Philosophy as Rigorous Science, Skepticism and Anti-skepticism in Leo Strauss’s Writings.

Due to an initial, very partial study and evaluation of the influence of Strauss’s philosophical sources on his entire work by his contemporaries, scholars, for several decades, have thought of Strauss only as the political philosopher who claimed that political philosophy in modern times was undergoing a fatal crisis and attributed this crisis to radical historicism in contemporary philosophy or to Weber’s idea of science as value-free. More recently, scholars have also thought of Strauss as the pessimist alter-ego of Hannah Arendt, who, though disillusioned with modern Western philosophical tradition, had still been convinced that philosophy and politics are irreconcilable, unless the latter is considered as the necessary framework for the former (since the philosopher cannot be completely free within the polis).