Ralph Lerner (born 1928) is an American political philosopher.
Lerner was born in Chicago, and attended the University of Chicago for his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in political science. [1] His Ph.D. was advised by Leo Strauss. [2] Lerner later joined the Chicago faculty, where he was named the Benjamin Franklin Professorship until 2003, when he was granted emeritus status. [3] In keeping with a long-standing tradition of having fully tenured faculty teach 1st and 2nd year undergraduates at the University of Chicago, Professor Lerner taught a very popular course, Classics of Social and Political Thought, as part of the Social Sciences requirement of the Core Curriculum. Works discussed in this course included Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, The Second Treatise on Civil Government by John Locke, The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. He also taught an advanced course focusing exclusively on Alexis de Tocqueville's seminal work Democracy in America.
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was a Florentine diplomat, author, philosopher, and historian who lived during the Italian Renaissance. He is best known for his political treatise The Prince, written around 1513 but not published until 1532, five years after his death. He has often been called the father of modern political philosophy and political science.
Allan David Bloom was an American philosopher, classicist, and academician. He studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon, and Alexandre Kojève. He subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, Yale University, the École normale supérieure, and the University of Chicago.
Modernity, a topic in the humanities and social sciences, is both a historical period and the ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the Renaissance—in the Age of Reason of 17th-century thought and the 18th-century Enlightenment. Commentators variously consider the era of modernity to have ended by 1930, with World War II in 1945, or as late as the period falling between the 1980s and 1990s; the following era is often referred to as "postmodernity". The term "contemporary history" is also used to refer to the post-1945 timeframe, without assigning it to either the modern or postmodern era.
Leo Strauss was an American scholar of political philosophy. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, Strauss later emigrated from Germany to the United States. He spent much of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books.
Alexandre Kojève was a Russian-born French philosopher and statesman whose philosophical seminars had an immense influence on 20th-century French philosophy, particularly via his integration of Hegelian concepts into twentieth-century continental philosophy.
In philosophy, the terms obscurantism and obscurationism identify and describe the anti-intellectual practices of deliberately presenting information in an abstruse and imprecise manner that limits further inquiry and understanding of a subject. The two historical and intellectual denotations of obscurantism are: (1) the deliberate restriction of knowledge — opposition to the dissemination of knowledge; and (2) deliberate obscurity — a recondite style of writing characterized by deliberate vagueness.
Herbert J. Storing was an American political scientist with broad ranging interests who is best known for reviving the serious study of the American Founding. The constitutional theorist and American politics scholar Walter Berns called him "the most profound man I have encountered in the field of American studies."
Harvey Claflin Mansfield Jr. is an American political philosopher. He was the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he taught since 1962. He has held Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships and has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center. In 2004, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush and delivered the Jefferson Lecture in 2007.
History of Political Philosophy is a textbook edited by American political philosophers Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey. The book is intended primarily to introduce undergraduate students of political science to political philosophy. It is currently in its third edition.
Thomas Lee Pangle, is an American political scientist. He holds the Joe R. Long Chair in Democratic Studies in the Department of Government and is Co-Director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Core Texts and Ideas at the University of Texas at Austin. He has also taught at the University of Toronto and Yale University. He was a student of Leo Strauss.
Clinton Lawrence Rossiter III was an American historian and political scientist at Cornell University (1947-1970) who wrote The American Presidency, among 20 other books, and won both the Bancroft Prize and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for his book Seedtime of the Republic.
Paul A. Cantor was an American literary and media critic. He taught for many years at the University of Virginia, where he was the Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English.
Ernest L. Fortin, A.A. was a professor of theology at Boston College. While engaged in graduate studies in France, he met Allan Bloom, who introduced him to the work of Leo Strauss. Father Fortin worked at the intersection of Athens and Jerusalem.
Muḥsin Sayyid Mahdī al-Mashhadani was an Iraqi-American Islamologist and Arabist. He was a leading authority on Arabian history, philology, and philosophy. His best-known work was the first critical edition of the One Thousand and One Nights.
Rémi Brague is a French historian of philosophy, specializing in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian thought of the Middle Ages. He is professor emeritus of Arabic and religious philosophy at the Sorbonne, and Romano Guardini chair of philosophy (emeritus) at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Walter Fred Berns Jr. was an American constitutional law and political philosophy professor. He was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor emeritus at Georgetown University.
The Gordon J. Laing Award is conferred annually, by the University of Chicago's Board of University Publications, on the faculty author, editor, or translator whose book has brought the greatest distinction to the list of the University of Chicago Press. The first award was given in 1963 and the most recent award was given on April 23, 2024, to Margareta Ingrid Christian, Asst. Professor, Department of Germanic Studies and the College at the University of Chicago.
Gerald Stourzh is an Austrian historian who studies modern history, especially the history of North America, of Austria, of political ideas, of constitutions and especially of human rights. He taught, as a professor, at the Free University of Berlin from 1964 to 1969, and at the University of Vienna from 1969 until 1997, when he became professor emeritus.
Gan Yang is a Chinese political philosopher, "Confucian socialist". He is dean of the Liberal Arts College at Sun Yat-sen University, and was formerly professor of political philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Werner Joseph Dannhauser was an American political philosophy professor and magazine editor. A German-Jewish émigré, he became an expert on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and on Judaism and politics and was a longtime professor of government at Cornell University. A protégé of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, Dannhauser had earlier been a writer and editor at Commentary magazine during the 1960s.