A couple of years ago there was a big scandal about College admissions. The true scandal however was that some Professors of non-STEM subjects are now stupider than their students. They can't write a single sentence without making some elementary error of logic or upholding some obviously false doctrine.
As a case in point, Agnes Callard writes in Point-
If you tried to understand museums by sitting outside and studying the demographics of who enters and exits, you might conclude that they existed to perpetuate the elite, and that they should work to achieve more social justice.
This is nonsense. Elites don't go to museums- they have busy, exciting, lives. Tourists and school kids and lonely people go to museums.
A Museum director may pretend to be fighting for social justice or to be conserving elite values or some other shite. But who gives a shit about museum directors?
Perhaps they do in fact do too much of the first thing, and should do more of the second.
Thinks nobody at all- unless they are trapped in that shitty profession.
Nonetheless your research would be missing something very important about what museums are for, something that requires entering the museum, and looking at the art.
A gallery has art. A museum may do so but then again it may not. But there is no need to enter a Gallery to know that you will be looking at 'art'.
A museum is nothing like a University because there is no entry requirement for the former. Only a cretin like Callard would make such a foolish comparison. The fact is, galleries and museums are premised on the notion that no special instruction is needed to appreciate what is on offer. Universities make the opposite claim. To study Medicine you need to show you are were an outstanding student of the sciences at School. There may be some shitty non-STEM subjects you can study at University but the pretense will be maintained that you showed academic promise and that was the basis of your admission.
That doesn’t really get the pundits off the hook, because they tend to be college-educated. The real scandal, if I may, is the fact that so many people who attended one seem to have no idea what it’s for.
There is only one person who went to College who doesn't get what it was for- that person is Callard.
So let me come out and tell you what a university is for: a university is a place where people help each other access the highest intellectual goods.
Nope. That's a Research Institute of a specialist kind. True, such an Institute may be hosted on a University Campus or a particular Department may function like a Research Institute but admission to even the best Research University does not mean access to that charmed circle where 'the highest intellectual good' is pursued- i.e. new discoveries are being made.
A university is a place of heterodidacticism.
No it isn't. The Didact, from the Greek didaktikos meaning teacher, teaches. She is not expected to learn from her students. She may collaborate on a research project with a colleague but research isn't teaching.
An autodidact is someone who learns best on their own,
No. The word means self-instructed. A poor man may have no choice but to be an autodidact.
by teaching themselves things. “Heterodidact” is a word I made up to describe the rest of us, for whom learning and knowing is a social activity.
So, Callard is talking about chatting. You can learn all sorts of interesting things- e.g. did you know Bill Gates was once a woman?- while imparting equally interesting items of gossip- e.g. Bill Clinton had an affair with Bill Gates. Their love child was Billie Piper.
While the college-admissions scandal was happening, I was teaching a class on Aristotle’s scientific system.
Callard was mugging up some stupid shite and regurgitating it to her cretinous students. She wasn't teaching shit.
What a crazy thing to teach or study, you might think. Hasn’t it all been surpassed by modern science? No.
The cretin means 'Yes'. Fuck is wrong with her?
But even if it had been, it is truly amazing to witness the birth of scientific thought.
Which, for Greeks, had occurred long before Aristotle.
Aristotle was the first to conceive that the changing, sensible, empirical world around us could be rationally systematized,
False. Aristotle was the first to systematize logic but he himself considered earlier thinkers to have offered rational systematizations of natural phenomena.
and he did this in opposition to a tradition—beginning with Parmenides and culminating in Plato—that insisted such a project was in principle incoherent.
No. It could be coherent. It was just wrong.
Aristotle proved that science was possible.
There is no need to prove that something can exist if people already know it exists.
His works—Physics, Parts of Animals, On the Soul, On Generation and Corruption, etc.—taken together, constitute the most ambitious intellectual project a human being has ever undertaken.
Nonsense! The fellow was simply a teacher. He invented nothing, discovered nothing and created nothing. He merely contributed to the prestige of a service industry whose total revenue, in the US, is less than that of the pet industry. Americans spend more on their doggies than on degrees.
