His interpretations of the thought of the American Founding, and of its philosophic foundations in Locke and Montesquieu, prepares the ground for his exposition of Nietzsche as the most radical critic of modern rationalism. These studies argue for the significance, within modernity, of a continued if eclipsed commitment to the life of understanding pursued for its own sake. At the same time, Pangle diagnoses the costs and the benefits—for civic virtue as well as for the life of the mind—of the diminished public or civic status of the moral and intellectual virtues in modern republicanism. Pangle is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and has won Guggenheim, Killam-Canada Council, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, and four National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. He has been awarded The Benton Bowl at Yale University (for contribution to education in politics) and the Robert Foster Cherry Great Teacher of the World Prize, Baylor University. In 2007 he delivered, at the invitation of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, the Werner Heisenberg Lecture. A Festschrift in his honor was published as: Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle. Edited by Timothy Burns. Lexington Books, 2010. Pangle's conception of philosophy Inspired and guided by Leo Strauss's revival of Platonic political philosophy, Pangle's work has as its unifying aim the clarification and defense of the original Socratic conception of political philosophy. In the manner that Pangle understands it, the Socratic conception is controversial. What the Socratic conception of political theory amounts to, Pangle contends, is a lifelong vindication, through conversational refutations that purify common sense notions of justice and nobility, of self-knowledge and of inquiry into the nature of things as the highest and supremely fulfilling dimension of human existence. This notion of the true human good, as the good that makes all relativistic and egalitarian outlooks appear impoverished, obviously contradicts or directly clashes with what most people today are told and believe is the life they ought to lead. Pangle asserts that the awakened philosophic life is the only truly human life. Yale tenure controversy Pangle was denied tenure at Yale University, in a scandal, during which a senior colleague explained, in a pronouncement (which became the theme of a protest panel at the annual convention of the American Political Science Association): "academic freedom is one thing, but there are two types who will never be permitted tenure at Yale: Leninists and Straussians."