new celebrity eggheads??

i guess samantha power is one. more of a celebrity than she was a few months ago, anyway.

(starting this thread at 11 pm ET on a friday night is not a good idea, i recognize.)

the most recent proper philosophy SUPERSTAR I can think of is Zizek, and he's been famous for ages now. Quite a bit younger than old man Chomsky, but hardly a spring chicken.

haven't two of the hot french products of the last 3-4 years been the equally aged badiou and ranciere?

it is hard to think of prominent thinkers in the fields i know about under 40.

Most philosophy these days isn't aimed at a general audience, and so new superstars of the sort you guys have in mind aren't forthcoming. Within these fields there are lots of new superstars, but there's no move to educate the public on what they write about, because it doesn't advance your career within academia (for better or for worse).

that's interesting, that last bit. kind of weird! i'm in academia, but doing a hard subject (film studies), not like philosophy. i think u have to be kind of aspies not to want to reach out a bit; but proper philosophy wasn't that often directed at laypeople. it's just that that generation or two of french dudes (sartre-foucault) made a point of trying to talk outside of class. hence they were the superstars.

Another reason is that the kind of philosophy that carries academic authority in the US is analytic philosophy, which is way more allied with science than with politics. But the topics these superstars you're talking about work on---this Zizek guy, e.g.---aren't usually science-related, but political.

I asked a question on the Zizek thread about how you guys run into him: it must be through English or history? Because within philosophy I have never heard his name come up, or these others you name, Badiou, Ranciere, and I write and read and travel pretty widely.

xpost banriquit yeah well we are aspies! but it's also that it doesn't pay the bills within the profession to reach out. It might pay better real money but that's unreliable, whereas offers from Harvard and Princeton are pretty graspable if you play the game well.

Another reason is that the kind of philosophy that carries academic authority in the US is analytic philosophy, which is way more allied with science than with politics. But the topics these superstars you're talking about work on---this Zizek guy, e.g.---aren't usually science-related, but political.

I asked a question on the Zizek thread about how you guys run into him: it must be through English or history? Because within philosophy I have never heard his name come up, or these others you name, Badiou, Ranciere, and I write and read and travel pretty widely.

-- Euler, Saturday, April 19, 2008 4:04 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

yeah, basically these theory-guys are famous because they aren't just known within philosophy, but because they have caught on like crazy with cultural studies people, which probably includes eng lit, and definitely film studies. anotehr big name -- lacan -- i don't think gets much respect within his home discipline.

obviously the analytic tradition is seen as more anglo-saxon; but US-produced soft-humanities academics are very much in thrall to these dudes too.

xpost banriquit yeah well we are aspies! but it's also that it doesn't pay the bills within the profession to reach out. It might pay better real money but that's unreliable, whereas offers from Harvard and Princeton are pretty graspable if you play the game well.

-- Euler, Saturday, April 19, 2008 4:05 PM (39 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

europe has less stable system of tenure -- i would think that getting your name out there helps you move around, get the sweet book deals, tv appearances, conference invitations, etc.

i am a prominent thinker

otm

yeah the people who I work with in France are all in CNRS, which is a totally stable system of employment (and one I would like to join). But I understand that those who teach in the French university system but aren't in CNRS are in a totally different situation.

on the US soft-humanities thing: right, we have this analytic/continental divide in philosophy and I gather all the guys you're talking are what we'd call continental thinkers. There's not much incentive for philosophers in the US to get to know continental thinkers since most philo jobs aren't continental, and there aren't any public intellectuals either (Obama is probably the closest we have).

i'm in academia, but doing a hard subject (film studies), not like philosophy
i'm in academia, but doing a hard subject (film studies), not like philosophy
i'm in academia, but doing a hard subject (film studies), not like philosophy
i'm in academia, but doing a hard subject (film studies), not like philosophy

im currently reading a recent british book by a cambridge academic, 'absent minds', which is basically about how british intellectuals -- since that term came into use, about 100 years ago -- have since the 50s consistently denied that britain has had an intellectual class/intelligentsia, mainly by comparison with france.

his argument is that france is the anomaly, that most countries don't think they have an intelligentsia. you get recurrent articles on the theme of 'where are the great public intellectuals now? we used to have bertrand russell, etc'.

from outside i don't know if the US does or doesn't have public intellectuals -- nyrb contributors, that kind of thing? i'm not an expert.

