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January 10, 2005
A quote from the Daily Telegraph about French intellectuals:
"What would the French do without their intellectuals? Holding court in the cafe rather than the lecture hall, surrounded by female admirers, they philosophise, glass in hand and cigarette smouldering, less to instruct than to entertain. Ever since Jean-Paul Sartre, this archetypal figure has held the Gallic imagination in thrall...
...Most French intellectuals of the last century got away with toadying to totalitarian tyranny, or with corrupting younger generations, or with obscure and pretentious charlatanry - often all three. Levy's chief crime, for his peers, is to be too rich, too famous, too bourgeois. That, at least, is progress."
'Corrupting younger generations'. What on earth does that mean?
The same as it did when the charge was levelled against Socrates.
Asking too many questions?
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Proof that stereotypes can survive for millenia... but strangely it's continental philosophers that seem always to get accused of falling prey to the cult of personality. Going to the AAP conference easily disabused me of that myth... David Chalmers is as much a rock star as Derrida ever was.