Professor Charles Mathewes

Nietzsche believed that the language we’ve developed has trapped us in a certain unhealthy position, and the primary surface manifestation of the problem is our continued captivity to the language of good and evil. […]

Friedrich Nietzsche’s most famous utterance is “God is Dead”. He felt that the repercussions of this were huge, but that it had not been fully comprehended by people yet. […]

Huck was wrought by his conscience believing that freeing his friend, Jim, was a crime. He is humane enough to sense that condemning people to chattel slavery cannot be right. And yet, his Victorian morality dictates that he do so. […]

The most surprising element of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address was the lack of blame game. He believed both the South and the North to be equally complicit when it came to the sin of slavery. He saw it as a theodicy question about the justness of God and saw the civil war as a theological punishment. […]

Mark Twain believed that morality can vary and hence should be more accommodating. Abraham Lincoln went a step further in promoting a mutually beneficial approach towards resolving a conflict. […]

Hegel adopts a view of God or the World-Spirit as directly governing the forces of human history and in some ways coming to understand itself in human history. […]