In this lecture, I walk through Leo Strauss’s unpublished lecture on Plato’s Euthyphro, as a prelude to offering a careful, line-by-line interpretation of the dialogue which will soon follow.
One might object to paying such close attention to an unpublished writing, but Strauss considered including a refurbished version of the lecture, in a proposed, but then rescinded collection that would have been entitled Jerusalem and Athens; it would have included his famous essay by that title, then his essay on Genesis to make a case for the Biblical perspective and then the essay on the Euthyphro would have been meant to make the case for the philosophical perspective. In Strauss’s view, these are the only two sources from which a serious human being can take guidance, and these two sources admit of no synthesis.
Furthermore, a recent volume came that published Strauss’s 1948 notebook on Plato’s Euthyphro, which includes a Stephanus page by Stephanus page commentary on the dialogue. I note a few of the significant differences in interpretation between the two. I also profited from reading Wayne Ambler’s essay on Strauss, and from reading Svetozar Minkov’s and Hannes Kerber’s reflections included in the Strauss notebook volume.
Also, if you can’t get enough Strauss and Euthyphro content, a conference dedicated to the same matters I discussed above took place a couple of years ago.
Other MCC posts on Strauss:
Kojeve vs. Strauss on the Universal and Homogeneous State
Leo Strauss on Relativism (with Phocaean)
