An Invitation Ruffles Philosophical Feathers

[Peter K.]

>>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."

I thought West was being a wise-acre but apparently not.
>From Alterman's latest column:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020715&s=alterman

"One wonders just what is so frightening. Perhaps it is a sense of being outgunned. I have seen West
debate the elder Podhoretz at a conference sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, and
the two proved so mismatched I left feeling a little sorry for Norman. Equally likely, however, is
the fear that a leftist like West will remind audiences that their putative hero died a proud
socialist. He may have been a fanatical anti-Communist, but his passions derived from an honest
engagement in the life of the mind, something the neocons long ago forfeited in their love affair
with power.

Ironically, West told Sam Tanenhaus that he didn't know he had been invited to the conference and
was wholly unaware of having caused a conservative boycott. He explained, however, that he had been
planning to go anyway--as a spectator. He saw a notice about it in The New York Review of Books and
looked forward to catching up on the recent scholarship on Hook. West recalled that back in 1985 he
had flown from California to Washington, DC, to be present for Hook's Jefferson Lecture and had the
opportunity to tell the then-83-year-old philosopher how important his work had been to him. "