UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

(H/B) LEO STRAUSS ON MAIMONIDES
Leo Strauss is widely recognized as one of the foremost interpreters of Maimonides. His studies of the medieval Jewish philosopher led to his rediscovery of esotericism and deepened his sense that the tension between reason and revelation was central to modern political thought. His writings throughout the twentieth century were chiefly responsible for restoring Maimonides as a philosophical thinker of the first rank. Yet, to appreciate the extent of Strauss' contribution to the scholarship on Maimonides, one has traditionally had to seek ...
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(H/B) LEO STRAUSS ON MOSED MENDELSSOHN
Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) was the leading Jewish thinker of the German Enlightenment and the founder of modern Jewish philosophy. His writings, especially his attempt during the Pantheism Controversy to defend the philosophical legacies of Spinoza and Leibniz against F. H. Jacobi's philosophy of faith, captured the attention of a young Leo Strauss and played a critical role in the development of his thought on one of the fundamental themes of his life's work: the conflicting demands of reason and revelation. "Leo Strauss on Moses Mendels...
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(P/B) SOCRATES AND ARISTOPHANES

(P/B) SHAKESPEARE AND THE LAW
William Shakespeare is inextricably linked with the law. Legal documents make up most of the records we have of his life, and trials, lawsuits, and legal terms permeate his plays. Gathering an extraordinary team of literary and legal scholars, philosophers, and even sitting judges, Shakespeare and the Law demonstrates that Shakespeare's thinking about legal concepts and legal practice points to a deep and sometimes vexed engagement with the law's technical workings, its underlying premises, and its social effects. The book's opening essays...
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(P/B) WHAT IS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