Daniel Dennett's made a pretty big name for himself outside school philosophy and he is (or perhaps was?) a big wheel in analytic philosophy. Rorty would be another if he hadn't earned himself the almost universal disdain of the analytic community. There's a good, pithy quote from Jerry Fodor about why analytic philosophy is not really read in the larger intellectual world. Actually, having just looked, it's not pithy. It's a whole paragraph in this book review http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/fodo01_.html .

judy butler? (i think of her cause im going to go see her speak in an hour). but she's hardly "new."

NYRB contributors are as close as we have to public intellectuals, but the distribution of that is probably what, 20,000? as compared to Newsweek or the like.

What you say about British public intellectuals is really interesting.

on Dennett: he's of average interest within philosophy of mind, which is itself a subarea of philosophy. You wouldn't read him in a typical graduate course in philosophy of mind in 2008. But he's been more vocal publically on atheism, that's true. I suspect the audience for those books is about what the audience for the NYRB is, though. Which isn't bad given that if 20 people read my papers, I'm ecstatic.

I remember agreeing with Fodor in that article, but I have more hope than he does for the future.

btw I saw this week that to get promoted to university professor at UCL, you'll have to do some promotion of your work in public. I'm not sure if this will carry over to other British universities but it does augur some change maybe.

honestly the most prominent intellectual right now in america is probably that dying professor

http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/

NYRB contributors are as close as we have to public intellectuals, but the distribution of that is probably what, 20,000? as compared to Newsweek or the like.

i guess your population is bigger, but i wouldn't have thought UK public intellectuals reach a much bigger audience than this. the LRB's circulation is gonna be like 10,000 tops, i would think. the other organs, prospect, new statesman, spectator (ew) -- more than that but not much.

it's not like zizek is a household name anyway.

http://powerlineblog.com/archives/theprofessors.jpg

* Arcadia University: Warren Haffar
* Ball State University: George Wolfe
* Baylor University: Marc H. Ellis
* Boston University: Howard Zinn
* Brandeis University: Gordon Fellman, Dessima Williams
* Brooklyn College: Priya Parmar, Timothy Shortell
* California State University, Fresno: Sasan Fayazmanesh
* California State University, Long Beach: Ron (Maulana) Karenga
* City University of New York: Stanley Aronowitz, bell hooks, Leonard Jeffries, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
* Columbia University: Lisa Anderson, Gil Anidjar, Hamid Dabashi, Nicholas de Genova, Eric Foner, Todd Gitlin, Manning Marable, Joseph Massad, Victor Navasky
* Cornell University: Matthew Evangelista
* De Paul University: Norman Finkelstein, Aminah Beverly McCloud
* Duke University: miriam cooke, Frederic Jameson
* Earlham College: Caroline Higgins
* Emory University: Kathleen Cleaver
* Foothill College: Leighton Armitage
* Georgetown University: David D. Cole, John Esposito, Yvonne Haddad, Mari Matsuda
* Holy Cross College: Jerry Lembcke
* Kent State University: Patrick Coy
* Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Noam Chomsky
* Metropolitan State College of Denver: Oneida Meranto
* Montclair State University: Grover Furr
* New York University: Derrick Bell
* North Carolina State University: Gregory Dawes
* Northeastern University: M. Shahid Alam
* Northwestern University: Elizabeth Brumfiel, Bernardine Dohrn
* Occidental College: Tom Hayden
* Penn State University: Michael Bérubé, Sam Richards
* Princeton University: Richard Falk
* Purdue University: Harry Targ
* Rochester Institute of Technology: Thomas Castellano
* Rutgers University: H. Bruce Franklin, Michael Warner
* San Francisco State University: Anatole Anton
* Saint Xavier University: Peter N. Kirstein
* Stanford University: Joel Beinin, Paul R. Ehrlich
* State University of New York, Binghamton: Ali al-Mazrui
* State University of New York, Buffalo: James Holstun
* State University of New York, Stony Brook: Amiri Baraka, Michael Schwartz
* Syracuse University: Greg Thomas
* Temple University: Melissa Gilbert, Lewis Gordon
* Texas A&M University: Joe Feagin
* Truman State University: Marc Becker
* University of California, Berkeley: Hamid Algar, Hatem Bazian, Orville Schell
* University of California, Irvine: Mark LeVine
* University of California, Los Angeles: Vinay Lal
* University of California, Riverside: Armando Navarro
* University of California, Santa Cruz: Bettina Aptheker, Angela Davis
* University of Cincinnati: Marvin Berlowitz
* University of Colorado, Boulder: Alison Jaggar, Emma Perez
* University of Dayton: Mark Ensalaco
* University of Denver: Dean Saitta
* University of Hawaii at Manoa: Haunani-Kay Trask
* University of Illinois at Chicago: Bill Ayers
* University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Robert McChesney
* University of Kentucky: Ihsan Bagby
* University of Michigan: Juan Cole, Gayle Rubin
* University of Northern Colorado: Robert Dunkley
* University of Oregon: John Bellamy Foster
* University of Pennsylvania: Regina Austin, Mary Frances Berry, Michael Eric Dyson
* University of Rhode Island: Michael Vocino
* University of South Florida: Sami al-Arian
* University of Southern California: Laurie Brand
* University of Texas at Arlington: Jose Angel Gutierrez
* University of Texas at Austin: Dana Cloud, Robert Jensen
* University of Washington: David Barash
* Villanova University: Rick Eckstein, Suzanne Toton
* West Chester University: Lawrence Davidson
* Western Washington University: Larry Estrada

