The minutes of Adorno’s aesthetics seminar, held during the summer term of 1932 at the university of Frankfurt, are a rare trace of the early philosophical reception of Walter Benjamin’s opus magnum, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928). Showcasing his critical spirit and pedagogy, Adorno and his students attempt a clarification, as well as a problematization, of this dense and difficult text, touching on such problems as the historicity of ideas or the concept of a ‘constellation’. This document is (...) thus both a valuable aid for reading Benjamin’ Trauerspiel-Buch and an important document for understanding the sources of Adorno’s own philosophy. (shrink)

For the first time, this edition presents Leo Strauss’s Hillel House lecture series on “Jerusalem and Athens.” The three lectures, delivered in the fall of 1950, investigate the agreement, disagreement, and conflict between the biblical and the philosophic “ways of life”: “Philosophy in the full sense is [...] incompatible with the biblical way of life. Philosophy and the Bible are the alternatives or the antagonists in the drama of the human soul. Each of the two antagonists claims to know the (...) truth, namely, the decisive truths, the truths regarding the right way of life. But there can be only one truth, and, hence, conflict is inevitable.”. (shrink)