Lightweights and Losers (Was: Sidney, Hilton, Cornel, etc.)

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Wed Jun 26 14:54:00 PDT 2002



>
>
>Justin Schwartz wrote:
> >
> > Same as Summers' attack on West; he's fair game because he's black. I'll
> > believe otherwise when I see West [oops! I meant to say Summers] go
>after white lightweights on the Harvard
> > faculty. I could name about three dozen off the top of my head, many of
>whom
> > have accomplishments rather more slender than West's.
> >
>
>I've sort of wondered over the years at the thinness of the
>contributions from Harvard professors of english.

Yah. In philosophy, Rawls, Quine, and Goodman (all dead or retired) were real giants. Nozick was a clever second rater who made his bones with Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a rather bad but very flashy detefense of libertarianism. Burton Dreben was a logician who never published anything. Quine thought he was smart. Stanley Cavell, well, the literary critics may find something in his stuff. Putnam used to be graet, and indeed did wonderful work through the mid-70s in many fields, and interesting work through the early 80s. Since then his stuff has been worse than embarassing. The current crop of Harvard philosophers are certainly all very smart and technically competent, but no one knows who they are. Their work is of little interest to even people in the field. The same is true of my undergrad alma, Princeton, except for the folks who are still there from when I was there.

jks

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