Michael Aeschliman

Michael D. Aeschliman is a U.S.-Swiss educator, literary critic and scholar, Professor Emeritus at Boston University, Professor of Anglophone Culture at the Università della Svizzera italiana and Curriculum Advisor to The American School in Switzerland Foundation Board.

Archives

Shaw, Scientism, and Darwinism

_{Michael D. Aeschliman
January 8, 2021}

George Bernard Shaw’s positive criterion by which to measure and ridicule folly and vice was fatally ambiguous, eclectic, and inconstant.

Darwinism as the Root Problem of Modernity

_{Michael D. Aeschliman
January 7, 2021}

Shaw and Chesterton believed that the acceptance of Darwinism made it impossible to resist social Darwinism, plutocracy, imperialism, racialism, and militarism.

Shaw, Chesterton, and the Critique of Darwinism

_{Michael D. Aeschliman
January 6, 2021}

Chesterton was a friend of Shaw but also an ideological opponent, who often debated with him on public stages.

The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism, Pt. 1

_{Michael Aeschliman
August 24, 2020}

On this episode of ID the Future, we recognize the 75th anniversary this month of the publication of C. S. Lewis’s prophetic science fiction novel That Hideous Strength, with the first slightly abridged part of John West’s documentary The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism. Several scholars were interviewed for the film, including Jay Richards, Angus Menuge, Victor Reppert, John West, and Michael Aeschliman. Scientism is the idea that science is the ultimate path to knowledge and wisdom — the only sure path — and that the spiritual realm is a mirage. Lewis never criticized science, only scientism, the abuse of science that bears an unexpected twinship with magic. …

That Hideous Strength — C. S. Lewis’s Fantasia of Consciousness at 75

_{Michael D. Aeschliman
August 16, 2020}

The novel is a narrative, fictional version of a philosophical anatomy of the satanic dimension and implication of much modern history from 1914 onwards.

Aeschliman on Three Great Authors Critiquing Scientism

_{Michael Aeschliman
October 16, 2019}

On this episode of ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid concludes his two-part conversations with Michael Aeschliman, author of the newly revised and expanded The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism. Here Aeschliman places Lewis among a strong line of thinkers critiquing scientism, including the philosopher/mathematician Blaise Pascal, who showed that scientific knowledge on its own could never be sufficient for being fully human; the theologian and physicist Stanley L. Jaki, who brilliantly integrated science and theology; and the great English author Jonathan Swift, whose satirical work skewered the illusions of scientific reductionism. …

Aeschliman Talks C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, and That Hideous Strength

_{Michael Aeschliman
October 14, 2019}

Michael Aeschliman, author of the newly revised and expanded The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism sits down with host Andrew McDiarmid to explore Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, its defense of natural law, and its bracing takedown of scientism.