Forthcoming Books

More than 220 letters with perhaps Strauss's closer and most brilliant student. Edited by Ronna Burger and Zarko Minkov (Mercer University Press, 2026)

Reading Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato's Apology and Republic, Aristotle's Ethics and Politics (edited E. Patard and Z. Minkov, Penn State University Press, 2027)

Leo Strauss-Paul Kraus correspondence, along with introductory essays and additional materials. This correspondence is of great interest since before Kraus' untimely death, the intellectual exchange between the two was remarkably intense, forthright, and fertile. Kraus, Strauss's brother-in-law, was a prodigious scholar who worked with facility in Arabic and Hebrew texts, but also Aramaic, Akkadian, South Arabic, Ethiopian, Greek, Latin and Persian ones. In turn, Kraus admired his brother-in-law Strauss' extraordinary intuitions: in one letter Kraus remarks that people like him (Kraus) and eminent scholar Shlomo Pines require the gradual deployment of a large apparatus of erudition in order to prop up their inquiries while Strauss, while also most learned, had a magisterial self-sufficiency in referring uncannily only to what is truly necessary, without suffering from what Strauss himself later referred to as intellectual perfumery or obesity. More importantly, as Strauss says in one of the letters included in the sample, Strauss and Kraus would change the face of the history of medieval thought. Decades later, Strauss continued to refer to Kraus' work (see the end of the 1966 Socrates and Aristophanes).

A stunning notebook.

•160 tightly handwritten pages of line-by-line commentary by Strauss.

•Strauss’s description of Plato’s dialogue: “Infinite insights into the nature of philosophy.”

•Notebook formed the basis of “extraordinary seminar” (Stanley Rosen) which Strauss taught in 1954.