(P/B) THOUGHTS ON MACHIAVELLI
Leo Strauss argued that the most visible fact about Machiavelli's doctrine is also the most useful one: Machiavelli seems to be a teacher of wickedness. Strauss sought to incorporate this idea in his interpretation without permitting it to overwhelm or exhaust his exegesis of The Prince and the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy. "We are in sympathy," he writes, "with the simple opinion about Machiavelli [namely, the wickedness of his teaching], not only because it is wholesome, but above all because a failure to take that opinion s...
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THE ARGUMENT AND THE ACTION OF PLATO'S LAWS (P/B)
Professor Strauss completed this study, his last major work, in the autumn of 1971, two years before his death. He wrote it with a lifetime of reflection on Plato behind him, and with a particular interest in the Laws that cannot have become intense more recently than the winter of 1959, when he gave a seminar on the dialogue at the University of Chicago. As the reader will perceive, this book acquires much of its inner character from its being the work of a scholar whose acquaintance with the Platonic corpus had ripened to familiarity, ju...
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(P/B) PERSECUTION AND THE ART OF WRITING
The essays collected in Persecution and the Art of Writing all deal with one problem - the relation between philosophy and politics. Here, Strauss sets forth the thesis that many philosophers, especially political philosophers, have reacted to the threat of persecution by disguising their most controversial and heterodox ideas. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) ON PLATO'S "SYMPOSIUM"
The first major piece of unpublished work by Leo Strauss to appear in more than 30 years, this volume offers the public the unprecedented experience of encountering this renowned scholar as his students did. Given as a course in autumn 1959 under the title "Plato's Political Philosophy" these provocative lectures - until now, never published, but instead passed down from one generation of students to the next - show Strauss at his subtle and insightful best. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) THE REBIRTH OF CLASSICAL POLITICAL RATIONALISM
This concise and accessible introduction to Strauss's thought provides, for wider audience, a bridge to his more complex theoretical work. Editor Pangle has gathered five of Strauss's previously unpublished lectures and five hard-to-find published writings and has arranged them so as to demonstrate the systematic progression of the major themes that underlay Strauss's mature work. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) THE TRUTH IN PAINTING
The four essays in this volume constitute Derrida's most explicit and sustained reflection on the art work as pictorial artifact, a reflection partly by way of philosophical aesthetics (Kant, Heidegger), partly by way of a commentary on art works and art scholarship (Van Gogh, Adami, Titus-Carmel). The illustrations are excellent, and the translators, who clearly see their work as both a rendering and a transformation, add yet another dimension to this richly layered composition. Indispensable to collections emphasizing art criticism and a...
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(P/B) THE PHILOSOPHY OF IMPROVISATION
Improvisation is usually either lionized as an ecstatic experience of being in the moment or disparaged as the thoughtless recycling of cliches. Eschewing both of these orthodoxies, "The Philosophy of Improvisation" ranges across the arts - from music to theater, dance to comedy - and considers the improvised dimension of philosophy itself in order to elaborate an innovative concept of improvisation. Gary Peters turns to many of the major thinkers within continental philosophy - including Heidegger, Nietzsche, Adorno, Kant, Benjamin, and D...
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(P/B) DEMON LOVERS
On September 20, 1587, Walpurga Hausm?nnin of Dillingen in southern Germany was burned at the stake as a witch. Although she had confessed to committing a long list of maleficia (deeds of harmful magic), including killing forty - one infants and two mothers in labor, her evil career allegedly began with just one heinous act - sex with a demon. Fornication with demons was a major theme of her trial record, which detailed an almost continuous orgy of sexual excess with her diabolical paramour Federlin "in many divers places... even in the st...
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(P/B) CRITICAL TEACHING AND EVERYDAY LIFE
In this unique book on education, Shor develops teaching theory side-by-side with a political analysis of schooling. Drawing on the work of Paulo Freire, he offers the first practical and theoretical guide to Freirean methods for American classrooms. Central to his method is a commitment to learning through dialogue and to exploring themes from everyday life. He poses alienation and mass culture as key obstacles to learning, and establishes critical literacy as a foundation for studying any subject. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) EMPOWERING EDUCATION
Ira Shor is a pioneer in the field of critical education who for over twenty years has been experimenting with learning methods. His work creatively adapts the ideas of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire for North American classrooms. In Empowering Education Shor offers a comprehensive theory and practice for critical pedagogy. For Shor, empowering education is a student-centered, critical and democratic pedagogy for studying any subject matter and for self and social change. It takes shape as a dialogue in which teachers and students mutuall...
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(P/B) MATHEMATICS AND THE UNEXPECTED
In this brief, elegant treatise, assessable to anyone who likes to think, Ivar Ekelund explains some philosophical implications of recent mathematics. He examines randomness, the geometry involved in making predictions, and why general trends are easy to project (it will snow in January) but particulars are practically impossible (it will snow from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. on the 21st). (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) SHAMANISM, COLONIALISM AND THE WILD MAN
Working with the image of the Indian shaman as Wild Man, Taussig reveals not the magic of the shaman but that of the politicizing fictions creating the effect of the real. "This extraordinary book... will encourage ever more critical and creative explorations." -Fernando Coronil, [I]American Journal of Sociology[/I] "Taussig has brought a formidable collection of data from arcane literary, journalistic, and biographical sources to bear on... questions of evil, torture, and politically institutionalized hatred and terror. His intent is la...
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(P/B) THE YOUNG LIONS
The Young Lions is a vivid and classic novel that portrays the experiences of ordinary soldiers fighting World War II. Told from the points of view of a perceptive young Nazi, a jaded American film producer, and a shy Jewish boy just married to the love of his life, Shaw conveys, as no other novelist has since, the scope, confusion, and complexity of war. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) COSMOPOLIS
In the seventeenth century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next three hundred years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavor, this vision perpetuated a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human nature and society could be fitted into precise and manageable rational categories. Stephen Toulmin confronts that agenda - its illusions and its consequences for our present and f...
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(P/B) TEARS AND SAINTS
By the mid-1930s, Emil Cioran was already known as a leader of a new generation of politically committed Romanian intellectuals. Researching another, more radical book, Cioran was spending hours in a library poring over the lives of saints. As a modern hagiographer, Cioran "dreamt" himself "the chronicler of these saints' falls between heaven and earth, the intimate knower of the ardors in their hearts, the historian of God's insomniacs." Inspired by Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, Cioran "searched for the origin of tears." He asked hims...
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