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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (4470)	8/7/2003 12:59:53 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 793682

If any of you wonder what is wrong with Western Philosophy, read this and realize that Derrida is considered almost a God by Academia. Ah, knock off the hyperventilating, Bill. "Academia", whatever that is, is not of one mind on anything; judgments about philosophy, state of the union, the state of the weather, the seasons, anything. Derrida is a serious thinker, as is Habermas, with whom the first interview is done. One can agree or disagree and almost everyone who is reasonable will do more than little of that with both of them. It doesn't speak well or badly of anyone if they agree or disagree with some, a lot, or a little. But it does speak well of readers if they engage the thoughts rather than throw tomatoes.

To: LindyBill who wrote (4470)	8/7/2003 1:40:49 PM
From: mistermj	Respond to of 793682

>>Derrida is considered almost a God by Academia.<< >>Typical academics, on the other hand, are not oriented toward political reality: “They tend to be unworldly. They are, most of them anyway, the people who have never left school. Their milieu is postadolescent.” They often work alone, without developing the social skills and sensibilities that would give them political insight. Here is how Posner summarizes the academic public intellectual: A proclivity for taking extreme positions, a taste for universals and abstraction, a desire for moral purity, a lack of worldliness, and intellectual arrogance work together to induce in many academic public intellectuals selective empathy, a selective sense of justice, insensitivity to context, a lack of perspective, a denigration of predecessors as lacking moral insight, an impatience with prudence and sobriety, a lack of realism, and excessive self-confidence. The “on the one hand, on the other hand” approach to politically or ideologically charged issues—the kind of approach that can understand slavery in its historical context, that sees the bad along with the good abolitionists, that seeks a functional explanation to (for us) bizarre practices such as clitoridectomy and infibulation, that acknowledges that Nazis were fervent environmentalists and public-health fanatics, and that Bill Clinton was the consolidator of the Reagan Revolution—this approach is uncongenial to the academic temperament. The typical academic is a Platonist, not an Aristotelian. In enumerating examples of poor performance by public intellectuals, Posner is devastating. One of his themes is that the public and journalists have a short memory; he remedies this by reminding readers of predictions made by public intellectuals in the past. While there is amusement how often the pontificators have fallen on their faces, Posner’s point is also positive: the quality of public intellectual work might actually improve if better score were kept of their prophetic utterances.<< aldaily.com