Kadoos to Zena Hitz, who noticed and challenged a really silly comment by David Velleman (who I think of as one of the good guys in the discipline--in the sense that he takes books and humane concerns seriously!) in a Leiter discussion (about how the NYT (mis) represents contemporary philosophy). Velleman wrote: "Nothing written today is more arcane than Aristotle's Metaphysics." Unless Velleman meant to be offering a Straussian reading of the Metaphysics (reading "arcane" as esoteric), Velleman's claim is...ahum...I'll quote Hitz here: "I admit the arcaneness of the book, but the idea that nothing today is so arcane is nuts." (One can point to contemporary debates over perdurantism, say.)
When Descartes and the early modern philosophers claimed that the Scholastics were unintelligible and the early analytic philosophers claimed that the British Idealists were unintelligible, they were committing patricide, justifiable or not--and we can kind of excuse the rhetoric. It made sense for them to focus on working out their own views rather than engaging their intellectual opponents with open minds and fair play. But we, who are many generations removed from the heat of battle, ought not repeat slogans that prevent hesitant, receptive and inquirying minds to open old books. Apologies to Velleman, of course, if he meant his comment as a kind of challenge (in the way stamping 'top secret' onto a dossier is the best way to get it publicized) to the budding student!
Recent Comments