Thanks for recycling this thread, I’m really pleased with my original reply. However, I don’t think I could understand the implications thereof as well as I can now. Before philosophy arises, epistemology’s basic question has already been answered, though not necessarily with the right, correct, true answer. There is already a kind of knowledge, something that is considered knowledge: common sense. Logic (the study) is really the analysis and purification of common sense. It seeks to establish the principles of what makes sense to us: to us, plural, because the logos is the word, and the word is common, communal.
As for phenomenology:
“When I was still almost a boy, Husserl explained to me who was at that time a doubting and dubious adherent of the Marlburg school of neo-Kantianism, the characteristic of his own work in about these terms: ‘the Marburg school begins with the roof, while I begin with the foundation.’ This meant that for the school of Marburg the sole task of the fundamental part of philosophy was the theory of scientific experience, the analysis of scientific thought. Husserl however had realized more profoundly than anybody else that the scientific understanding of the world, far from being the perfection of our natural understanding, is derivative from the latter in such as way as to make us oblivious of the very foundations of the scientific understanding: all philosophic understanding must start from our common understanding of the world, from our understanding of the world as sensibly perceived prior to all theorizing.” (Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy”.)
Note that the theory of relativity renders the notion that the sun turns around the earth equally valid to the notion that the earth turns around the sun.
There is much, much more here, but I’ll leave it at this, for now. I think our projected debate on whether Value Ontology is a mystification should probably start from these considerations. Heidegger said something like, those who disregard the Nothing thereby annihilate Being (as they do not contrast Being with the Nothing). Strauss said:
“[Kojève and I] both apparently turned away from Being to Tyranny because we have seen that those who lacked the courage to face the issue of Tyranny, who therefore et humiliter serviebant et superbe dominabantur [“themselves obsequiously subservient while arrogantly lording it over others”] were forced to evade the issue of Being as well, precisely because they did nothing but talk of Being.” (“Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero”, restored final sentence.)
Compare:
“I think Strauss’s preoccupation with the problem of Socrates [who preceded the codification of scientific language by Aristotle] in his later years reflects the conviction that the reconstruction of classical political philosophy requires a reliance upon the moral distinctions as the key to the metaphysical distinctions. Political philosophy–meaning thereby first of all moral philosophy–must become the key to philosophy itself. We have access to theoretical wisdom only by taking the moral distinctions with full seriousness. This is very clear in Strauss’ marvelous eulogy of Churchill:
‘We have no higher duty, and no more pressing duty than to remind ourselves and our students, of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence. For we are supposed to train ourselves and others in seeing things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness…’
‘Seeing things as they are’ refers to the being of things, their metaphysical reality. Yet that being is seen as goodness (‘The Primacy of the Good’). The spectacle of political greatness, human greatness becomes then the ground of philosophy itself, because the philosopher himself looks to this spectacle to contemplate the being of things which become manifest in the spectacle. The great statesman thus brings to light the distinctions which are the ground of theoretical as well as practical philosophy. In Strauss, the moral distinctions become the heart of philosophy. And statesmanship thus itself becomes part of philosophic activity, seen in its wholeness. This is Strauss’s answer to Heidegger as well (as Churchill was the answer to Hitler)–in whom political philosophy finally disappears. If then we see in Heidegger the death of political philosophy (and the death of God, for they are one and the same), in Strauss we may see their resurrection!” (Harry Jaffa, Letter to Professor S.B. Drury, Political Theory, 15 (August, 1987) p. 324, as quoted in Harry Neumann, Liberalism, Introduction.)