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Exposing the religious roots of our ostensibly godless age, Michael Allen Gillespie reveals in this landmark study that modernity is much less secular than conventional wisdom suggests. Taking as his starting point the collapse of the medieval world, Gillespie argues that from the very beginning moderns sought not to eliminate religion but to support a new view of religion and its place in human life. He goes on to explore the ideas of such figures as William of Ockham, Petrarch, Erasmus, Luther, Descartes, and Hobbes, showing that modernity is best understood as a series of attempts to formul

AbstractThis essay calls into question Zuckert's claim in Postmodern Platos that Strauss provides the best contemporary defense of the superiority of the philosophic life against the claims of Nietzsche and Heidegger that it leads to nihilism and despair. For her, Strauss persuasively draws on Plato, read through Alfarabi and Maimonides, to defend this view by showing that the philosopher understands the true ends of human life as a whole which is part of the whole, and thus provides a vision of the noblest, best, and most beautiful. I argue that this claim is implausible, that Strauss's Platonic vision of the ends of human life is obscure, and that even if correct, it does not offer an answer to the question of the relative value of these heterogenous ends, and thus does not demonstrate that the philosophic life is more worth living than any other form of life.

Focuses on Immanuel Kant's discussion of the Third Antinomy in The Critique of Pure Reason. Bridging the notions that (1) the motion of all natural beings is causally determined, & (2) human beings are free & self-moving, Kant's Third Antimony resolves the contradictions between these two positions in his critique of reason, distinguishing its legitimate philosophical use from its dialectical or rhetorical use. The Third Antimony is analyzed in the context of Kant's critical project to demonstrate how its dialectical reasoning has its roots in classical rhetoric. Kant's successors adopted the dialectical reasoning that he rejected, deriving their method from the antinomies, & thus replacing reason with rhetoric in 19th & 20th century philosophical systems. Adapted from the source document.