The founding editors of The Review were at one in proclaiming that their journal was devoted to the philosophical and historical approach to political realities. The labors and fads of half a century have made the motto suspect for the arrogant simplicity of its common sense. One may, nevertheless, ask: what do you call that which is there? Or is reality like Gertrude Stein's Oakland, with no “there” there? And are our words the conveyances of nothing but emotional sounds?

At the turn of the century, American higher educational institutions were rapidly divesting themselves of their religious content and functions. The conscious attempt of the University of Illinois to separate itself from its fifty years of vaguely Protestant Christianity was representative of this process, which was, in fact, the final chapter in the gradual secularization of the higher learning that had prevailed in the Western European tradition for some eight hundred years. Fully to understand these developments entails a historical analysis of the complex and dialectical cultural and political changes that brought them about, including a critical definition of secularization as a way of thinking and as a social-political program. The practical problem, it is argued, is located in the post-Reformation tendency to confuse an institution of higher learning with a local church, the Yale experience furnishing an instructive example of this confusion. The result was a religious demand the university could not meet and a corresponding withdrawal of religion to a merely pastoral and psychological strategy in place of its former substantive intellectual role. Thanks to the “Kantian defense,” neither orthodoxy nor the new liberal Christianity (which might have been seen as a candidate to replace it in academe) any longer needed the university, both having retired to a safer autonomy. The resulting dilemma, that to be religious hampers learning, and that to be learned entails at least religious neutrality if not its complete abandonment, persists in present day conflicts over the role of religion in our educational institutions at all levels.

This article challenges the view that Aristotle's Poetics provides a defense against Plato's assault on poetry. I argue that Aristotle's discussion of poetry is at least as critical of the poetic depiction of the city and the gods as is the Platonic account. In the Poetics Aristotle does break with Plato in order to establish poetry's independence from philosophy. Aristotle's account of poetry as an independent activity should not, however, be read as a defense of poetry against Plato's subordination of poetry to philosophy. Instead, it is argued that Aristotle establishes poetry's independence from philosophy as a corrective to Plato's resort to poetry, thereby establishing that philosophy is completely autonomous from poetry.

Love of a friend and gratitude for the benefactions of a teacher have moved Paul Caringella, Juergen Gebhardt, Thomas A. Hollweck, and Ellis Sandoz to shoulder the gigantic task of publishing all of the major writings of Eric Voegelin in a uniform edition.1 Louisiana State University Press, Voegelin's publisher of choice since 1956, has committed itself to bringing out thirty-four volumes in which his works will be grouped in formal categories, and arranged in roughly chronological order within each classification.

Most of the official obituaries which followed the death of Michael Oakeshott were so inadequate, paid so little attention to what really mattered to him, that one can only hope that something better can be achieved.1 If one believed the New York Times (20 December 1990) he was a “right-wing guru,” a high-Tory oracle centrally concerned with interpreting (and usually decrying) current political events; if one did fractionally better and gave credence to the London Times he was, though a philosopher who “stood fastidiously aside” from politics, nonetheless the “articulator” of “the real philosophical foundations of Mrs. Thatcher's policies” (22 December 1991).