Strauss on Husserl

"The decisive point in Husserl is the critique of modern science in the light of genuine science, that is to say, Platonic-Aristotelian. His work can only be understood in the light of the enormous difficulties in which Platonic-Aristotelian culminated, namely, the problem of nous. Considering the enormous difficulties of understanding de anima iii.5, Husserl's egological foundation of the ontologies is at least excusable."

Letter to Voegelin, October 11, 1943

"On the question of modern philosophy and progress: modern philosophy (or science) is originally the attempt to replace the allegedly or really inadequate classical (and that means, at the same time, medieval) philosophy (or science) by the correct philosophy. The inadequacy was this: the achieved science of antiquity (Plato and Aristotle) was not capable of giving an account of certain natural phenomena (of the external world) which on its own terms it had to give an account of. The idea arose that the materialistic physics, displaced by classical philosophy, that is, above all by the Aristotelian physics, offered an unheard of expansion of the possibilities of knowledge. But: one had learned from Plato-Aristotle that a materialistic physics cannot understand itself, the possibility of knowledge (noein). Thus the task: first to secure the possibility of knowledge, in order then to be able to proceed with mechanistic physics, and so to be able to understand the universe. That is the meaning of Descartes Meditations, of the fundamental book of modern philosophy."

Letter to Lowith, August 20, 1946