And he succeeded to an astonishing degree—his most radical moves against his contemporary interlocutors are the ones we’ve most tenaciously internalized.
No we haven't. That's why people have to do a course in that shite. But they forget everything in it the moment they've gotten their grade.
I’m going to make a confession about that class:
You wet yourself in front of your students. I sympathize.
I did not know the material I was teaching very well.
That's why you wet yourself. You suddenly realized you had prepared a lecture on 'Harris Turtle the Teenage Mutant nobody talks about', rather than some Greek guy who wasn't a Turtle at all.
Aristotle’s natural philosophy is not my specialization, and I intentionally chose readings I was least comfortable with. Minutes before I walked into the classroom each Tuesday or Thursday afternoon, I had been buried in commentaries and confusion.
So the woman did no research. She just read commentaries.
There was so much I did not understand about Aristotle’s arguments against atomism!
But it is easy to divide what is not understood into philological/hermeneutic problems and metaphysical ones. Show which Greek words in Aristotle are problematic for scholars and then try to relate what Aristotle might have meant to current arguments against atomism.
But time was up, and I had to get in there and say something. If you were in that class, you probably thought what I said sounded pretty good, pretty coherent.
I'd have thought her a babbling cretin. But then I wouldn't be fool enough to take a class in Aristotle save one given by a reputable Professor of Greek.
Actually, it was. But that wasn’t all me. I was looking at the students’ faces, noticing how they paid attention when I was making sense, noticing when they didn’t follow.
This won't do. Teachers must ensure they are making sense all the time. They need to prepare their lectures well in advance. Waltzing in and saying stuff which the students nod at isn't teaching. It is swindling young people.
Their interest drew me out. I listened to their questions and reframed the argument on the spot; sometimes an objection was so devastating I had to reorganize a whole lecture on the fly. Sometimes, when I just plain didn’t know the answer, I asked the question back at the class.
The problem here is that Callard could have done exactly the same thing if she had wandered into the wrong lecture hall and found herself talking about not Aristotle but the Arthashastra.
Teaching involves a sleight of hand in which the part of the student is erased, and the teacher ends up getting all the credit.
No. Swindling may involve legerdemain. Teaching does not.
Actually that’s a point from Book 3 of Aristotle’s Physics: he says the teacher isn’t teaching if the student isn’t learning, because teaching and learning are one activity.
And swindling is not that activity. Of course, by sheer 'luck'( τῠ́χη • (túkhē)) kids may learn from a teacher who knows shit. I once attended a Maths class with really bright kids. The teacher would write an equation and within five minutes one guy would come up and talk us through his solution. There'd be some back and forth from the other bright kids. The advantage with this approach was that we were learning about generalizability. It almost had the appearance of 'spontaneous order'. But the teacher wasn't really ignorant and idle. He was guiding this process by the sequence of equations that were being solved and showing how different branches of math related to each other.
Aristotle said that kids can't have this sort of 'luck'. They are too undeveloped. At a later stage, sure, they have 'teleology'- by 18 some dudes are obviously going to be mathematicians and if they sit together solving problems then that is 'research' which may exceed anything being done by tenured Professors anywhere.
I was able to get something out of that Math class- grandly titled a 'Seminar', i.e. you got credit simply by showing up- because some of the young people were already accomplished mathematicians nearing the peak of their power. I was as stupid as shit, but seeing how these guys functioned was helpful for me. After all, I'm a consumer, not a producer, of Maths. I just needed to know which branch was helpful to me and which other branch showed why that help would always be limited.
Now don’t go thinking this was some kind of subpar, slapdash course.
Yet that is precisely what it was.
This was one of the best classes I’ve ever taught.
Because you knew nothing about the subject and your students were too stupid or bored to call you on it.
Good courses have all the messiness of human cooperation baked into them.
No. A course of lectures on the internet such that there is no Q&A and no interaction between students which nevertheless greatly improves the student's performance is a very good course. Incidentally what Aristotle bequeathed to us is the lectures from the courses he gave. People who read Aristotle in isolation from each other, nevertheless found him useful to them in some respect. No 'messiness of human cooperation' is involved when we read a set of lectures written long ago or other didactic works- e.g. St. Paul's epistles.
