Adorisio, Chiara
Senior Fellow: October 2023–February 2024
Research Project: The Art and Science of Philosophising: Jewish Modern and Pre-Modern Sources of Leo Strauss’s Scepticism
Thanks to new discoveries in physics and quantum mechanics, we know that philosophy and physics are equally obligated to tend to the so-called truth, to the knowledge or comprehension of what we call “reality” (even though we are aware that this knowledge can be ever-changing and never complete). For physicists, as for philosophers, a certain sceptical attitude towards reality seems to be the only method that will ever enable us to rethink reality and to change the language in which we speak of it. Leo Strauss (1899–1973)—one of the most important German-Jewish philosophers of the epoch of the (so-called crisis of the) Weimar Republic—described scientific scepticism as the basis of philosophy, as a rigorous science, and as a method that had already been used by the philosophers of the past, from antiquity to medieval and early modern times.
Central to the topic of this project is a complete examination of scepticism in Strauss’s work. To achieve this, it will systematically examine and reconstruct all the modern, pre-modern, and ancient influences that shaped his scepticism, thereby particularly considering his Jewish sources, which are generally the most neglected by Strauss scholars. This project intends to reconstruct Strauss’s scepticism in its various aspects both as a method of knowledge and a way of living.
Chiara Adorisio is Associate Professor of Philosophical Anthropology at the Sapienza University of Rome.