This is very weird. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy writes about the recent rugby match between Ireland and the All Blacks ... in exactly the style you'd expect from a French philosopher. It's cool yet slightly annoying ... again, as you'd expect from a French philosopher!
Actually, BHL is all but a philosopher :)
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard-Henri_Lévy#Criticisms
And his texts written in French are even more painful to read...
BHL is not a philosopher, although he claims to be one.
ReplyDeleteThis is easy to demonstrate. A common (admittedly flawed yet helpful nonetheless) way to measure the influence of a given scholar is to find out how often he or she is cited by his peers. BHL appears in the popular media, and particularly on television, all the [expletive] time. He is cited in scholarly literature about ... never.
Therefore his peers are not philosophers, they are TV pundits.
I won't go into the details of his political orientation (neocon with occasional leftist populist outbursts would be a good summary), but to give you an idea of the intellectual magnitude of the man, consider this: one of his latest tomes presented as facts quotes from a satirical essay. He evidently did not realize it was tongue in cheek. Before you venture to credit him with a shred of benefit of the doubt, said satire was titled "Landru, precursor of feminism?"
Landru (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_D%C3%A9sir%C3%A9_Landru) was a famous early XXth century serial killer of women.
It hurts to see BHL taken as representative of French philosophers abroad!
ReplyDeleteGood to know. Someone better tell huffingtonpost.com!
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