting the closer Strauss comes to Hei- degger, as when Strauss revisits Heidegger’s work in the 1950s and ’60s, with his reading of Heidegger’s late publications, Holzwege, Was Heißt Denken, and the Nietzsche volumes. The true force of Strauss’s remark that Hei- degger’s disinterment of the tradition required the careful inspection of its roots—that Heidegger required the reexamination of the very