Meier demonstrates that in his quest to understand the nature of thinking, Strauss was involved in a dialogue with Heidegger that was more fundamental and fascinating than is usually thought. For Strauss, the philosophical act is groundless, which resonates with Heidegger’s own attempt to recover the Greeks as well as his phenomenology of temporality. Meier even suggests that Strauss may have been sympathetic with Heidegger’s substitution of death for God (as the horizon of an atheistic philosophy), although this goes against the grain of Strauss’s most trenchant criticisms of Heidegger. Strauss always thought that Heidegger confused philosophy with theology by framing philosophy with an existential rhetoric that barely conceals its genealogy in secularize Protestant theology.

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