Platone vs Buckley

Riccardo Mariani

15 h · 

Amazon

 · 

Meglio il governo dei più saggi (Platone) o quello dei primi 100 sulla lista del telefono (William Buckley)?

La ricerca di evidenza a sosteno della risposta più scontata fatica maledettamente nell' adempiere al suo compito.
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When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics

Philosophers usually emphasize the importance of logic, clarity and reason. Therefore when they address political issues they will usually inject a dose of rationality in these discussions, right?Wrong. This book gives a lot of examples showing the unexpected…

AMAZON.COM

Mi piaceVedi altre reazioni

La saggezza deve dimenticare se stessa

Riccardo Mariani

15 h · 

Amazon

 · 

Un bel libro sugli intellettuali, sul perché sarebbero saggi se non si credessero saggi.
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When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics

Philosophers usually emphasize the importance of logic, clarity and reason. Therefore when they address political issues they will usually inject a dose of rationality in these discussions, right?Wrong. This book gives a lot of examples showing the unexpected…

AMAZON.COM

Hobbes sugli intellettuali rincoglioniti dalla politica

Riccardo Mariani

Adesso · 

Amazon

 · 

Perché sono così frequenti i dotti rincoglioniti dalla politica?

La teoria di Hobbes: l’ignorante si accontenta di posizioni intermedie, il dotto si abbandona più facilmente ai radicalismi.
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When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics

Philosophers usually emphasize the importance of logic, clarity and reason. Therefore when they address political issues they will usually inject a dose of rationality in these discussions, right?Wrong. This book gives a lot of examples…

AMAZON.COM

Quell’idiota di Imre Lakatos

Imre Lakatos: Eulogized in England, Unforgiven in Hungary – When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics – Neven Sesardic

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Punti chiave: Non certo un “resistente” per la patria – Contributo per una scuola dottrinaria – Marxista dogmatico fuori tempo massimi –  Informatore per i regime –  Un pericolo pubblico dalla disumanità esemplare, praticamente uno psicopatico – Marxista da barzelletta – Il doppio standard crispetto al caso Heidegger – 

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Imre Lakatos is one of the most important philosophers of science of the twentieth century…Currently, the greatest recognition in the philosophy of science bears his name: the Lakatos Award….

Note:CHI È

LSE: Economical with the Truth?

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he in fact firmly rejected a suggestion that members of his secret seminars should engage in anti-fascist resistance (Long 2002, 265).

Note:RIFIUTO DELLA RESISTENZA

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Lakatos worked for the Ministry of Education between 1945 and 1948, and was an active writer supporting the hard Party line against the liberal factions to be demolished by [Hungarian Prime Minister Matyas] Rakosi. During the 1947–1948 academic year, Lakatos dedicated himself to helping destroy the distinguished Eötvös College, targeted by the Communists because of its resistance to transforming itself into an indoctrination tool like the recently established Györffy College. .

Note:IL RIFORMATORE EDUCATIVO?

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Before his destructive actions at Eötvös College, Lakatos was one of the leaders of a student group, Debrecen University Circle, which not only demanded the dismissal of “reactionary” professors but also established a “screening committee” aiming to “cleanse the student body of fascists and reactionaries who had wormed their way into the ranks” (Bandy 2009, 59–61).

Note:UNO STUDENTE CASINISTA E INDOTTRINATO

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A secret police document kept in the Historical Archives of the State Security Services says that Gábor Kovács (Lakatos’s codename as an informer) “gave us valuable information about [György Lukács’ circle]” (Bandy undated, 5). According to the philosopher Agnes Heller, Lukács was aware that Lakatos was helping the Party build an ideological case against him

Note:INFORMATORE

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he was a political prisoner simply because he was more Stalinist than many of the leaders of the Hungarian Communist Party.

Note:SUPERSTALINISTA

Murder by Suicide

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his role in the suicide in 1944 of a young woman named Éva Izsák…During World War II Lakatos joined the Communist Party and became the unofficial leader of a small underground cell in Nagyvárad. One of the cell members was a nineteen-year-old Jewish woman, Éva Izsák. She, like many other members, was in hiding and had false papers. It was feared she was a particular security risk for the whole group—…This problem had to be addressed and there was no doubt about who should be in charge: Imre Lipsitz (Lakatos’s original surname)…The best way out was for Éva Izsák to commit suicide. The proposal was supported by an argument couched by the future LSE professor in terms of Marxist dialectics which the other members found so compelling that they all immediately voted for it—including Éva’s own boyfriend!…Lakatos was such a dominating influence on the minds of other group members that they were ready to obey all his instructions unconditionally. In some respects the atmosphere resembled that of a sect like Jim Jones’s infamous People’s Temple community in Jonestown….

