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When parents look at the beautiful covers adorning the gift-boxed sets of Philip Pullman's fantasy series, His Dark Materials, they might be forgiven for believing that these books follow in the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia. In fact, the publishers are counting on it. The display tables have arrived just in time for Christmas and the release of the screen adaptation of the first volume: The Golden Compass.What Pullman's promoters desperately hope is that parents will not get beyond the colorful covers, which appear to depict nothing more than an...

It has now been twenty years since the late Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, his bestselling broadside against the ideas and conceptions that animate the contemporary university. The general theme of Bloom’s book is encapsulated in the subtitle: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. . . .The Closing of the American Mind has been interpreted as one of those influential salvos in the cultural wars of recent decades between reformers and traditionalists on the campus and between conservatives and liberals in the society at large. . . . Bloom...

This is the continent where some leading thinkers are talking about a "post-Christian Europe." And this is the country of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who infamously quipped, "God is dead." So some may be surprised at the receptivity in Germany this week to visiting Pope Benedict XVI's message: Europe needs to rethink the thesis that secularism and economic progress go hand in hand. Coincidentally, some of Europe's stalwart secularists are challenging the idea that religious reasoning inevitably retreats from the public sphere as countries modernize. Germans themselves are modeling a growing acceptance of religion's role in shaping society: • Head of...

IN BEYOND Good and Evil, Nietzsche rejoices that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, "the last chord of a centuries-old great European taste . . . still speaks to us" and warns that "alas, some day all this will be gone." Nietzsche was unsure whether the future held the triumph of the despicable, bourgeois "last man" who is no longer even ashamed of himself or, as he hoped, of the newly heroic and disciplined races that the "new philosophers" would mold. Either way, he thought Mozart would become incomprehensible--though probably not to the new philosophers or Overmen themselves. So, does Mozart still speak...

During Israel’s dramatic eviction of its settlers, it went almost unnoticed that on Aug. 15, armed men in Gaza kidnapped a soundman who worked for a French state television station. I’ll bet you’ve already assumed the kidnappers were Arab Muslims. Shame on you. And yes you’re right, they were. The week before, three foreign workers were kidnapped by members of Fatah, founded by the late Yasser Arafat. “Fatah” means “conquest by means of holy war.” No matter what our political views, we all agree on two things: 1) Israel and the West on the whole follow the norms of civilization;...

During Israel’s dramatic eviction of its settlers, it went almost unnoticed that on Aug. 15, armed men in Gaza kidnapped a soundman who worked for a French state television station. I’ll bet you’ve already assumed the kidnappers were Arab Muslims. Shame on you. And yes you’re right, they were. The week before, three foreign workers were kidnapped by members of Fatah, founded by the late Yasser Arafat. “Fatah” means “conquest by means of holy war.” No matter what our political views, we all agree on two things: 1) Israel and the West on the whole follow the norms of civilization;...

During Israel’s dramatic eviction of its settlers, it went almost unnoticed that on Aug. 15, armed men in Gaza kidnapped a soundman who worked for a French state television station. I’ll bet you’ve already assumed the kidnappers were Arab Muslims. Shame on you. And yes you’re right, they were. The week before, three foreign workers were kidnapped by members of Fatah, founded by the late Yasser Arafat. “Fatah” means “conquest by means of holy war.” No matter what our political views, we all agree on two things: 1) Israel and the West on the whole follow the norms of civilization;...

PERHAPS genius can be perceived no way but kaleidoscopically, with interpretation endlessly rearranging the same bright shards. Who was Nietzsche? ''Listen!'' he shouts at the beginning of ''Ecce Homo,'' and the italics are naturally his, he being the emperor of vehemency. ''For I am such and such a person. For heaven's sake do not confound me with anyone else.'' The chapter titles then explain even more about him: ''Why I Am So Wise,'' ''Why I Am So Clever,'' ''Why I Write Such Excellent Books.'' Our immediate reaction, as he might have intended, is to suspect the wisdom, cleverness and excellence...

Dear Freepers, I am a new writer in search of a publisher, and I thought it prudent to post here in the hopes that someone might be able to give me a lead on a publisher or an agent. Shameless, I know, but the query process demands the total abandonment of humility. Please post below or contact me by Freepmail if you are an interested publisher or can point me in the direction of one. General comments are also welcome, of course. I've posted an excerpt from the 45,000 word manuscript, "Ethereal Plain: A 21st Century American Philosophy," below. Essentially,...

