Andrew Fuyarchuk
Andrew Fuyarchuk B.A. (Carleton), M.A. (Alberta), and Ph.D. candidate (St. Michael's College) is a public servant in Ontario. He has been teaching philosophy and the liberal arts for over fifteen years, currently at Sheridan College. He aims to uncover the wisdom of the Gospels, theology, and classical metaphysics embedded within modern-secular cultures. Toward that end he has challenged organizational behaviour and made public essays on liberalism, Nietzsche, Wagner, Heidegger ,and Augustine in The Journal of the Fellowship of the Catholic Scholars (Canadian Chapter). In 2010 his first book was published, Gadamer's Path to Plato, in which he argues that a Platonic metaphysics does a better job than the German Hegelian tradition in respecting human dignity. He is active on the executive for the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars and Catholic Teacher's Guild, and is currently editing conference papers for his next book Philosophers: Pathological, but not hopeless. After a decade of fulfilling his task he finds reassurance in the words of Kelly Clarkson, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
Bio last updated April 30th, 2018.
Articles by Andrew Fuyarchuk
Re-Opening "The Closing of the American Mind"
By Andrew Fuyarchuk
September 1, 2012
On its silver anniversary, Andrew Fuyarchuk ponders new thinking about Allan Bloom's book.
At the welcoming ceremony at the White House in 2008, Pope Benedict XVI said, "From the dawn of the Republic, America's quest for freedom has been guided by the conviction that the principles governing political and social life are intimately linked to a moral order based on the dominion of God the Creator The opposition Bloom and Ratner-Rosenhagen represent between foundations housed in either the intellect of philosophers or the creative will of the people might, however, be false Principles are not transcendent to history or human making, and studying the works of great philosophers is incidental to performing the ideas of liberty and equality in our daily lives In contrast to Bloom, who believes that Americans do not have the depth of character to understand the significance of a life without first principles, she argues that anti-foundationalism is at the heart of the American way For example, by studying John Locke's Treatise on Civil Government, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Baron de Montes-quieu's Spirit of the Laws, Bloom reasoned that the well-groomed student would develop the knowledge and mental skills requisite to defend the principles of liberty and equality upon which their republic was founded These oversights suggest that Bloom's reading of the Enlightenment philosophers who founded the principles of democracy is overly determined by Plato's philosophy (for whom piety is a virtue replaced by wisdom) In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom attacked Friedrich Nietzsche's anti-foundational philosophy as the source of moral relativism in the United States