Saturday, March 28, 2015

Thank God academics are unarmed?


While in graduate school, and with all respect to aspiring scholars, I was always glad they (and our learned professors) were unarmed.

image from

This rather guttural feeling of my relative youth was revived when I read the below exchange in The Times Literary Supplement between two philosophers, with one (a Galen Strawson) writing about the other (TLS, March 20, p. 6), a Nicholas Humphrey:
In January 2011 I published a critical review of Humphrey's book Soul Dust in the Guardian, to which Humphrey replied publicly as follows: "Strawson has not so far responded to my invitation to retract his review of my book. But it's clear from messages I've received from colleagues in philosophy that they see him as an embarrassment to their profession: not only an intellectual ass but unscholarly and lazy too. His ideas about panspsychism have made him a laughing stock. His attacks to resolve the problem of consciousness as a scientific issue -- such as mine -- consign him to the nursery.
I would not put these two in charge of Russian-Ukrainian relations in the "real world."


No comments: