Justin writes:
>My experience of academia is that philosophy professors are not
>intellectuals. My ex-colleagues at Ohio State were (are) not readers or
>people of wide culture, or even much curiosity. They were mostly narrow
>technicians who had found a little groove they were good at, generally a
>technical thing, and who mined it as a sort of a job, but who didn't read
>or discuss cultural matters, or even philosophical matters, outside that
>narrow schtick. This was also true of most of my profs at Princeton, the
>No. 1 ranked school in the discipline in the country, as such rankings
>(largely compiled by Princeton grads) go. My own mentor, a man of genuine
>cultivation and no publications, called them "philosophoids." Rorty fled
>the place.
Maybe I'm naive, but I can't understand this. Shouldn't philosophers, of
all people, be experts on a wide variety of philosophical thought, going
back to the ancient Greeks and nowadays stuff from non-"Western" cultures?
After all, don't we build on the foundations created by Aristotle and all
those old guys? Does this ignorance -- and non-intellectualism -- have
anything to do with the method of "analytical philosophy"?
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine