Cropsey on natural slavery Cropsey wore street clothes and changed into a blue pinstripe suit in his office before giving his lectures.  He kept his socks in the bottom drawer of his desk.  On top of his steel filing cabinet , which contained Leo Strauss' private papers,  was an 18th Century leather bound folio volume from Pierre Bayle's  Dictionary , which contained Leo Strauss' private papers.  I don't think these smelled of socks.  The Bayle volume contained Bayle's article on Spinoza.  Cropsey espoused his own brand of scepticism, so the Bayle was not surprising, nor was his reluctance to let non-Straussians peruse Strauss' correspondence.  Cropsey had us read Aristotle's  Politics , Plato's  Meno , and  Heidegger's Basic Problems of Phenomenology . The translation we used for Aristotle's  Politics  was translated by Straussian Carnes Lord--we called it the Lord edition.  One of the essay questions Cropsey set ...

If you really want to understand the University of Chicago and its Great Books program, you must first get through a few preliminaries, including, (1) getting to Hyde Park--the once affluent commuter community on the south side of Chicago; (2) learning the language of town and gown; (3) finding a place to live; and (4) hearing from Ford and learning about "umbrella coverage", which has nothing whatever to do with Ford or insurance. Getting there I have never owned a car, so have taken the bus, or subway, or elevated, or electric light rail--or even real trains--all of my life.  For those who enjoyed Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , and actually took on board the idea that almost as important as reaching a destination is your journey (physically and spiritually) to get there, taking slower forms of public transportation has a number of side benefits. Oh, there's the interesting people you see (after all, it takes all kinds--as we have all been...