Note:OMBRA

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Lakatos’s extreme manipulativeness, unscrupulousness, lack of concern for other people, and rigid loyalty to a totalitarian ideology make a combination that is, if not unique, certainly quite rare.

Note:UN PERICOLO PUBBLICO

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it was actually Bernard Williams, the preeminent British moral philosopher, who once described Lakatos as “a kind of a thug.”

Note:UN TEPPISTA

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he was “evil” (Joseph Agassi, philosopher and colleague), that he was “an impossible infantile monster, completely unable to understand other people” (a former girlfriend), that he was “not fully human,” that “his drives and his mind are in place, but the rest missing” (a mathematician colleague), that “people did not matter to him,” that he was “a truly Satanic figure” and that “it was scary to see him in action” (a historian colleague), that he was “diabolic” (philosopher Agnes Heller), that he was seen as “an evil spirit” and “demonic” (Endre Ságvári a Communist activist), that he was “diabolic” in his “total disregard for people” (István Márkus, a journal editor), that he was “like the devil . . . absolutely inhuman . . . that he had no human feelings for anyone . . . and that he would trample on anyone to get ahead” (András Nagy, professor of economics), that he was “a Satanic figure” (an editor Zoltán Zsámboki), that he was “unbelievably unscrupulous” (Péter Németh, a literary historian), that he “met the criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder in the current DSM IV” (Long 2002, 294). All in all, a lot of the evidence points to the possibility that Lakatos was a psychopath, which is indeed how he was described by Dr. Klára Majerszky

Note:ACCUSE UNANIMI… PSICOPATICO

Sticking with the Superego

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he kept the true Stalinist faith until 1956

Note:FEDELE ALLA LINEA

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in a 1971 letter to the psychologist Paul Meehl, Lakatos says that the Communist Party was his last superego and that it was only in 1956 that he finally got rid of that superego…This is embarrassingly late…

Note:1956

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as Solzhenitsyn said, Marxism in the Soviet Union “has fallen to such a low point that it has become a joke, an object of contempt . . . and that no serious person, not even university and high-school students, can talk about Marxism without a smile or a sneer”

Note:MARXISTA QUANDO IL MARXISMO ERA UNA BARZELLETTA

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Lakatos, who was then already a lecturer at the London School of Economics, was still collaborating with the Hungarian secret police (see Bandy 2009, 304).

Note:1962

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A striking contrast: Lakatos’s real-life actions that caused loss of life and immense human suffering have barely produced a yawn among philosophers; meanwhile, in another case, top scholars in the profession have issued strident condemnations and repeatedly expressed disbelief and shock over what one old and disillusioned man had written in the last year of his life in his private diary, which was published seventy years after his death (see pp. 188–193).

LAKATOS E HEDEGGER… UNO STRANO CONTRASTO

13 Il dotto rincoglionito dalla politica. Perché è così frequente? E perché è quasi sempre di sinistra?

Il dotto rincoglionito dalla politica. Perché è così frequente? E perché è quasi sempre di sinistra?

Left-Wing Bias: An Infantile Disorder of Contemporary Philosophy – When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics – Neven Sesardic

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Argomenti trattati: perché il mondo accademico perdona le stupidaggini (se sono “di sinistra”) – il simula e dissimula dell’accademico di destra – l’ IQ dei “fascisti” e quello dei neri – perché tanto chiasso su Frege e il silenzio sui tanti comunisti (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Badiou, Lukács, Bloch… Neurath, Russell, Wittgenstein, Lakatos, Cohen, Putnam, Davidson… – l’equivalenza tra destra e fascismo – ci vuole davvero un genio per giustificare certe pratiche ripugnante – le idiozie di Parfit: tutti i ricchi sono ladri – La raffica di idiozie di Jeremy Waldron sulla tortura – Hobbes sui dotti rincoglioniti: l’ignirante si accontenta di posizioni intermedie, il dotto più facilmente preda di radicalismi – la stupidità in politica, specie a sinistra,  è gratificante e gratuita –

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Academic philosophy, like other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, has a notoriously strong leftist tilt (see, e.g., Gross 2013, 299; Maranto et al. 2009, 16, 22).

