``Tue. 17 Apr 2001
Michael Friedman has a book on the Davos debate, The Parting of the Ways, Pretty interesting, also talking about the revolutionary socialist roots of logical positivism (!) (Carnap was also at Davos).
I like Gombo, say what you will. He was a great scholar, though very formalistic. --jks''
So, thank you Justin. I finally got around to getting Friedman's book and just finished it two nights ago. If anyone is interested it is excellent, although a little thin on Heidegger.
I also realized I had already tried one of Friedman's books on the philosophical foundations of relativity. But the math was beyond me so I had put it away. I'll probably dig it up again and go through the later chapters with the discussion sections.
But the reason for going to find the Davos debate book was to try to fill in more of the intellectual climate that hatched Leo Strauss! I think I have a better handle on that now, actually. It has to do with the Weimar era foundation disputes over modernity and their counter-reactions which are partly contained in Cassirer, Carnap, and Heidegger lectures at Davos. I don't think Strauss understood these foundational disputes at the same level (or in the same way), but he must have felt them---particular the deep equivocations over Kant's Critique of Judgment, which is touched upon in Friedman's book.
I had to find what Strauss had written about Cassirer's Myth of State and did manage to dig it up out of Social Research a journal from 1947 (SR, v14, 125p)---which I found in the bibliography of yet another essayist (Haenel) on Cassirer---which to turn full circle comes from an exchange with Michael Pollak...
Chuck Grimes