Woody Allen (liberal) and Natan Sharansky (conservative) are celebrity Jewish intellectuals who offer radically different worldviews for your contemplation. Allen's is more popular with intellectuals worldwide. Sharansky's whole life says that Allen is wrong. Allen recently explained his view of history to the German magazine Der Spiegel. And Sharansky was interviewed by Jay Nordlinger of the National Review. If you understand their disagreement, you will grasp the main spiritual question facing Americans today. Allen, 69, is a filmmaker from Brooklyn, N.Y. Sharansky, 57, was a political prisoner in the Soviet gulag; today he is an Israeli politician. Allen got famous...

Friedrich Nietzsche called himself “the Anti-Christ,” and wrote a book by that title. He argued for atheism as follows: “I will now disprove the existence of all gods. If there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god? Consequently, there are no gods.” He scorned reason as well as faith, often deliberately contradicted himself, said that “a sneer is infinitely more noble that a syllogism” and appealed to passion, rhetoric and even deliberate hatred rather than reason. He saw love as “the greatest danger” and morality as mankind's worst weakness. He died insane, in an asylum, of...

Once upon a time, not too awfully long ago, America was known as the ‘shining city on the hill.’ America, the most radical experiment in the history of the world, was the only nation to which people oppressed and repressed by old world systems of social classes and castes could be free of the stifling bindings engendered by those man created constraints. She was a Judao-Christian nation where God of the bible, and not an elite ruling class, was sovereign over all. America was the land of hope, promise and opportunity, where not only all men were equal before God’s...

EDINBURGH The madman in Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra," who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours and ran to the market to proclaim the death of God to the scoffing bystanders, realized he had come too early: "My time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way. ... It has not yet reached the ears of man." It has reached them now. Its time has come. God is dead. . That may sound like a quixotic claim in a time transfixed by religious controversy, with the devotees of rival gods at each other's throats, but it...

I had hoped to avoid being dragged into the Strauss/Nietzsche fracas, but then Jonah had to go taunt me by suggesting an affinity between Weber grillers and Nietzsche. Jonah--that's Max Weber you've got in your head next to Nietzsche, not Weber grills! And certainly not me! See if you get invited to my next BBQ! Three points need to be raised. First, in my opinion no American conservatives today, or ever, have been Nietzscheans (with the possible exception of Bloom and a handful close to him, and they won't admit it). Second, Strauss was not a Nietzschean. However, thirdly, Strauss...

The protagonist of Friedrich Nietzsche's seminal work "Thus Spake Zarathustra" declares, "God is dead." But it was God, or at least nature, that had the final say in the matter. A clever epigram puts the issue in stark relief. Nietzsche: "God is dead." God: "Nietzsche is dead." Nietzsche predicted that the decline in traditional beliefs, such as the belief in God, would undermine the cultural foundations of morality and set mankind on an inevitable journey toward relativism and nihilism. After Nietzsche's death, one of the great captains of that journey was Jacques Derrida, an Algerian-born French philosopher whose signal contribution...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Twitching with rage and disbelief, a pro-homosexual student approached one TFP Student Action member and said, “Why are you here? This is a liberal university.” Visibly shaken, he continued: “You’re in the wrong place. People on this campus disagree with you.” To this the TFP member nodded: “Yes, that’s exactly why we came – to let the other side be heard.” The TFP had gone to George Washington University in Washington, D.C. to defend traditional marriage as part of a continuing effort on college campuses. News of their presence spread like wild fire. Within minutes of their arrival, homosexual activists...

Fr. James V. Schall on Political Philosophy By Ken Masugi Posted December 23, 2003 James V. Schall, S. J. has had a venerable career in teaching and publishing. He is Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. His books include: Another Sort of Learning, At the Limits of Political Philosophy, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, Schall on Chesterton, Idylls and Rambles, What Is God Like? and Jacques Maritain: A Philosopher in Society. His writings are posted here. Last December, the Claremont Institute's Ken Masugi interviewed Fr. Schall at length. He picked up the conversation again, earlier this...

The Resenters By Mark Gauvreau Judge February 21, 2003 Moralism without Morality In recent weeks the media has treated the antiwar protesters as one of two things: either as a harmless group of mainstream folks angry about American bellicosity, or as the second coming of the communists. In fact, it’s both simpler and more complex than that: The protesters are not anarchists or soccer moms—at least, they are not merely anarchists or soccer moms. First and foremost, they are Resenters. Resentment as a source of human action and thought has been around as long as the human race, of course, but...

They are: Machiavelli, the inventor of "the new morality"; The most amazing thing about this brutal philosophy is that it won the modern mind, though only by watering down or covering up its darker aspects Kant, the subjectivizer of Truth; He gave impetus to the turn from the objective to the subjective, including the redefinition of truth itself as subjective. The consequences have been catastrophic. Nietzsche, the self-proclaimed Anti-Christ; Nietzsche, the insane inventor of the "superman" was not only the favorite philosopher of Nazi Germany, he is the favorite philosopher of hell. Freud, the founder of the sexual revolution; Freud...