Wollheim wrote a further piece on this subject in the London Review of Books, which included this as the last paragraph:
'In the Sunday Telegraph (2 July) Professor Roger Scruton published an article headed ‘The man who hated wisdom’. Scruton is a professional philosopher. He knows the history of philosophy well. He is fully aware of the complex issues that surround the assessment of a philosophy like Ayer’s. Yet for the duration of his obituary, he ignored these considerations in the interests of belittling a serious philosopher and of establishing his own profundity. Three times now, Scruton has sanctimoniously assaulted a major thinker of our age – Michel Foucault, Isaiah Berlin, A.J. Ayer – in words that anyone of sensibility, friend, acquaintance, enemy, would have dropped down dead rather than see appear above his name.'
How did Foucault manage to get included in that list?
One might say that both sides were wrong in this kerfuffle. The Education minister was certainly overly sensitive, but the response of the philosophers was typically hyperbolic.
I spoke with Scruton about logical positivism at a conference in Colorado about a decade ago and, though he had a certain amount of respect for the folks in Vienna (which did not mean that agreed with them in the least), he did not care for Ayer at all. He thought of him as a more of a showman/entertainer than a philosopher. Of course, by that time, Scruton had been banished from the inner circle of acceptable philosophical inquiry.
Regarding the political/educational context of the exchange, the Tories not only cut spending on education, but also got rid of tenure for university professors and introduced the very American system of counting and grading publications as a part of the evaluation process. I was in graduate school in the UK in the early '90s, and the faculty were united in their unhappiness with the Conservative Party.
Can we please return to a time when Conservative Party MPs were capable of this level of intellectual discourse
Here you go.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n14/richard-wollheim/diary
Wollheim wrote a further piece on this subject in the London Review of Books, which included this as the last paragraph:
'In the Sunday Telegraph (2 July) Professor Roger Scruton published an article headed ‘The man who hated wisdom’. Scruton is a professional philosopher. He knows the history of philosophy well. He is fully aware of the complex issues that surround the assessment of a philosophy like Ayer’s. Yet for the duration of his obituary, he ignored these considerations in the interests of belittling a serious philosopher and of establishing his own profundity. Three times now, Scruton has sanctimoniously assaulted a major thinker of our age – Michel Foucault, Isaiah Berlin, A.J. Ayer – in words that anyone of sensibility, friend, acquaintance, enemy, would have dropped down dead rather than see appear above his name.'
How did Foucault manage to get included in that list?
Do you have a link for that... it looks like it might be entertaining!
People get really really wound up by Scruton. I interviewed him once. He was in the middle of mucking out pigs, IIRC.
One might say that both sides were wrong in this kerfuffle. The Education minister was certainly overly sensitive, but the response of the philosophers was typically hyperbolic.
I spoke with Scruton about logical positivism at a conference in Colorado about a decade ago and, though he had a certain amount of respect for the folks in Vienna (which did not mean that agreed with them in the least), he did not care for Ayer at all. He thought of him as a more of a showman/entertainer than a philosopher. Of course, by that time, Scruton had been banished from the inner circle of acceptable philosophical inquiry.
Regarding the political/educational context of the exchange, the Tories not only cut spending on education, but also got rid of tenure for university professors and introduced the very American system of counting and grading publications as a part of the evaluation process. I was in graduate school in the UK in the early '90s, and the faculty were united in their unhappiness with the Conservative Party.