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Date of Birth
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14-September-1930
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Place of Birth
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Indianapolis
(Marion County, United States of America, Indiana, Area code 317)
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Nationality
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United States of America
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Also know as
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Allan David Bloom
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Profession
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Writer, Philosopher, Professor
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Quotes
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- Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.
- The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.
- We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.
- Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.
- The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.
- The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.
- As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.
- There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.
- The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.
- Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.
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Allan David Bloom 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, Yale University, École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and the University of Chicago. Bloom championed the idea of Great Books education and became famous for his criticism of contemporary American higher education, with his views being expressed in his bestselling 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. Characterized as a conservative in the popular media, Bloom explicitly stated that this was a misunderstanding and made it clear that he was not to be affiliated with any conservative movements. Saul Bellow wrote Ravelstein, a roman à clef based on Bloom, his friend and teaching partner at the University of Chicago.
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