The Abolition of Man is one of C.S. Lewis’s most important and influential works. In three weighty lectures, given at the height of the Second World War, Lewis defends the objectivity of value, pointing to the universal moral law that all great philosophical and religious traditions have recognized. This critical edition, prepared by Michael Ward, helps readers get the most out of Lewis’s classic work with an introduction placing the book in the context of his life and times; a fully annotated version of the text; a commentary on key passages; and a set of questions for group discussion or individual reflection. Scholarly, detailed, yet accessible, it is the must-have version of an essential volume.

C.S. Lewis sets out to persuade his audience of the importance and relevance of universal values such as courage and honor in contemporary society. This critical edition, prepared by Michael Ward, helps readers get the most out of Lewis's work with an introduction placing the book in the context of his life and times; a fully annotated version of the text; a commentary on key passages; and a set of questions for group discussion or individual reflection.

The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis's masterpiece in ethics and the philosophy of science, warns of the danger of combining modern moral skepticism with the technological pursuit of human desires. The end result is the final destruction of human nature. From Brave New World to Star Trek, from steampunk to starships, science fiction film has considered from nearly every conceivable angle the same nexus of morality, technology, and humanity of which C. S. Lewis wrote. As a result, science fiction film has unintentionally given us stunning depictions of Lewis's terrifying vision of the future. In Science Fiction Film and the Abolition of Man, scholars of religion, philosophy, literature, and film explore the connections between sci-fi film and the three parts of Lewis's book: how sci-fi portrays "Men without Chests" incapable of responding properly to moral good, how it teaches the Tao or "The Way," and how it portrays "The Abolition of Man."

The definitive exploration of C.S. Lewis’s philosophical thought, and its connection with his theological and literary work Arguably one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, C.S. Lewis is widely hailed as a literary giant, his seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia having sold over 65 million copies in print worldwide. A prolific author and scholar whose intellectual contributions transcend the realm of children’s fantasy literature, Lewis is commonly read and studied as a significant theological figure in his own right. What is often overlooked is that Lewis first loved and was academically trained in philosophy. In this newest addition to the Blackwell Great Minds series, well-known philosopher and Lewis authority Stewart Goetz discusses Lewis’s philosophical thought and illustrates how it informs his theological and literary work. Drawing from Lewis’s published writing and private correspondence, including unpublished materials, C.S. Lewis is the first book to develop a cohesive and holistic understanding of Lewis as a philosopher. In this groundbreaking project, Goetz explores how Lewis’s views on topics of lasting interest such as happiness, morality, the soul, human freedom, reason, and imagination shape his understanding of myth and his use of it in his own stories, establishing new connections between Lewis’s philosophical convictions and his wider body of published work. Written in a scholarly yet accessible style, this short, engaging book makes a significant contribution to Lewis scholarship while remaining suitable for readers who have only read his stories, offering new insight into the intellectual life of this figure of enduring popular interest.

Evil Is Coming – Worse than You Imagine

The summation of nearly three decades of work by a leading figure in environmental ethics and bioethics. The 22 papers are invigoratingly diverse, but together tell a unified story about various aspects of the morality of our relationships to animals and to nature.

An analysis of Lewis's eleven novels and many non-fiction works critically looking at the twin concepts of beauty and truth as Divine in source.

Highly controversial when it was first published in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue has since established itself as a landmark work in contemporary moral philosophy. In this book, MacIntyre sought to address a crisis in moral language that he traced back to a European Enlightenment that had made the formulation of moral principles increasingly difficult. In the search for a way out of this impasse, MacIntyre returns to an earlier strand of ethical thinking, that of Aristotle, who emphasised the importance of 'virtue' to the ethical life. More than thirty years after its original publication, After Virtue remains a work that is impossible to ignore for anyone interested in our understanding of ethics and morality today.

For over half a century, scholars have laboured to show that C. S. Lewis's famed but apparently disorganised Chronicles of Narnia have an underlying symbolic coherence, pointing to such possible unifying themes as the seven sacraments, the seven deadly sins, and the seven books of Spenser's Faerie Queene. None of these explanations has won general acceptance and the structure of Narnia's symbolism has remained a mystery. Michael Ward has finally solved the enigma. In Planet Narnia he demonstrates that medieval cosmology, a subject which fascinated Lewis throughout his life, provides the imaginative key to the seven novels. Drawing on the whole range of Lewis's writings (including previously unpublished drafts of the Chronicles), Ward reveals how the Narnia stories were designed to express the characteristics of the seven medieval planets - - Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, and Saturn - - planets which Lewis described as "spiritual symbols of permanent value" and "especially worthwhile in our own generation". Using these seven symbols, Lewis secretly constructed the Chronicles so that in each book the plot-line, the ornamental details, and, most important, the portrayal of the Christ-figure of Aslan, all serve to communicate the governing planetary personality. The cosmological theme of each Chronicle is what Lewis called 'the kappa element in romance', the atmospheric essence of a story, everywhere present but nowhere explicit. The reader inhabits this atmosphere and thus imaginatively gains connaître knowledge of the spiritual character which the tale was created to embody. Planet Narnia is a ground-breaking study that will provoke a major revaluation not only of the Chronicles, but of Lewis's whole literary and theological outlook. Ward uncovers a much subtler writer and thinker than has previously been recognized, whose central interests were hiddenness, immanence, and knowledge by acquaintance.

After Humanity is a guide to one of C.S. Lewis's most widely admired but least accessible works, The Abolition of Man, which originated as a series of lectures on ethics that he delivered during the Second World War. These lectures tackle the thorny question of whether moral value is objective or not. When we say something is right or wrong, are we recognizing a reality outside ourselves, or merely reporting a subjective sentiment? Lewis addresses the matter from a purely philosophical standpoint, leaving theological matters to one side. He makes a powerful case against subjectivism, issuing an intellectual warning that, in our "post-truth" twenty-first century, has even more relevance than when he originally presented it. Lewis characterized The Abolition of Man as "almost my favourite among my books," and his biographer Walter Hooper has called it "an all but indispensable introduction to the entire corpus of Lewisiana." In After Humanity, Michael Ward sheds much-needed light on this important but difficult work, explaining both its general academic context and the particular circumstances in Lewis's life that helped give rise to it, including his front-line service in the trenches of the First World War. After Humanity contains a detailed commentary clarifying the many allusions and quotations scattered throughout Lewis's argument. It shows how this resolutely philosophical thesis fits in with his other, more explicitly Christian works. It also includes a full-color photo gallery, displaying images of people, places, and documents that relate to The Abolition of Man, among them Lewis's original "blurb" for the book, which has never before been published.