Author: chad wellmon

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  9.18.2015 2:19 AM

  In 1869, at the age of twenty-five, the precociously brilliant Friedrich Nietzsche was appointed to a professorship of classical philology at the University of Basel. He seemed marked for a successful and conventional academic career. Then the philosophy of Schopenhauer…

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  6.12.2015 3:34 AM

  The Enlightenment Index

  It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book that has understanding for me, . . . surely I do not need to trouble myself. —Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question ‘What is Enlightenment?’” The main figures…

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  6.11.2015 7:46 PM

  How the Philologist Became a Physician of Modernity: Nietzsche’s Lectures on German Education

  In January of 1869, Friedrich Nietzsche was offered a peach of a job—a professorship in classical philology at the University of Basel. Nietzsche was just twenty-four and far from completing his dissertation, but the university’s standards for employment were looser…

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  6.4.2015 2:09 PM

  Epistemo-technics, Peter Leithart on “Organizing Enlightenment”

  Published in First Things, 4.16.15 “In his Organizing Enlightenment, Chad Wellmon explains how the modern research university was a response to a crisis of “information overload.” The Enlightenment saw an explosion of new knowledge and research. The Enlightenment empire of erudition was a…