Note:IL BIAS DOCUMENTATO

Robert Nozick Loses His Nerve

the leftist extremists would be considered by a huge majority of their colleagues (who share their basic political opinion) as being (a) correct or almost correct; or (b) perhaps too radical but still “having their heart in the right place”; or (c) profoundly wrong but nevertheless not remotely as condemnable as the right-wing extremists.

Note:L’ESTREMISTA DI SINISTRA LADDOVE LA SINISTRA DOMINA

Since one has to communicate on a daily basis with colleagues in one’s discipline and find a basic modus vivendi with one’s professional peers, it is clear that in such a situation the pressure against the minority extremism would be enormous.

Note:MASCHERARE

According to a 2013–2014 study by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, the ratio of university professors who described themselves as politically “far left” vs. those on the “far right” was between 30 to 1 and 50 to 1 (Eagan et al. 2014, 112).

Note:NUMERI

A nice illustration of the effect of ideological majority pressure in philosophy is the case of Robert Nozick. He admitted that at one point he went along with the incorrect representation of his views just because he expected it would make his colleagues view him more favorably

Note:NOZICK AMMETTE: HO FALSATO IL MIO POSIZIONAMENTO POLITICO PER QUESTIONI DI “SOPRAVVIVENZA”

Those Dumb Conservatives

Sometimes the political imbalance in academia is attributed to a putative correlation between being a conservative and having low intelligence.

Note:A DESTRA IQ PIÚ BASSO

We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.

Note:ROBERT BRANDON DIXIT

several non-philosopher commentators wondered whether Brandon would be willing to extend the same logic to another context where it would seem to apply with no less force.

Note:LA LOGICA DI BRANDON APPLICATA AI NERI: APRITI CIELO

A good illustration is the case of the philosopher Michael Levin, who in 1990 published a short letter in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (62–63) in which he suggested this explanation for the low proportion of blacks in philosophy… Eighteen reactions were published, all of them negative, with some authors expressing strong disagreement and others condemning the APA for publishing Levin’s letter and calling it “racist propaganda.”…

Note:IL CASO LEVINE E LO SCANDALO SUSCITATO

A similar case (in which a prominent philosopher makes a late appearance) involves Frank Ellis, a former lecturer in Russian and Slavonic studies at the University of Leeds, who publicly expressed agreement with Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s claims, made in their controversy-generating book The Bell Curve (1994), about the black–white difference in intelligence and its social effects…The vice-chancellor of the university suspended him…

Note:LA SOSPENSIONE DEL PROF ELLIS: PARLARE DELLA DESTRA SI PUO’ MA DEI NERI NO

why should we have to work and study with racists and homophobes? The answer is: we should not (Times Higher Education Supplement, June 9, 2006).

Note:STEVEN FRENCH SU ELLIS MURRAY E HERRNTEIN… PAROLE ESEMPLARI

he is being “disciplined” solely because students found his views offensive, and thus a breach of the university’s obligation to promote “racial harmony”

Note:PUNITO PER RAGIONI DI ARMONIA

The Curious Case of Gottlob Frege

The most salient factor that makes Frege stand out from all those other philosophers discussed in this book, and might explain the asymmetry, is that he has been castigated for supporting what is regarded as an extreme right-wing view. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Frege states: “Unfortunately, his last years saw him become politically conservative and right-wing…Why is it deemed “unfortunate” that in his last years Frege became “politically conservative and right-wing”?…

Note:PERCHÈ TANTO CHIASSO SU FREGE E SILENZIO SU MOLTI ALTRI

Notice, again, that no one has used the word “distasteful” (let alone “very distasteful”) and no one has been “shocked” (let alone “deeply shocked”) nor “upset” (let alone “very, very upset”) over any of the aforementioned cases of leading philosophers publicly supporting murderous totalitarian regimes of the left.

Note:ASIMMETRIA PATENTE

Sluga (op. cit.) went further and claimed, also relying on Frege’s diary, that one of Frege’s “heroes” at the end of his life was Adolf Hitler.

FREGE FAN DI HITLER?... NON SCHERZIAMO

Agreeing with Hitler’s claim about a political disorientation in post-Bismarck Germany in no way implies support for Hitler’s politics, and certainly not “something close to admiration” for him.

Note:MA…

in contrast to Heidegger, who publicly supported the Nazi Party for years after it came to power and after its policies left no doubt about its true goals and methods, Frege was jotting notes in his private diary nine years before Hitler became the chancellor of Germany and more than one year before Mein Kampf was published.

