On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 11:12 AM, Chuck Grimes <c123grimes at att.net> wrote:
> Yes, I would say my real education began when I started reading original
> sources.
>
> Joanna
> -----------
>
> There is a kind of equivalent to this not reading but lots of opinion on
> something in
> art history and criticism by people who don't know how to make art. They
> get their phd without picking up a bush where they have to make something.
>
> I reconfronted this problem the minute I read Shadia Dury's take down of
> LS. I had to read LS which turned out to be his opinion of what a long list
> of other philosophers had written. So then I had to read them and see what
> LS was doing. He had read them alright, but he had written mostly bad
> interpretations, making their original arguments into straw men. I finally
> got him in a direct contradiction in Hobbes, Leviathan Thank god LS had
> footnoted similar passages in De Cive. Well so I didn't have to go through
> the whole tedious Hobbes.
>
> Bad scholarship or a lie, I couldn't tell. When LS turned to Calvin, I
> stopped. I am not going to read and analyze Calvin, period, unless somebody
> pays me. And I was only working on LS's first book on Spinzoa----another
> fascinating character in an intensely interesting time and place, Amsterdam
> 1660s. Strauss hated him on some
> twisted principle I could never figure out. But this gave me a lot of
> insights into the
> current push pull battle with Israel and US Jews, and the enlightenment
> principle of
> freedom of speech for intellectuals like Kushner.
>
> Nobody I know could understand why I found LS fascinating and he was such a
> rightwing pig anyhow... It was the fun of doing scholarship, like I had
> never done
> in school against an intellectual enemy. Catch him out. LS had footnoted
> his own passage, which directly contradicted what Hobbes and written when
> you track back to the source. There's is a reward somehow in that.
>
> CG
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