The fellow who dreamed up this award -- journal editor Dennis Dutton, who teaches the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand -- has an article in today's Wall Street Journal, "Language Crimes," that explains his animus toward today's jargonistic professoriate. Some excerpts:
"... kitsch theorists mimic the effects of rigor and profundity without actually doing serious intellectual work. Their jargon-laden prose always suggests but never delivers genuine insight."
"To ask what [Judith Butler's writing] means is to miss the point.... [It] beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it."
"As a lifelong student of Kant, I know that philosophy is not always well-written. But when Kant or Aristotle or Wittgenstein are most obscure, it's because they are honestly grappling with the most complex and difficult problems the human mind can encounter. How different from the desperate incantations of the Bad Writing Contest winners, who hope to persuade their readers not by argument but by obscurity that they too are the great minds of the age."
Carl Remick
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