This chapter presents the reception of Leo Strauss by analytic philosophers after Strauss’s emigration to the United States. It gives a brief survey of the polemics against Strauss and his school by analytic philosophers, which aided in the self-constitution of analytic philosophy as a rival school of thought in philosophy. But most of the chapter is devoted to recovering the significance and influence of a criticism of Strauss by Ernest Nagel. The chapter argues that this response is of intrinsic interest (...) because it involves the relationship between science and values. Nagel’s response was foundational to Felix Oppenheim’s political philosophy or what Oppenheim called his project of ‘conceptual reconstruction.’ Lurking in Oppenheim’s response to Strauss are questions about the role of the principle of sufficient reason in philosophy. Rge chapter argues that an opportunity was missed to clarify questions pertaining to the inductive risk of philosophy more than a half century before these issues became fashionable again. (shrink)

Abstract Following Temkin's Inequality I take my point of departure in an individualistic approach according to which a situation is bad in respect of inequality to the extent individuals in it have egalitarian complaints. After having criticised some of Temkin's notions of inequality, I argue that there are two proper egalitarian conceptions, the Equal Share Conception and the Place Conception. The first concerns how much welfare an individual can claim to have in order to have what she should have in (...) virtue of equality. The second concerns an individual's egalitarian complaint in so far as it depends on her place in a situation's distribution of welfare. I argue that the first conception can be employed in a defence of Telic Egalitarianism against Derek Parfit's Levelling Down Objection and that the second one can explain why this objection may seem so convincing. I also argue that Telic Egalitarianism, understood according to the first conception, in one respect is preferable to Parfit's Priority View. (shrink)

L'étude des rapports sociaux entre les hommes permet de dégager un invariant structurel des sociétés avec accumulation : le fait de la domination économico-socio-politique d'un petit nombre parmi les hommes sur le plus grand nombre. Qu'il s'agisse du couple maître-esclave dans la société grecque, seigneur-serf dans la société féodale ou dominant-dominé dans la société capitaliste, le rapport reste le même : quelques-uns seulement parmi les hommes ont pouvoir sur la masse. La société postindustrielle n'échappe pas à la règle. Elle réitère (...) le même modèle de rapports sociaux sous la forme de la domination d'une élite d'intellectuels sur une masse anonyme.The fact of an economic, social and political domination of a minority over the majority is an invariant of all societies of accumulation in the history of mankind. Wether it be the master and slave couple in the Greek City, the Lord and Serf duality in the Feudal society or the "dominant-dominé" division of the capitalist society, the relationship is built on the same pattern: only a few men have power over the mass. The postindustrial or "programmed" society duplicates the same pattern of the domination of an Elite of Intellectuals over an anonymous mass. (shrink)