C. S. Lewis sets out to persuade his audience of the importance and relevance of universal values such as courage and honor in contemporary society.
C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man purports to be a book specifically about public education, but its central concerns are broadly political, religious, and philosophical. In the best of the book's three essays, "Men Without Chests," Lewis trains his laser-sharp wit on a mid- century English high school text, considering the ramifications of teaching British students to believe in idle relativism, and to reject "the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kinds of things we are." Lewis calls this doctrine the "Tao," and he spends much of the book explaining why society needs a sense of objective values. The Abolition of Man speaks with astonishing freshness to contemporary debates about morality; and even if Lewis seems a bit too cranky and privileged for his arguments to be swallowed whole, at least his articulation of values seems less ego-driven, and therefore is more useful, than that of current writers such as Bill Bennett and James Dobson. --Michael Joseph Gross
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C.S. Lewis Argues Against Moral Relativism and in Favor of Universal Values:
In this philosophical essay, C.S. Lewis uses a high school text to make two main points. First, he argues that intellectuals of the day were trying discredit anything not based on the scientific method--for example emotions and values. He referred to this as creating "men without chests." Secondly, he argues that in doing so, these intellectuals were also teaching that morality and values were completely relative. Lewis goes on to show that although the intellectuals thought mankind was becoming more in... more info
A Dense Defense of Natural Law and the Validity of Reason:
As far as I can see, there were two main cornerstones in Lewis' thinking: (1) The ultimate validity of Reason, perhaps best summed up in his essay "De Futilitate": "Unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated." (2) The ultimately objective nature of morality, also known as Natural Law and in this book called the... more info
Gimongously Interesting!:
Lewis extracts the meaning of modern western schooling trends, that is, he shows logically and religiously what the modern system implies for the future of human thought and behavior. It's fantastic! Much more interesting than my measly review could possibly indicate!
Biased, religious, and logically flawed.:
While this is a great piece if you want to step inside a virtue theorist's mind, as an actual philosophical text it is rather poor.
While it is obviously religiously biased, it is Lewis' own circular paradoxes that lead to a flawed system of logic that can not support itself.
