Masquerade of the Dream Walkers

Book excerpt: Through extensive textual analysis, this book concludes that the prevailing opinion about the nature of modern and contemporary philosophy is wrong. It maintains that almost all modern and contemporary philosophy is deconstructed, secularized, Augustinian theology, not philosophy. The work is divided into eight chapters, a guest Foreword by Herbert I. London (President of the Hudson Institute and Olin Professor of Humanities at New York University) notes, bibliography, and an index. Chapter 1 (Protagoras Sees the Ghost of Hippo) considers Cartesian thought, Hobbes, and Newton. Chapter 2 (I Feel the Spirit Move Me) examines Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Chapter 3 (The Urge to Emerge) investigates Lessing and Rousseau. Chapters 4 (To Dream the Impossible Dream) and 5 (Wake Up, Wake Up, You Sleepyhead) treat Kant. Chapters 6 (I Am Music) and 7 (Looking for God in All The Wrong Places) deal with Hegel. Chapter 8 (Dirty Dancing: Higher Education as Enlightened Swindling) concludes that a lack of philosophical and historical experience coupled with a widespread inability to read philosophical texts according to the intention of the author (1) causes us to mistake secularized theology for philosophy and (2) is a main cause for the decline of contemporary universities.