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Among The Professional Lovers Of Wisdom

Learning from the demotic ejaculations of some of America's top philosophers
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Begging your pardon for the language below, but you really do have to see this to appreciate its greatness. Golden-tongued Yale philosopher Jason Stanley continues to draw plaudits from the academic philosophy community for his incisive dismissal of Oxford’s Richard Swinburne and those who may share his convictions. From Stanley’s public Facebook page:

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A reader who is also a philosopher writes:

These are not nobodies either. Jonathan is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and is very active and well-known in the profession, and is often featured on popular philosophy blogs. Georgetown University’s Kukla, too, is fairly well known. In addition to being an editor for a prominent philosophical journal, she’s often interviewed and featured in magazines like HuffingtonPost, LA Times, 3AM magazine, etc. A quick Google search will yield those results.

Kukla not only teaches philosophy at Georgetown, a putatively Catholic university, but is also editor in chief of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal and Public Affairs Quarterly. She is the senior researcher at Georgetown’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics, which, according to its website, believes that “a morally complex world needs practically engaged ethics.” The Kennedy Institute of Ethics wants you to know that is “the best of Georgetown in its commitment to conversation for the common good.” Which I guess is why its senior researcher wants Richard Swinburne’s defenders to suck her giant queer cock.

The Ivy League continues to cover itself in glory on Stanley’s Facebook page:

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John Collins teaches philosophy at Columbia University. 

Other insightful commentary from colleagues and friends of Prof. Stanley available on his Facebook page, including one remark eagerly anticipating the death of “Swineburne.”

A couple of readers have sent me this paragraph from the introduction to Stanley’s book How Propaganda Works. Stanley discusses his “intellectual debt” to his sociologist father:

My father, like my mother Sara Stanley, was a survivor of the Holocaust. No doubt as a consequence, he devoted his academic career to a theoretical repudiation of authoritarianism in all of its various guises. He argues in his work that no system that usurps the autonomy of persons can be acceptable, even if it is in the name of greater social efficiency or the common good. The lessons of history show that humans are too prone to confuse the furtherance of their own interests with the common good, and their subjective explanatory framework with objective fact.

I suppose that in the view of Stanley fils, philosopher, the truth of things is to be determined by what furthers individual autonomy, and people who don’t understand that are living in false consciousness. Also, f–k you, assholes.

Why on earth do people say that the humanities are in crisis within the academy? I can’t imagine.

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