Philosopher
Allan Bloom
Overview
Allan David Bloom (September 14, 1930 – October 7, 1992) was an American philosopher, classicist, and academician. He studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon, and Alexandre Kojève. He subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, Yale University, the École Normale Supérieure, and the University of Chicago.
Bloom championed the idea of Great Books education and became famous for his criticism of contemporary American higher education, expressing his views in his bestselling 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. Characterized as a conservative in the popular media, Bloom denied the label, asserting that what he sought to defend was the "theoretical life". Saul Bellow wrote Ravelstein, a roman à clef based on Bloom, his friend and colleague at the University of Chicago.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Philosophers who discussed Allan Bloom
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Leo Strauss
- Susan Sontag
- Raymond Aron
- Martha Nussbaum
- Alexandre Kojève
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
- Martin Heidegger and Nazism
Ideas Allan Bloom discusses
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Political freedom
- Francis Fukuyama
- Gustave Flaubert
- John Rawls
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Emile, or On Education
- Western philosophy
- Hero
- Interdisciplinarity
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Republic (Plato)
- John Locke
- Essays (Montaigne)
- Isocrates
- Ancient Greek philosophy
- Logical positivism
- Leo Tolstoy
- Richard Rorty
- Leo Strauss
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Newsweek
- Irony
- Nihilism
Place in the tradition
Part of Jewish philosophy.