That’s what I wish I could’ve communicated to those embroiled in the admissions-scandal brouhaha;
But those guys had gone in for plenty of very messy, not to say shitty, human cooperation of a criminal kind.
I wanted to break down the walls around my classroom, throw a spotlight on it, and tell everyone to stop talking, look and listen: “It is happening right here—this is what universities are for: reading Aristotle together.”
But smart peeps read Aristotle alone. What is the point of hearing the jock's opinion or the cheer-leader's opinion or that of the Goth or some other such stereotypes? Does this have something to do with overcoming the trauma of epistemic self-abuse?
If reading things together is so important, why not join a book club? Fuck Aristotle, lets do 50 shades of Grey while drinking Chardonnay.
All the arguments about elitism and corporatization and donations were as irrelevant as the ivy growing on the walls.
Coz Universities are just book-clubs. Wake up sheeple! Why are you shelling out big bucks to send your kids to Ivy League? Just get them some nice paperbacks and a box of Chardonnay and lock them in the Garage with a bunch of other adolescents.
I could give you a hundred more examples, but I’ll restrict myself to one. The previous quarter, I taught a class on courage, and we read Homer’s Iliad. I think the Iliad is one of the greatest things ever made by human beings,
is the sort of thing Donald Trump might say. Callard should have taught at Trump University.
but I hadn’t read it in at least seven years. Why not? What was stopping me from picking it up? For that matter, why am I not reading it right now? The answer is that it’s hard to read the Iliad.
In Greek- sure. In English- not so much.
Have you ever tried? It takes so much energy.
No. Read it aloud. Dactylic hexameter restores energy. Bardic poetry actually improved battle readiness and stamina.
All those epithets. So many tendons being unstrung by spearpoints.
OMG! I'm such a girlie girl! Why couldn't Achilles have simply braided Hector's hair while they gossiped about how Agamemnon is so-ooo jelly of Menelaus?
I am not some special kind of human who just sits around reading the Iliad for fun.
So, you don't like ancient Greek bardic poetry coz u r a big girlie girl.
I’m not that different from the students I teach.
Because they too are as ignorant as shit.
They get their energy from me, I get my energy from them. That’s how a university works.
No. That's the way an orgy works.
And it’s totally amazing that human beings can do this,
Yes dear. It's totes amazing.
that we can form intellectual communities.
You can't. You are too stupid and you write like a Donald Trump who has taken too much oestrogen in the hope of stimulating hair growth.
If we didn’t actually see it happening, human beings collaborating with nothing to bind them to one another but a shared intellectual interest, we would doubt such a thing was possible.
The problem here is that the vast majority of University students don't continue to collaborate with each other to delve deeper into Aristotle. They may bind together for some other reason- e.g. to achieve success in business or politics or the law or something of that sort.
The very best mathematicians do need each other in a way that philosophers don't. This is because there are only a few people on the planet who can check their latest theorem or understand its significance. Yet mathematics probably has more recluses than any other discipline. Some are collegial and work in Universities or Research Institutes, but many withdraw from such places so as to pursue a higher level of abstraction.
These communities are far from perfect, a fact they inherit from the creatures who compose them. But they are wonderful.
Book clubs may be wonderful as may throwing away the books and just getting stuck into the Chardonnay.
Most wonderful is the manner in which the interest is shared—how the whole of energy and enthusiasm becomes more than the sum of its parts, eventually growing strong enough to vanquish a foe as formidable as the tedious, confusing intricacies of Aristotle’s argument against atomism in On Generation and Corruption.
There is nothing confusing about it. Aristotle's logic was faulty. It is easy to show how modern developments in logic and category theory resolve the problems he raised. How can a 'foe' be formidable if Science vanquished it long ago?
A university is a world inside the world, a haven, a bubble,
No. It is merely a service provider.
and those who reacted to the college-admissions scandal tried to pop that bubble.
No. They merely wanted the service to be provided in a proper and lawful manner.
My initial impulse was to see this as an act of aggression and hostility: they are trying to blame us for everything!