Note:DIFFERENZE CON HEIDEGGER

Frege’s chief sin was anti-Semitism, but we should not forget that historically anti-Semitism has not been exclusively a right-wing phenomenon…“Like the left in France and Germany, the British left played a central role in the popular dissemination of anti-Semitism in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain” (Brustein 2003, 89; emphasis added)….

Note:L‘ANTISEMITISMO DI FREGE

What is perceived as a right-wing deviation is not easily forgiven in contemporary philosophy. In contrast, much worse left-wing sins are typically passed over and excused.

Note:SOLO SBALLARE A DESTRA E’ IMPERDONABILE

A good illustration of this bias is again Glover’s book Humanity (1999)…The part about Nazism has an entire chapter, titled “Philosophers,” in which Glover criticizes the political views of Heidegger and Frege as well as those of some obscure philosophers like Alfred Bäumler and Lothar Tirala. In contrast, Glover did not include a “Philosophers” chapter in the part about Stalinism and Maoism, although it would have been easy to produce a much longer list of well-known philosophers who had fallen under the spell of Communist totalitarianism. The names that come to mind include Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Badiou, Lukács, Bloch, and many others,… Neurath, Russell, Wittgenstein, Lakatos, Cohen, Putnam, Davidson… Yet that chapter remained unwritten, and Glover never explained why philosophers deserved a whole chapter in one case but not in the other….

Note:ESEMPIO DI ASIMMETRIA

Richard Rorty said in an interview for the Believer in 2003: “I think all that September 11 changed was to give the fascists a chance. The Republicans saw that if they could keep us in a state of perpetual war from now on . . . they could keep electing Republicans more or less forever.”… Elsewhere Rorty associated Republicans with Hitler and the Nazis:…

Note:ROTRY… FASCISTI=REPUBBLICANI

But who was Eldridge Cleaver? He emerged from prison in 1966 after spending nine years there for rape and assault with intent to murder. He then joined the Black Panthers and became a presidential candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party in 1968.

Note:IL CANDIDATO PRESIDENTE DEI FILOSOFI DI PRINCETON

campus newspapers of two Ivy League universities recommended to its readers that they vote for Cleaver rather than for any of the major presidential candidates. The Harvard Crimson advised that “one should vote to the left of the major three candidates—whether it be for Eugene McCarthy, Eldridge Cleaver, Dick Gregory, Fred Halstead (Socialist Worker), or Henning Blomen (Socialist Labor),” and that “in states like Massachusetts where no left wing candidates qualify for the ballot or for a legal write in, one should refuse to vote for the Presidency.” The Columbia Daily Spectator went even further and officially endorsed Cleaver.

Note:GIORNALI ACCADEMICI

According to studies of the political attitudes of American professors at the time, the proportion of the professors’ vote for the far-left candidates (including Cleaver) in the 1968 presidential election was about ten times higher than in the general population (Ladd & Lipset 1972, 44).

Note:QUANTIFICARE IL BIAS

And Then He Started to Cry . . .

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the philosophers’ ability to concoct seemingly good arguments even for rather implausible, or sometimes even preposterous, views.

Note:CI VUOLE UN GENIO PER GIUSTIFICARE CERTE PRATICHE

Living in a bubble and spending most of their time with politically like-minded leftist colleagues will cause even very clever people to start hyperbolizing the dangers and bad effects of right-wing politics

Note:LA SINDROME DELL’ACQUARIO

on LeiterReports.typepad.com, the most-visited philosophy blog on the Internet—which most philosophers check regularly to get professional news about their discipline (new hirings, changes in the expert ranking of top philosophy departments, professional gossip, etc.)—conservatives have been routinely referred to as “repugs,” “morally depraved,” “morally deranged,” “crackpots,” “lunatics,” “idiots,” “twits,” “nuts,” “slimy,” “stupid,” “crazies,” “villains,” “moral monsters,” “fools,” “fascistic psychopaths,” “Neanderthals,” “despicable Neanderthals,” “sociopaths,” “threats to humanity,” “morons,” “dishonest scumbags,” “right-wing slime artists,” “noxious right-wing creeps,” and “brainless fascist thugs.”

Note:LEITER

Consider the asymmetry: A single private email from Leiter, followed by a Twitter post, started this avalanche of outrage among hundreds of philosophers, but his years-long uncontrolled torrent of public insults directed at his conservative colleagues and Republicans was never seen as a problem.

