Arguments in the Guardian letters page

[bouteillebleu]

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,1751402,00.html

Tuesday April 11, 2006 - Dr Annie Seaton believes that "Derrida, Bataille, Baudrillard, Lacan..." are among the best French thinkers. (Recall that Lacan is the man who implied that the square root of minus one was equal to his penis.)

She also says "My apologies to Oxbridge, where conceptual advances seem less important than old school ties and reinforcing class distinctions".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,1751860,00.html

Wednesday April 12, 2006 - James Syme replies that Oxbridge is better than France in the sciences, and Cambridge alone has 56 Nobel Prize winners to its name compared to France's 11. Alas, he fails to mention that Trinity College alone also has more Nobel Prize winners than France.

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,1755146,00.html

Monday April 17, 2006 - Six more people respond to Seaton's letter. Prof Raymond points out that French universities have moved on from the worst of the postmodernist nonsense that Harvard is still fascinated by.

Seaton herself replies to Syme's letter, with the claim that "there is a reason why it is the sciences - and not difficult modernist fiction or books about the philosophy of freedom - which can still flourish in totalitarian societies". She then fails to mention what this reason is.

Comments

[reichsfreiherr.livejournal.com]

not difficult modernist fiction or books about the philosophy of freedom

My first thought is that ‘fiction’ is the operative word there followed by wanting to suggest that the reason that books about the philosophy of freedom aren’t exactly rated so highly is that they’re rather stating the obvious. Anyone can sit down and have a think about what it means to be ‘free’ in any usage of the term but to actually understand practical sciences there has to be some academic learning involved, formalised or otherwise.[/pre-caffeine-assessment]

I suspect that this Seaton individual has something of a complex about the sciences in general but I shall have to come back and read about that when I actually have a cup of tea to hand.
I do like your piece of Trinity College trivia too.

[bouteillebleu.livejournal.com]

That's a good point, and one that I hadn't thought of. Sort of like the old joke that mathematicians can do with just a pencil, some paper and a wastebasket, and philosophers don't even need a wastebasket.

Two other possible reasons I came up with were:

1. It's easier to get funding for research when you can prove to your government that the results will be useful (this isn't just restricted to totalitarianism - see the slashing of budgets for humanities departments when Thatcher came to power). Science provides (in a gross simplification) new ways to make weapons, but philosophy doesn't do anything practical.

2. Philosophy makes people think and possibly question the government. Not the sort of thing a totalitarian state wants to encourage.

The Trinity College trivia is one of those possibly apocryphal things I picked up while I was there. Sort of like the story about why our clock rings twice for each hour (allegedly it's to rub it in to St John's that we got the clock tower and they didn't).

[reichsfreiherr.livejournal.com]

Exactly so. The most obvious argument is the practicality of the situation and the paranoid philosopher answer is as you’ve said there for the second possibility. I suppose some people like to think that they’re being subversive instead of marginally useless.

Of course I am feeling marginally vitriolic today anyway and I’m sure there are some sensible philosophers out there who really do contribute intelligent debate, though I expect those would be the ones who don’t go round shouting about how subversive they are and instead just get the job done.


I think the only piece of trivia that I can think of off hand has to be that business at Reading where it’s either the Chemistry department or the Biochemistry one that has a staircase that leads to a blank wall because the two departments were meant to be joined but they got into a fight beforehand so their buildings were instead build at opposite ends of the campus.