No. They are blaming guys who took bribes. If Callard did not take bribes, she is in the clear.
But with hindsight, I have begun to entertain the possibility of a different interpretation. Maybe the sentiment driving the scandalmongering was marked as much by envy as indignation. After all, one reason you might try to pop a bubble is because you want in.
No. You can't get into a popped bubble. Still, Callard is onto something here. Bernie Madoff may firmly believe he ended up in jail coz of envy.
Do people envy Callard? Would you really want to prepare a lecture on Aristotle? Wouldn't you rather be a great surgeon saving the lives of beautiful little babies?
As I mentioned, the journalists and pundits spearheading the attack did not lack for experience of the academic world.
While this academic is turning into a gushing type of journalist.
They had all been to colleges, good colleges most of them. One of them—the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens
a mensch. He did good work getting the Israeli point of view across at a difficult time. But he lost the plot later on. Then Trump squashed him like a bedbug. Sad.
—went to college with me. We were in classes together. I remember one class in particular, with Leon Kass,
also Jewish. Kass was a Doctor who took the wrong turn into bioethics.
on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
Kass was bright but no philologist. Anyway, Mussar Ethics is better than any Aristotelian shite.
It was one of the best intellectual experiences of my life.
But you are as stupid as shit.
At first I thought, indignantly, people like Bret Stephens should know better. But then I realized: people like Bret Stephens do know better. Maybe that’s the whole problem. Maybe they know what they are missing. Under the pretext of channeling others’ feelings of exclusion, they could actually be venting their own.
Very true! A guy with a Pulitzer is jelly coz he isn't having to write up some shite on Aristotle for the benefit of a bunch of thickos.
In his brilliant essay “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” Leo Strauss
also Jewish
ascribes the following view to ancient authors, Plato in particular:
They believed that the gulf separating “the wise” and “the vulgar” was a basic fact of human nature which could not be influenced by any progress of popular education: philosophy, or science, was essentially a privilege of “the few.” They were convinced that philosophy as such was suspect to, and hated by, the majority of men.
Strauss observes that an author who holds such a view
at a time when few people read anything at all
can address his intended reader
simply by making it boring for anyone else
—the person who is innately wise and philosophical—by way of a practice he calls “writing between the lines.”
But this is not what Plato and Aristotle and so forth actually did.
This practice involves saying things whose explicit content might not be true:
by lying
He would defeat his purpose if he indicated clearly which of his statements expressed a noble lie, and which the still more noble truth. For philosophic readers he would do almost more than enough by drawing their attention to the fact that he did not object to telling lies which were noble, or tales which were merely similar to truth.
The phrase “noble lie” is taken from Plato’s Republic, in which Socrates constructs an ideal city, lays out the details of an educational program for its rulers—who will later be known as “philosopher-kings”—and proposes that its citizens be told a lie.
Strauss was speaking of esotericism after Christianity, Judaism, Islam etc. had started persecuting heretics. Callard is so stupid she thinks Strauss was talking about Plato- who explicitly develops this doctrine!
The lie is that the education that the rulers received was a dream, and that these rulers are equipped to rule because they have gold mixed into their souls. (The other, lesser citizens have silver or bronze mixed into their souls.)
Notice two things about Plato’s noble lie: first, the reader is explicitly told that it is not the truth. Plato does not hide this information “between the lines.” Second, its political function
is to oppose Democracy. The tax burden on Plato's peeps was simply too great. Also Athens kept losing wars so it wasn't like the rich could recoup themselves by fucking over the colonies. This was also the reason Trump squashed Stephens. The cunt thought neo-con adventures were cool even though it was abundantly clear they couldn't turn a profit the way the first Gulf War had.
is to naturalize culture, which is to say, to make it appear as though differences caused by education
which only the rich could afford. This is not 'naturalizing'- it is a guy who has set up an Academy drumming up business.
were inscribed in people from the outset in the form of innate capacities whose existence underlies outer differences in social class.
This 'noble lie' would have been familiar enough to Ashkenazis from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The nobility claimed 'Sarmatian' origin. Aristocrats often pretend to be 'blue blooded' and descended from superior type of barbarians- e.g. Aristocratic Franks vs Plebian Gauls, Norman ichor vs Anglo Saxon blood, etc, etc.