I am British and have know of a massive FIVE of those people.

That Columbia University must be a deathtrap.

* City University of New York: Stanley Aronowitz, bell hooks, Leonard Jeffries, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

bell hooks usin some dangerous punctuation

Zizek, as it happens, I first heard of when Channel 4 showed The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, and later I read some of his stuff for a class on Deleuze.

Interesting factoid: right-wing scolar David Horowitz is Beastie Boy Ad-Rock's father.

scholar

The mills of the intellectual celebrity machine grind slow, but exceedingly randomly. It obsesses on physicists with quirky but loveable personalities.

Bodrick, Ad-Rock's dad is the playwright Israel Horowitz.

That's what he wants people to think, so he doesn't get blackballed by the liberal elite that covertly controls America.

So, Fodor came and gave a talk at my campus yesterday, and I sat through it. He presented this argument which mostly seemed to be attacking this understanding of natural selection which -- I am no biologist or anything, no expert -- seemed based on a misunderstanding of how NS is supposed to work -- which is to say, it seemed like a straw man. When students brought up fairly cogent criticisms of his argument -- and wow, that power dynamic between visiting professors and the ill-prepared undergrads who are being presented with this idea and who don't have the time to think about it very well, that is totally an easy dynamic to exploit! -- his defense was, literally, "well, if you think about that a little more you'll see that I'm right".

Afterwards I was trying to explain to my friend, who reads far more philosophy than I do, about how frustrating this was, and it took him a while to realize that it was Fodor that I had seen, and he said, "Oh! Well, Fodor's a douche." Which I'm inclined to agree with, with what little evidence I have.

Anyway, I hadn't really heard of him before, and his name's come up on this thread, and so I felt like venting.

Fodor is an angry and bitter old man now, for various professional reasons. But it's really bad form to take it out on undergrads. I HATE it when people say, "think more and you'll agree with me". That's a sign of, well, casuistry.

i guess daniel dennett is a celebrity in the sense that his books get reviewed in mainstream places and he writes op-ed articles for the nyt and whoever. (celebrityhood in this context is obviously a pretty loose concept.) he's older than zizek though. maybe you don't get to be a celebrity egghead until you're over 50 or something?

* Occidental College: Tom Hayden

lol tom hayden hasnt taught at oxy in 5 or 6 years

also we have way more dangerous professors who teach dangerous subjects like "jewish male sexuality"

Surely it has to be a little more subtle than that to be casuistry.

