About Us

The aim of the foundation is to continue and expand the study and dissemination of Leo Strauss’s work and thought (as promoted by the Leo Strauss Center). Strauss’s student Richard Kennington wrote in 1982 that “the interpretation of what Strauss means and thought will probably begin in, say, ten or fifteen years, and may take another fifty years before the issues become genuinely clear.” As Strauss's student Warren Winiarski might have said, Kennington's estimate places us near the end of the fermentation period. While the foundation will aim to make Strauss’s inquiries and arguments accessible to a broader audience, it will not inscribe the thinker into a narrowly political context. Its goal is the preservation and investigation of Strauss’s ideas, and it will support rigorous philosophical and philological work on the substantive and interpretive questions articulated by Strauss.

• Education and training: organizing seminars, online and in-person lectures, reading groups, and conferences (for example, a conference on Liberalism Ancient and Modern, which combines very well Strauss’s non-ideological timeliness with his inquiry into the permanent philosophical problems)
• Archival work: the digitization, transcription, annotation of the Strauss papers, ranging from detailed notes to marginalia to correspondence (including extensive unpublished materials on Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed and "Eight Chapters," Joseph Albo's Ikkarim, Shakespeare, Pascal, Spinoza, Lessing, Kierkegaard, Plato's Statesman, the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers, and Aristotle’s Physics); any further maintenance, commentary, and publication related to the course transcripts project.
• Transcribe and explicate the annotations in the books Strauss owned and left behind.
• Publications: the creation of a Strauss journal; the support of other publications, such commentaries, translations.
• Support of visiting fellows (short-term as well as year-long), and the maintenance of a broader network (related to the reading groups, seminars, and lectures mentioned above).