I believe that Plato’s phrase “noble lie” is an attempt to describe something we might nowadays call “the ideology of the elite”—the story that elite people tell themselves, and one another, in order to justify their elevated social position.
Fuck off! The elite are the guys who have made billions or achieved a better than billionaire life-style at some one else's expense (e.g. Barack Obama) by reason of their own enterprise and innovation. They may be polite to Professors but they are also polite to the maitre 'd and the hairdresser to the stars and the personal trainer who got Keanu Reeves looking buff in his last movie.
In Plato’s case, the privileges that get justified in this way are not wealth (the rulers in his city are kept poor, and even prevented from owning property) nor ruling (which Plato sees as a burden and a chore), but the gift of education itself, and that of the philosophical life that, we will later learn, the rulers will get to spend most of their lives living.
That was the lie part of it. The ignoble part of it was that Plato was running an Academy which had to compete with high price Sophists who could help you win your case or get an office of profit from the Ecclesia.
Universities still promise to do that. Take some shitty course on Aristotle and in a couple of years you'll get hired by a White Shoe law firm or whatever.
When Strauss ascribes to Plato the view that there is some “basic fact of human nature” that excludes many from and entitles few to the highest kind of life, this seems to be the content of the account that Plato presented in the Republic as a lie.
What is wrong with the sentence given above? It has a when, but where is the then? What is Callard saying? Strauss thought Plato was lying? Is that it? The problem here is that a Greek speaker would hear not 'noble lie' but paramythia- a comforting story, but also an epithet of the Mother of God. After all, if you have reincarnation then everybody gets a turn at everything- I have been a God, a dog, a beggar, a bugger, etc etc.
If Plato did not subscribe to the idea that only a select few have a talent for philosophy, does it follow that he thought everyone had it? Far from it. For one thing, he sets up elaborate contests and competitions to see whether the recipients of his educational program have in fact learned what they were taught.
Yes, yes. But there is 'innate knowledge' and anyway everybody gets reborn as everybody else. Face it Callard. Athens wasn't Jerusalem. Them goys didn't get that there is bodily resurrection at the end of time- t’chiyat hameitim dude! 'According to the Talmud , all bodies not already in Israel will be rolled through underground tunnels to the holy land. Avoiding this process, which is said to be spiritually painful, is one reason some Jews choose to be buried in Israel.'
This suggests an acknowledgment of noneducational factors in the outcome. What Plato denies (or rather, what he uses the myth to deceptively assert) is that these factors play the role of talents or innate human potential.
Nonsense! Plato doesn't deny stupid shite which only exists in Callard's brain.
Strauss is right to want to distance Plato from the conceit that each of us has, within us, an equally powerful wellspring of intellectual potential, just waiting to be released or unshackled.
Why not say Gauss & Mauss & Von Haus were equally right to want to distance Plato from being a fucking pederast? Wanting shite has fuck all to do with the shit that actually went down.
The core idea of the liberal Enlightenment is that human beings are, by nature, equal.
No. The core idea is that Popes and Archbishops and so forth know from shit.
Plato would have dismissed this as a myth. And yet Strauss goes wrong in ascribing to Plato the idea that human beings are, by nature, unequal. Plato thought that was a myth too.
While we think Callard's intelligence is a myth.
How can someone believe that both natural equality and natural inequality are myths?
Because they are imperative not alethic notions. Baby is an angel, baby is a devil, are things Mums say. But these are phatic or imperative statements. They don't correspond with any actual state of the world.
By allotting most of the explanatory work to chance.
You don't need an explanation. Everything just happened by chance. I don't need to tell you why I was seen stabbing my wife by several reliable witnesses. By pure chance, each of those witnesses had the same hallucination. I wasn't stabbing my wife, I was porking yours at the time when that unfortunate incident occurred.
Consider: if the only cuneiform class is at 7 a.m., someone who is a “morning person” will be more likely to learn cuneiform.