Note:E QUANDO SU LEITER APPARE UN EMAIL ANOMALA CHE OFFENDE I “COMUNISTI” DEI DIPARTIMENTI DI FILOSOFIA…

Are All Rich People Thieves?

Consider first an interesting example involving Derek Parfit, one of the most influential living philosophers. It would be very hard to find an analytic thinker today who is held in higher regard.

Note:PARFIT... IL GURU

At the beginning of his talk Parfit says that according to William Godwin, if you walk past a beggar and you don’t give him your coins, you’re stealing; the money doesn’t belong to you, because the beggar needs it more than you, so you’re stealing (“Derek Parfit—Full Address,” YouTube, 8:15–8:39). Immediately after citing Godwin’s eccentric opinion that not giving to a beggar equals stealing from him, Parfit surprisingly goes on to agree with it enthusiastically: “Well, that is actually what I feel we rich people . . . in the world today are doing. We’re not entitled to our vast wealth.”

Note:CHI NON DONA RUBA

(1)   It seems to me fairly clear that the great wealth that we rich people have isn’t in a moral sense ours to give. It’s legally ours, but it’s not morally ours.        (2)   I’m not entitled to my vast wealth compared with these two billion people in Africa.        (3)   There’s no way in which I’ve come to deserve it and they haven’t (ibid., 6:55–7:19).

Note:L’ARGOMENTO PER CUI I RICCHI RUBEREBBERO

The problem with Parfit’s logic is twofold. First, he provides no real evidence (let alone compelling evidence) for the sweeping assertion (3), and second, even if he did, (2) would still not follow.

Note:UN ARGOMENTO CHE FA ACQUA

such a radical approach to economic redistribution is almost unheard of. In terms of ordinary political taxonomy, it is best classified as belonging to the extreme fringe of the extreme left.

Note:RADICALISMO ESTREMO

Let the Massacre Begin!” Said the Ethicist

Another example is provided by the philosopher Jeremy Waldron… Waldron participated in the debate “Is Torture Ever Permissible?” at Columbia University on April 21, 2005…. he was inevitably asked about the notorious “ticking bomb scenario”: What would Waldron’s advice be if a nuclear device were planted in New York City and if the only way to save millions of innocent people from a certain and horrible death were to torture an arrested terrorist who knew the location of the bomb? He replied that the answer is clear: Since morality tells us there are certain things that must not be done under any conditions—and torture is one of those things—then it follows that in that kind of situation we should “take the hit” and let all these millions of people die…. He is saying that if he had to choose between (1) saving millions of lives in the only way possible, by applying rough treatment (say, waterboarding, which he regards as torture) to one of the organizers of the impending nuclear attack on New York, and (2) protecting the perpetrator from any mistreatment, with the result that millions of people would die, he would choose (2)….

Note:IL CASO JEREMY WALDRON: CHE MUOIANO MILIONI DI AMERICANI PIUTTOSTO CHE TORTURARE UN TERRORISTA

Excellently Wise and Excellently Foolish

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How was it possible that other extremely smart people managed to believe—despite all the evidence to the contrary—that, among other things, the existence of the Iron Curtain was to be blamed on the United States; that Enver Hoxha’s regime in Albania was great; that all rich people in the West are thieves; that those convicted in the Moscow show trials were guilty as charged; that an appropriate reaction to the collapse of Soviet Communism was “a feeling of loss”; that there was no reason to join the war against Hitler until June 22, 1941; and that the United States in the 1950s was as much a police state as Hitler’s Germany?

Note:IL DILEMMA PIU’ IN GENERALE: PERCHÈ I PIÙ INTELLIGENTI SONO ANCHE I PIÙ SCEMI QUANDO L’ARGOMENTO È POLITICO?

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For between true science, and erroneous doctrines, ignorance is in the middle. Natural sense and imagination are not subject to absurdity…In accordance with what Hobbes says, philosophers are also good both at becoming “excellently wise” (in their strictly philosophical area of specialization) and “excellently foolish” (in politics, as numerous examples in this book illustrate)….

Note:HOBBES: L’GNORANTE DI SOLITO ASSUME UNA POSIZIONE INTERMEDIA

Being foolish in philosophy is immediately followed by a heavy penalty (loss of reputation), but being foolish in politics often incurs no cost at all, assuming of course that the foolishness is of the leftist variety.

LA STUPIDITÀ IN POLITICA È GRATUITA