ABSTRACT
The Abolition of Man received little attention on its publication in 1943. Originally, the entire work was overlooked, although a number of C. S. Lewis's friends, among them the essayist Owen Barfield, praised the book for its strong argument and its excellent writing style. In fact, Lewis's philosophical opponents did not judge his newest text to be worthy of their scrutiny at all. The logical positivists, pragmatists, and behaviorists who populated the faculty of philosophy at the University of Oxford were so unimpressed that Lewis clung to such traditional, well-established, and, by that time, outmoded notions that they ignored him. Contemporary critics, among them the American Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft, see the text as ripe for reconsideration, praising Lewis for his insightful view that both reductionism and the idea of technological progress inevitably lead to the opinion that the natural world has no inherent worth and is simply there for human use and manipulation.
