An Invitation Ruffles Philosophical Feathers
June 29, 2002 By EMILY EAKIN
The black studies scholar Cornel West, who may be best known for recently cutting a rap album and for feuding with the president of Harvard University, is also the author of a well-regarded book on American pragmatism that includes a section on the philosopher Sidney Hook. So he seemed a natural choice to invite to a conference on Hook that the Graduate Center at the City University of New York is planning to hold in October.
Yet when a group of prominent conservatives - the political essayist Irving Kristol, the art critic Hilton Kramer and the historians Gertrude Himmelfarb and John Patrick Diggins - who had also been invited heard that Mr. West would be attending, they abruptly withdrew.
On Thursday afternoon, Mr. Diggins, a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center who had been serving as an informal adviser for the conference, said his objections were scholarly, not political. "I'm not concerned about Cornel West's political point of view," he said by telephone from Laguna Beach, Calif., where he was attending a conference. "I'm concerned about whether he has any point of view in matters of philosophy." Mr. West, he explained, did not have a reputation for coming to conferences prepared: "In order to comment on Sidney Hook, one would have to read at least 20 of his books. Cornel West is such a celebrity intellectual, I don't think he'll have time for it."
An hour later, however, Mr. Diggins called back to say that he planned to participate in the conference after all. "This whole thing has become utterly unfortunate," he said, adding that he hoped all those who had withdrawn would reconsider. "I hope the conference continues with Professor West," he said. "After all, he is a public figure. To have him speaking on Sidney Hook is a significant event in American culture." Mr. Kristol, Ms. Himmelfarb and Mr. Kramer declined to comment. (Last week, Mr. Kramer told The Chronicle of Higher Education that when he learned Mr. West would be at the conference, he decided his own attendance "wouldn't be appropriate.")
The boycott came as a shock to other conference participants, who quickly condemned it. Acknowledging that some of Mr. West's scholarly activities have been the object of fierce debate, scholars say his participation at the conference, which is sponsored by the graduate school's Center for the Humanities, should not be a source of contention. Not only is Mr. West an academic philosopher schooled in Sidney Hook's brand of philosophical pragmatism, they point out, but his book "The American Evasion of Philosophy" (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) contains a significant - and sympathetic - assessment of Hook's thought.
"I consider West's work on Hook to be first rate," said Christopher Phelps, an assistant professor of history at Ohio State University at Mansfield who helped secure Mr. West's participation. "Whatever other controversies have swirled around him, it seems to me that to claim he does not have equal place at this conference is intellectually indefensible."
Timed to the centennial of Hook's birth, the conference would be the first major posthumous assessment of the philosopher, whose intellectual contributions have been overshadowed by his controversial politics. A protégé of John Dewey who distinguished himself early in his career with an important study of Karl Marx, Hook became increasingly disenchanted with the left, emerging after World War II as an ardent anti-Stalinist and hard-line cold warrior. Hook's reputation as a turncoat was cemented in 1985, four years before he died, when Ronald Reagan awarded him the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
An enthusiastic polemicist, Hook rarely turned down an opportunity to debate an opponent, an irony not lost on the boycott's critics. Robert Talisse, an assistant professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville who helped organize the conference, quoted one of the 10 rules for intellectual debate Hook laid out in a famous 1954 essay, "The Ethics of Controversy": "The cardinal sin, when we are looking for truth of fact or wisdom of policy, is refusal to discuss, or action which blocks discussion."
For his part, Mr. West seemed strangely unaffected by the furor. Reached by telephone on Thursday, he said he had no memory of being invited to the conference and learned of the boycott only when a reporter contacted him last week. Still, he said he was eager to attend. "I have learned much from the art criticism of Kramer, the fine historiography of Himmelfarb, the intellectual history of Diggins and some of the essays of Kristol," he said serenely. "I just see through their nonsense."
www.nytimes.com/2002/06/29/arts/29HOOK.html?ex=1026354139&ei=1&en=fd33ca3 bb38b1f63
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
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