Author Description

This story is classically told in a way that has not been done since Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy in the mid 20th century. The classic tale holds that in pagan antiquity it was the Stoics versus the Epicureans with the Skeptics unable to decide between the two. Christianity then subsumes the Rational moral theistic Stoics who are in the tradition of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The Christians continue to oppose the atheist, hedonistic Epicureans, who are in the humanist tradition of the Greek Sophists. The Christians also oppose a new player in the early centuries of the Church, namely, Neo-Platonism, which attempts to construct an amoral, spiritual-humanism to oppose Christianity. These debates largely die from 500 to 1500 AD, but in modernity Spinoza and Hegel revive the failed Neo-Platonism of antiquity while atheists like Voltaire and Hume revive the failed Epicureans of antiquity. Both of these groups oppose the traditional, Christian theists Thomas Jefferson and John Locke. Locke and Jefferson eventually lose out in the West among the educated elite in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the new Epicureans and Neo-Platonists, until both of these positions tend to collapse or fall into an anti-intellectual humanism in the second half of the 20th century. This book is a call to return to the Reason of Greek philosophy and to its Hebrew counterpart, the Wisdom of Solomon.