Eyes Above The Waves

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Repatriate Kiwi. Hacker.

Thursday 25 November 2010

Most Unusual Rugby Commentary

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!



Comments

Tangui
Actually, BHL is all but a philosopher :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard-Henri_Lévy#Criticisms
And his texts written in French are even more painful to read...
nixar
BHL is not a philosopher, although he claims to be one.
This 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.
Benoit Jacob
It hurts to see BHL taken as representative of French philosophers abroad!
Robert O'Callahan
Good to know. Someone better tell huffingtonpost.com!
mirathomas
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