No. Night owls who want to learn cuneiform will party hearty till 6.45 a.m before showing up for class.
If we assume being a morning person is a biologically innate property, it would follow that in this scenario people are not naturally equal in respect of where they will end up, cuneiform-wise.
But it does not follow.
But that doesn’t mean that being a morning person constitutes a talent for cuneiform or an innate potential to excel at cuneiform. Now imagine that most intellectual differences interface with the accidents of environment in just this brute, contingent way.
I just tried. But I discovered the thing was incompossible save in an Occasionalist Universe. Why? Intellectual differences arise by evolution or else we are Liebnizian monads. But 'accidents of environment' are the 'interface'. It is not the case that there is a fitness landscape which interfaces with another fitness landscape. There is just one fitness landscape with no further undergirding or hypokeimenon or whatever.
No one would “deserve” their intellectual opportunities,
but only in the sense that they wouldn't deserve to be themselves. Why should I be punished for killing my wife? I deserve to be the murder victim and should get lots of sympathy. Furthermore, I should get to sue her estate for damages coz I deserve to be her whereas she deserves to be me.
any more than being a morning person entitles you to learning cuneiform.
which it does not at all.
The fact that the education program laid out in the Republic eventually turns out to involve over fifty years of trials and tests is an acknowledgement of how little knowledge Plato thought we could presume, even in a utopia, as to how to “make someone a philosopher.”
No. The fact that smart peeps keep learning new stuff till the age of seventy or eighty or whatever is what Plato was getting at. If the kids won't pay to attend the Academy, maybe we could get in retired folk.
In the real world, Plato’s view seemed to be
to no one except Callard- because Callard is an utter cretin
that philosophers arise because occasionally a human being—for no reason, following no plan, and certainly not because he was secretly marked out as One of the Special Ones from birth—manages by sheer luck to find his way to the lone worthwhile life.
In which case why bother attending an Academy? Plato wasn't foolish enough to give peeps a reason not to go to Skool coz he was a teechur.
Thus Socrates’s shortcomings with respect to the intellectual “talents” most valued in his era—memory and rhetorical cleverness—are often thematized by Plato.
Fuck off! His Socrates speaks in a well-bred manner. Ironically, he was stupider than he ironically made out.
Plato’s explanation for why most people don’t get access to the best things is unsatisfying to those who are expecting either a tale of justice, such as the noble lie of the triumph of the talented, or a tale of injustice, such as the liberal account of how the equal potential in all of us is squandered when the powerful oppress the weak.
Plato was explaining things to the people of his time. Callard, cretin that she is, thinks the guy had a choice between being Ayn Rand or Angela Davis.
But you don’t need to oppress people in order to withhold intellectual treasures from them
is true. You also don't need to oppress people in order to withhold streams of your urine from their upturned faces.
if there is simply no reason they would find them in the first place.
is not true. They might find them by accident. Only if you are oppressing them can you get them to drop the thing and scurry back to picking cotton or whatever.
The intellectual goods lie hidden in plain view.
No. If they are hidden, then some extra training in decoding visual data is required. An expert tracker can teach you how to see things in the forest which 'are in plain view' but whose significance you missed or overlooked.
The things people long for are: safety and security; fancy vacations and luxury goods; honor, power and acclaim; the warmth of family life and human connection.
Not if they already have them. You don't long for a fancy vacation if you are on a fancy vacation.
They want these things even when they don’t have them
only when they don't have them. Even I, when asked whether I want a pizza, have to answer 'No. I already have a 16 inch pizza with loads of toppings. Ask me again in 5 minutes.'
—often, the less they have them, the more they want them.
Such wisdom in one so young!
People don’t long for intellectual goods.
Yes they do. I'm longing to know if the Mochizucki proof of the abc theorem is correct or if P is provably not equal to NP or where the ur-heimat of the Dravidian people was located and so on and so forth. That's the problem with dying. Some fucker is bound to solve the big mystery which absorbed you through out your life about a week after you are in the ground.
