Comment by Naga

Leo Strauss wrote "Persecution and the Art of Writing" where he argued, among other things, that many ancient and early-modern writers would hide their true beliefs in their works underneath all of the publicly acceptable stuff. This has implications for how we read those texts now: if you're reading a summary, did the summarizer pick up on the esoteric meanings? Did the translator? If we stick to what was said in the text, we're missing what the writer really said. If Hume retracted essays, the Straussian reading of this would be that that's what he probably truly believed, or at least closer to that. Is this something the HN might care about? Not sure, but that's some of the implied context here.