Commentary - Timothy W. Burns: Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education. (New York: State University of New York Press, 2021. Pp. 201.)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his dense and concise book, Burns explores Strauss's texts on liberal education in order to reflect on the relevance of such education for contemporary liberal democracies.The apparent narrowness of the subject matter and sources consulted in Burns's book is misleading.It presents in a clear and straightforward manner some of the most essential aspects of Strauss's thought.As the numerous and very rich footnotes attest, Burns has a deep and firsthand knowledge of Strauss's work.His short study can be compared favorably with the best studies published on Strauss in the last twenty years.He seeks to understand Strauss on his own terms by means of an internal analysis, but one can see that he has benefited from the advances in research on the genesis and development of Strauss's thought.He perceives very well how a deep understanding of Strauss requires one to resituate him in his debate with the tradition of German philosophy and, in particular, with Heidegger.Therefore, one of the most important contributions of this book is the attempt to clarify the terms of this debate.My first question is about the complex relationship between Heidegger and Strauss.Burns shows very well the challenge that Heidegger's thought could represent for a philosopher wanting to defend a decent political regime.Strauss has perceived and analyzed the ambiguities and the political background of decisionism and radical historicism present in Sein und Zeit.Like his friend Karl Löwith, he understood that such decisionism prepared the German catastrophe and that Heidegger was an accomplice in the advent of National Socialism."German Nihilism" 6 describes in depth the moral climate of the German Conservative Revolution and how the promoters of that revolution became allies in Hitler's takeover of power.In crucial passages, Burns takes up Strauss's criticisms of Heideggerian existentialism (13-15, 25n10, 47-51, 89n30, 112-13, 118, 130n19, 138-39, 162-63) and his presentation of these criticisms is profound and accurate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.026 | 0.037 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.010 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".