new celebrity eggheads??

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.

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

then again my exp in college is pretty specific and heavy on a certain kind of thought and certain kinds of thinkers and i cant speak to intellectuals from areas outside my interests

well back in the day John Locke and Etienne Condillac were public intellectuals that were read by specialists also; Locke's Essay was evidently a best-seller in London! More recently, John Rawls was such a figure. Foucault gets some respect among analytic philosophers, but Derrida is just the butt of jokes.

In math there are a few intellectuals known in the public, like Andrew Wiles, but mainly as freaks, not for their ideas (I think Stephen Hawking is known the same way).

haha, my linear algebra professor on wiles: "yeah, that dude's a speed freak"

wiles used to come to the video store where i worked in high school all the time

shy dude

yeah over drinks I could tell stories about mathematicians and drugs, but I won't kiss and tell on the internet.

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

Foucault gets some respect among analytic philosophers, but Derrida is just the butt of jokes.

im sure this is true but neither of them are analytic philosophers and both are widely-read in other academic disciplines. i was thinking more of someone like buckley--is he widely-read in politics departments, on any level? or sontag, outside of a couple essays most in art history/theory depts?

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!

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