Dennett got no respect from my cogsci professor. apparently he's off on his own tangent away from everyone else in the field.

the main thing with this question -- argues the guy i'm reading (stefan collini), and he's right -- isn't who's 'good' or 'right', etc; first you have to identify who counts as an intellectual. for him it means specialists moving across to speak to a wider public, not necessarily on their specialism. the term basically came into play when french intellectuals -- soi-disant intellectuals, i guess, because it was a major act to identify themselves as a class -- weighed in on the dreyfus affair.

so dennett having a name and a public profile maybe puts him on the list.

Unfortunately I think Malcolm Gladwell is what passes for a "public intellectual" these days.

He did have some really good New Yorker pieces back in the day though.

also abanana totally OTM

yeah collini also says it's basically obligatory to say that current intellectuals are 'what passes for intellectualss', because obviously things were better in The Past.

fine, Gladwell's our Sartre

im sort of interested in knowing who was considered a public intellectual 10, 20, 30 years ago (not a rhetorical question, id like to know names)

well going back 30-40 years, on the american side, people like sontag, mcluhan. maybe arthur miller. william f. buckley. arthur schlesinger. (to different degrees, obviously, and in different fields.)

10 years ago? Skip Gates!

gates is totally still a public intellectual

fine, Gladwell's our Sartre

-- rogermexico., Saturday, April 19, 2008 9:29 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

jesus christ: the point isn't 'i agree with...' (in this case, sometime stalinist j-p) but 'are they a public intellectual?' i'm not repping for gladwell; on the other hand, are you really going out to bat for sartre?

i agree w. tipsy's list without actually digging on any of those people.

freakonomics guy is a public intellectual but i dont remember his name

sontag is definitely a public intellectual, practically an axiom.

another question is how many of the 'public intellectuals' of any era are widely-read by academics in their own fields? obviously all of them are read to some extent but the only people i can think of who would potentially be described as public intellectuals who ive read in more than one class during my time at college are foucault and derrida and i dont really think either of them count

-- max, Saturday, April 19, 2008 10:20 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

i think ya girl sontag fits this pretty well, also foucs and derrida -- but the point is really that they reach beyond even academia! academia so big since the 60s (uh in europe anyway) that this is debatable, but that's the idea anyway. nyrb, les temps moderne, encounter, criterion -- intellectuals write for a non-specialist but educated public.

nah but i guess what im thinking is that 'public intellectual' might (sometimes/often) describe guys and girls who non-academics think are really smart, famous, whatever, but who arent very widely-read w/in their fields or academia in general (dennett, for example)

that's possible. im sure dennett is read by some philosopher types -- whereas duder was saying that the french theorists were not, so much. within film studies, though, you encounter people who are au fait with the 60s/70s theory folk but kind of ignorant of yer actual film-critical tradition.

otm. in my intro film studies course we did do eisenstein, bazin, auteur theory and all, but by the 400-level courses it was all deconstructions of slash fiction and soap operas. there was stuff i liked in all of it, but there was a definite disconnect between the traditions.

on Dennett: he's of average interest within philosophy of mind, which is itself a subarea of philosophy. You wouldn't read him in a typical graduate course in philosophy of mind in 2008

^^this is the comment i was thinking of. im willing to still count the frenchies cause even if analytic philosophers dont read them thousands of other academics do, whereas someone like dennett isnt going to be read at all among academics outside philosophy depts and seems to not be particularly widely-read in philosophy depts despite being some sort of vague celebrity among the xkcd crowd and as much of a "public intellectual" as any

wld also be interested to know how freakonomics guy is taken by economics professors

Public intellectual well read by people in his field - John Dewey.

I think everyone I know who has done philosophy of mind has looked at a little Dennett. Bertrand Russell kind of fits what max is saying, had one big heavy book no one read (think he claimed he'd only heard of a handful of people that had read the whole thing) and then lots of popular stuff that doesn't seem to get studied at all.

michael hardt and toni negri might count as public intellectuals who are still read w/in their disciplines (or related disciplines)

10-15 years ago camille paglia would have been mentioned way before now (if with a lot of derision). but i guess she's faded. i know she still writes for salon, but i don't get the sense anyone cares about her anymore, even people who hate her. (i'm actually a sometime paglia defender, i think she gets kind of a bad rap. but she brought a lot of it on herself.)

tara_reid_scientist.jpg

Naomi Klein?

