30 Facts About Allan Bloom

Allan David Bloom was an American philosopher, classicist, and academician.

Allan Bloom studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon, and Alexandre Kojeve.

Allan Bloom subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, Yale University, the Ecole normale superieure, and the University of Chicago.

Allan Bloom was born in Indianapolis, Indiana to second-generation Jewish parents who were both social workers.

In 1946, Allan Bloom was accepted to the same program, starting his degree at the age of fifteen, and spending the next decade of his life enrolled at the university in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood.

Allan Bloom graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor's degree at the age of 18.

Allan Bloom subsequently studied under the influential Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojeve in Paris, whose lectures Bloom would later introduce to the English-speaking world.

Allan Bloom studied and taught in Paris at the Ecole Normale Superieure, and Germany.

Allan Bloom went on to teach at Yale from 1960 to 1963, at Cornell until 1970, and at the University of Toronto until 1979, when he returned to the University of Chicago.

In 1963, as a professor at Cornell, Allan Bloom served as a faculty member of the Cornell Branch of the Telluride Association, an organization focused on intellectual development and self-governance.

Allan Bloom translated and commented upon Rousseau's "Letter to M d'Alembert on the Theater", bringing it into dialogue with Plato's Republic.

Allan Bloom repeated this effort as a professor of political science at the University of Toronto in 1978, translating Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile.

Allan Bloom was an editor for the scholarly journal Political Theory as well as a contributor to History of Political Philosophy.

Allan Bloom's friends do not deny his homosexuality, but whether he actually died of AIDS remains disputed.

Allan Bloom's work is not easily categorized, yet there is a thread that links all of his published material.

Allan Bloom was concerned with preserving a philosophical way of life for future generations.

Allan Bloom strove to do this through both scholarly and popular writing.

Allan Bloom follows Strauss in suggesting that the "Just City in Speech" is not natural; it is man-made.

The Closing of the American Mind was published in 1987, five years after Allan Bloom published an essay in National Review about the failure of universities to serve the needs of students.

The book is a critique of the contemporary university and how Allan Bloom sees it as failing its students.

Allan Bloom's critique extends beyond the university to speak to the general crisis in American society.

Allan Bloom argues that commercial pursuits had become more highly valued than love, the philosophic quest for truth, or the civilized pursuits of honor and glory.

Allan Bloom, informed by Socrates, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Nietzsche, explores music's power over the human soul.

Allan Bloom cites the soldier who throws himself into battle at the urging of the drum corps, the pious believer who prays under the spell of a religious hymn, the lover seduced by the romantic guitar, and points towards the tradition of philosophy that treated musical education as paramount.

Allan Bloom claims that Jagger is a hero to many university students who envy his fame and wealth but are really just bored by the lack of options before them.

Martha Nussbaum, a political philosopher and classicist, and Harry V Jaffa, a conservative, both argued that Bloom was deeply influenced by 19th-century European philosophers, especially Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nussbaum wrote that, for Allan Bloom, Nietzsche had been disastrously influential in modern American thought.

Allan Bloom was writing vigorous polemic at a time when America sought to ensure that the intellect could not rise above gender and race; the mind was to be defined by its melanin and genetic content, and by what lay between our legs; or, in the academe, the canon was to be re-read and re-defined so that it fitted the latest theorem of gender or race.

Allan Bloom loved people who were first-rate with real love.

Well, the truth is that Allan Bloom was a very superior person, great-souled.