On Mon, 10 May 2010 12:18:19 -0700, Christopher D. Green wrote: >Allen is perhaps exempt, given his background, but it seems to me that >psychologists complaining about the turgidity of other scholars' prose >is a very dangerous game to be play. If anyone is guilty of >intentionally making relatively simple ideas seem complicated by giving >them inordinately arcane labels in order to render them "scientific," it >is psychologists.
Chris paints, I think, with a very wide brush and very broad strokes. I hazard that the philosophers come in first when it comes to using arcane or even mundane terms in ways that are simply uninterpretable. For fun and giggles, see the following student article on the rehabilitated Nazi Martin Heidegger; see: http://www.thecrimson.com/column/the-f-word/article/2010/4/27/being-nussbaum-butler-academic/ Favorite line: |Encountering impossible semantic permutations of the word “being”—capitalized |and uncapitalized, infinitive and participle, singular and plural—I took to narrating |the most esoteric examples aloud. What else could I do with a phrase like “Being |means the Being of beings”? And how about this conclusion: |In the end, beyond elucidating the question of being, Heidegger taught me that |all academic disciplines are forms of gibberish—specialized lexicons that must |be mastered before they can glean any insights. Each is comical in its own way, |whether through overzealous use of the word “being” or too much C++. Note: the article gets extra point for links to the "Postmodern Generator" and the "Bad Writing Contest" websites. >My personal (anti-)favorite has always been the behaviorists' penchant >for using "perseverate" whne they mean simply to repeat or continue. Ah, come on, stop beating up on the behaviorists. Everyone knows that you have to go to the phenomenologists in order to get authenic gibberish. ;-) -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=2568 or send a blank email to leave-2568-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