Oh yeah, and what's up with Cornell West in MTV ads?

Back in my college daze, (about a year ago), it seemed like Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Giorgio Agamben, Warren Montag, and Achille Mbembe were all sort of the newer generation of celeb nerds. I think the only one of those folks who are young though is Mbembe.

John McWhorter

archbish of canterbury

Stanley Fish has a NYT blog. So does the Freakanomics guy.

As has MOMUS!

and suzanne vega...

Richard Littlejohn

archbish of canterbury

-- Frogman Henry, Sunday, 20 April 2008 17:31

lol

theory zzzzzzzzzzzz

well yeah

dr morbius public intellectual

NEVAH!

private intellectual

Wait, Morbs, it's Sunday, you're not supposed to be online on Sundays.

America has a great many public intellectuals. Only a handful or two on the list of people who scare David Horowitz qualify.

one list

The fact that Thomas Friedman is the 4th American from the top of that list isn't really helping your case.

Thomas Friedman (Our fourth greatest contemporary philosopher)

significance as a public intellectual does not necessarily vary directly with significance as an intellectual. the list was merely intended to illustrate what (some) people mean by the term, and as an alternative to the people listed in the horowitz book, which does not list public intellectuals.

Okay, Friedman fits within the list's qualifications. But I think when people bemoan the lack of public intellectuals in the U.S., they're complaining that aren't many academics or, uh, thinkers addressing a broadly similar constituency or contributing to the same discourse. Of course there are academics in various fields who have attracted a larger audience, but that list just sort of reinforces the feeling that a lot of these people aren't really talking to each other. Do Friedman and Jurgen Habermas share a public? Are they similarly qualified as 'intellectuals'?

share a public... sphere? lololololol

AC Grayling. He gets tarred with the popularist brush but he ain't no Alain de Boton. In a way he is going for the same mass-appeal, trying to bring philosophy to a wider audience, but he's a better thinker and writer and deals with more serious topics.

He's rubbish

i'm kind of impressed habermas is still alive.

He's rubbish

ah cmon gimme more than that.

Mediocre philospher for hire

Mediocre -> pitching things at a level the public can understand. For hire -> getting philosophy out there in the public sphere. Win-win.

grayling, john gray... roger scruton, probably some other dudes are UK category public intellectuals, like em or not.

Mediocre -> pitching things at a level the public can understand.

Nah. I meant more in the traditional sense of "not very good really"

stupendous hair.

Well I haven't read his more academic stuff so can't comment on that, but for all his Guardian columns, and every time I've heard him on the radio or seen him on Newsnight he's been utterly OTMFM. He might not come across as the deepest of thinkers but for the kind of practical ethics subjects that he comments on I don't think deep thought is required; just a kind of a clarity and commitment, and lack of agenda, that you normally just don't get from pundits.

Indeed, my problem is that I hang out with bitchy philosophers

i doubt he's any worse than the run of public intellectuals in this country over the last century or so -- he's a good example beucause he isn't a massive game-changing wittgenstein/chomsky/foucault-type.

Freddie Ayer >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> AC Grayling

Never read Ayer, but Grayling is engaging and fun and not too lite-- a perfect public intellectual!

I quite enjoyed Steve Fullers "Kuhn vs Popper The Struggle for the Soul of Science" yes a very dramatic title, to my mind he covers way too much ground and his theological asides are annoying but any defence of Popper is ok with me. 8/10 !

re comments on the position of Chomsky/Dennet/Fodor and other "mentals"
my only comment would be reacting to Skinners excesses is well and good but idioms and rules dont have to be "internal", ie at some point "beliefs" are not grounded "on" knowledge, they are grounded "in" action-hence beliefs dont cause , or prefigure our actions.

being a public intellectual in contemporary America is the loneliest number that you'll ever do.

Since Fish has been mentioned this seems timely - O HAI I UPGRADED YR POMO:

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/french-theory-in-america-part-two/

http://www.anythingleft-handed.co.uk/nl/nlimages/eggheads.jpg

oh right