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

The Restoration of Man

C.S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism
Michael Aeschliman
September 4, 2019
C. S. Lewis is best known for his Narnia tales and Christian apologetics, works that have sold more than 100 million copies. But Lewis was also a trained philosopher and a professor at Cambridge and Oxford. An intellectual giant, he fiercely and extensively critiqued the fashionable dogma known as scientism — the idea that science is the only path to knowledge, and matter the fundamental reality. Michael Aeschliman’s The Restoration of Man ably surveys Lewis’s eloquent case against this dogma, and situates him among the many other notable thinkers who have entered the fray over this crucial issue. Aeschliman shows why Lewis’s case for the human person as more than matter — as a creature with inherent rationality and worth — is a precious resource for restoring and preserving …

Murderous Science

From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, by Richard Weikart
Michael Aeschliman
March 28, 2005
From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, by Richard Weikart (Palgrave Macmillan, 324 pp., $59.95)It is an open question whether civilization will survive Darwinism, whose inspiration for Nazism, militarism, racism, wars of extermination, eugenics, abortion, and euthanasia is amply documented in Richard Weikart’s excellent new book. In precise and careful detail Weikart narrates an indispensable chapter of cultural and intellectual history that had tragic consequences: the growing ascendancy in Germany in the period 1860-1933 of Social Darwinist ideas that fostered a ruthless, amoral view of the human person and of the relations between individuals, groups, nations, and races. Though in this period all “advanced” Western nations (and Japan) were …