You know the joys of intellectual engagement by experiencing them,
Fuck off! Most peeps hated Skool. As for Uni, everybody skips lectures if they can get away with it. Anyway, what fucking 'intellectual engagement' do non-STEM subjects offer? You have to listen to a shithead and regurgitate his shite so as to get your sheepskin.
and as you step away from them they fade from view. There are strange people who somehow, through a series of accidents, get and stay keyed onto intellectual goods on their own—the autodidacts I mentioned earlier—
i.e. guys who read non-fiction. But Googling stuff works even better.
but the rest of us need constant help reorienting, because just about every worldly temptation pulls us in the opposite direction.
So, Callard needs a study buddy. Sweet. Left to herself she might absent mindedly start eating the book she is meant to be reading. Also she might jump out the window to fly after a bird which has caught her attention.
This, in the end, is the explanation of why the innermost parts of the university are hidden from view—and not only to outsiders.
Very true. The toilets are so constructed that you can't watch your professors poop.
I rely on my students and colleagues—including my dead colleagues, such as Aristotle and Plato and Leo Strauss—to redirect me when I lose my way.
On the evidence of this article, that reliance was misplaced.
If I had left the university after college, I believe the intellectual life I occasionally glimpsed as an undergraduate would have faded into a nostalgic memory.
The reverse is the case. It is only twenty years after you left Collidge that you begin to see
a) how shite your Professors were and what their major malfunction was
b) that it is easy to see where progress has been made but not worth anybody's time and effort- unless they were already a Professor (and thus a cretin)- to stitch the thing together into a better pedagogy.
Meanwhile, by doing your own work better you are making progress in that 'intellectual life' Callard is severely missing.
There’s nothing in your DNA that makes you a philosopher,
There are things in the DNA which we know could stop you from being a philosopher- or indeed from being able to tie your shoelaces. Thus, being a philosopher is dependent on having DNA within a certain range.
nor is there some regimen you can run through to transform yourself into one.
Yes there is. You can study philosophy to a level where you are recognized as a philosopher.
The closest we have come to devising a system for attuning a person to the intellectual life is to surround her with others aiming at the same thing for as long as the relevant parties can continue to afford it, and hope for the best.
No. If you pay enough money, some people will find ways to get attuned to whatever type of life you care to specify.
The idea that one has to be physically located inside a university in order to engage in deep thought is, one would think, too absurd to dignify rebuttal—were it not for the vehemence and regularity with which it gets rebutted.
An absurdity does not cease to be so if people argue otherwise. If you shit yourself, that is funny. It is even funnier if you insist you did not shit yourself. Somebody put some shit into your panties when nobody was looking.
One is not prevented from coming to the intellectual life on one’s own, nor is there some obstacle blocking intellectual communities from arising in any place and time. But that does not mean that there is any reason that the former will actually happen,
Yes there is. 'Intellectual life' has survival value. So does 'Religious Life' and 'Aesthetic Life' and so on on and so forth.
or that the latter, when they do, will have any stability to them.
Coevolved processes display robustness and anti-fragility.
Universities, especially elite universities, stand as our symbols of the idea of stable intellectual community.
Nope. They stand as our symbols of screening and signaling mechanisms of a particular type.
For this reason, they also symbolize the problem of the legitimate distribution of intellectual goods
which, like spiritual goods, can't be distributed at all. They have to be created by the individual's own efforts. One may as well to shit another's turd or jizz through some one else's cock.
—through the course of our lives as well as over a society—and its intractability. Our society has many questions and uncertainties about the just and correct manner of distributing wealth, or health care, or honor, or political power; but these difficulties seem insignificant in comparison to the gaping chasm of total cluelessness we have when it comes to the problem of distributing the very highest goods of all—the intellectual ones.
Callard doesn't get that educational services are like health care. They can be redistributed. The outcome of health care- viz. health- can't be redistributed just like the outcome of educational or spiritual services.
Callard is totally clueless. Still, if she gets a nice study buddy she might finish reading Aristotle rather than getting distracted by her own feces quietly filling up her panties. I'm not saying this will make her a better philosopher. But that's only because I got distracted by soft pitter patter of my urine against the window pane. Okay, that last isn't true. But Callard might think it a 'noble lie'. That woman truly has shit for brains.
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