One of the many contributions of Postmodern Platos is that it raises an old question in the postmodern age: what is the value of philosophy? This essay finds and assesses three distinct arguments for the philosophical life in Zuckert's book, which she associates with Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Strauss. Philosophy, according to all three arguments, represents the highest life for human beings because it realizes our highest capacity, and it secures for our otherwise finite existence a measure of permanence. The arguments diverge on the question of the order and goodness of nature. The case for philosophy has relevance in our postmodern age, as we are driven to ask the question of the best life yet are unequipped to answer it.

This essay calls into question Zuckert's claim in Postmodern Platos that Strauss provides the best contemporary defense of the superiority of the philosophic life against the claims of Nietzsche and Heidegger that it leads to nihilism and despair. For her, Strauss persuasively draws on Plato, read through Alfarabi and Maimonides, to defend this view by showing that the philosopher understands the true ends of human life as a whole which is part of the whole, and thus provides a vision of the noblest, best, and most beautiful. I argue that this claim is implausible, that Strauss's Platonic vision of the ends of human life is obscure, and that even if correct, it does not offer an answer to the question of the relative value of these heterogenous ends, and thus does not demonstrate that the philosophic life is more worth living than any other form of life.

Catherine Zuckert’s Postmodern Platos is built around Leo Strauss’s complex response to Martin Heidegger’s vision of the prephilosophic starting points of philosophy, his phenomenology of human existence. Zuckert accepts too much of this spare phenomenology, and so gives too bleak an account of what philosophy can be. A richer account is available in Plato’s Phaedrus, and is even intimated at crucial points of Strauss’s own writings. The cheerful “first philosophy” built on this erotic phenomenology is truer than Heideggerian bleakness to where philosophy begins in practice, as much for Zuckert as for Strauss and Heidegger: in the experience of the eros of the conversation between teacher and student.

Because Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues is such a monumental book, understanding its own coherence is a daunting task. The dialogue Theaetetus has as its theme the problem of knowledge, and so the part of Plato's Philosophers that deals with the Theaetetus seems a promising place to begin to think through what Zuckert's book means to be as a whole. In the Theaetetus we learn how knowledge, as a story that must begin and unfold for us in time, while necessarily partial, provides indirect, if imperfect, access to the whole and leads to a kind of self- knowledge. Plato makes this self-knowledge, the true goal of philosophy, most fully manifest in the drama of the life of his philosopher, Socrates, to which Plato's Philosophers, in meticulously tracing the dramatic order of the dialogues, means to provide access.

Catherine Zuckert's Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues presents the dramatic order of the dialogues as the narrative arc of Socrates's philosophical investigations. Focusing on the opening chapters of the work, I consider the place in this dramatic order of Socrates's intellectual autobiography in the Phaedo, Symposium, and Apology and his famous turn from the study of the heavens to the study of the human things. I examine in particular Zuckert's account of the problem of the cause or causes of the whole that motivated this turn and the doctrine of the ideas in the inquiry that followed it.

In her magisterial Plato's Philosophers, Catherine Zuckert presents a radically new interpretation of Plato's dialogues. In doing so, she insists we must overcome reading them through the lens of Aristotle, whose influence has obscured the true nature of Plato's philosophy. However, in her works dealing with Aristotle's political science, Zuckert indicates several advantages of his approach to understanding politics. In this article, I explore the reasons why Zuckert finds Aristotle a problematic guide to Plato's philosophy as well as what she sees as the character and benefits of Aristotle's political theory. I conclude by suggesting a possible reconciliation between Zuckert's Aristotle and her Plato, insofar as both the Socrates whom Plato made his hero and Aristotle agree that political communities will rarely direct citizens toward virtue by means of law and that we must instead look to informal means of doing so.

Catherine Zuckert's Machiavelli's Politics offers an unprecedented interpretation of all of Machiavelli's major works. Her interpretation places Machiavelli in his historical context as he understood it and shows Machiavelli seeking a populist alternative in politics. Because her approach and her conclusion have been championed by scholars explicitly opposed to Strauss's interpretation of Machiavelli, she intervenes in the scholarly debates on Machiavelli by drawing seemingly opposed approaches closer together. Strauss acknowledges the importance of Machiavelli's historical situation and understands him as a type of democrat. Nevertheless, in highlighting the functioning of Machiavelli's republic, Zuckert directly challenges Strauss, who, she argues, focuses too narrowly on Machiavelli's war on Christianity to explicate fully Machiavelli's politics. Religion and politics, though, are inextricably linked in Machiavelli's thought, and his treatment of Christianity's ascendency offers insight into his new republicanism. Consideration of Montesquieu's commentary on Machiavelli underscores some of the excesses of the Florentine's political solutions.

Both Zuckert and Strauss take the “surface” of Machiavelli's work as the necessary starting point for their interpretations. Zuckert differs from Strauss, however, with respect to what she takes the surface to be. She focuses more attentively on the literary character of the work, as written or literary, and so is led to a different series of observations and emphases in her interpretation of Machiavelli.

This paper deals with Zuckert's book Machiavelli's Politics. It takes as its point of departure Zuckert's remark that Machiavelli is “surprisingly like Socrates.” The paper begins with a brief discussion of what makes a Socratic philosopher and then charts out the many similarities between Socrates and Machiavelli. Responses are offered to some of the key reservations against terming Machiavelli a Socratic. In particular, the paper points to a less activist and more meditative mode in Machiavelli's writings that allows one to make a more convincing case for a Socratic Machiavelli.

Catherine Zuckert's earliest published work was in the area of Politics and Literature. From the start she saw this work as an important supplement to the dominant forms of political science and American political thought. Her work in this area, especially her manifesto-like journal articles and her first book, Natural Right and the American Imagination, made the case that literature provides insight into both the internal and hidden lives of democratic citizens as well as into the elusive broader regime-character of the political community.

The demonstrated willingness of ten knowledgeable scholars to read and comment on parts of my work is, indeed, a great honor. As Mary Keys's introductory remarks show, the contributors are friends. However, although their comments are generally appreciative, they are by no means uncritical. I thus welcome the opportunity to respond to them.

John Evans announces the question to which all three of these books respond in his title: What is a human? And in the subtitle, he indicates the reason many people today are concerned about the answers offered to that question: what the different answers mean for human rights. As the debates about the fate of a fetus or comatose patient show, definitions of what is human can determine who lives or dies.