MediaWatch Issue 10
I wish in a way, that I had, you know, gone to college and gotten a
degree. I would have tried to have gotten a degree in probably
philosophy. If there is such a thing. Is there?
Actress Melanie Griffith, Spokesman Review 23/11/1999
Plato had the most terrible effect on Western education, because it
meant that even if you did learn history, modern languages or something,
that was despised compared to learning mathematics and things that
didn't change and were abstract. In this country it led to the despising
of practical education.
Mary Warnock (below), In Our Time, BBC Radio Four 4/11/1999
When women forge their own 'gender identity', in the way the feminists
recommend, they become unattractive to men - or attractive only as sex
objects, not as individual persons. And when men cease to be gentlemen,
they become unattractive to women. Sexual companionship then goes from
the world. All that it needs to save young people from this predicament
is for old-fashioned moralists to steal unobserved past their feminist
guardians and whisper the truth into eager and astonished ears - the
truth that gender is indeed a construct, but one that involves both
sexes, acting in mutual support, if it is to be built successfully.
Roger Scruton, City Journal Autumn 1999
If you think of Goya's famous picture about the sleep of reason bringing
forth monsters, I would say that, if you're thinking of Enlightenment
reason, it's reason that brings forth monsters in the sense that it
shows us not to be creatures with high aspirations and able to reach
them, but simply scientifically determined beings, determined by forces
of society and by Darwinian explanations, just having to survive and
reproduce and so on.
Anthony O'Hear, In Our Time, BBC Radio Four 18/11/1999
I don't like anything that sets itself up as an in-group or an elite,
whether it is the Bloomsbury group or Derrida.
Martha Nussbaum, New York Times 21/11/1999
Enough of these philosophers, lets have someone who improves the lot of
the common man. Kenneth Clarke, Advocating Henry II as a person of the
millennium, in contradistinction to Aquinas and Machiavellli, on
Straight Talk, BBC News 24 1/1/2000
Philosophers of the world, get real! You have nothing to lose but your
irrelevance.
Steve Sailer, National Post Online 28/12/1999
[Peter Singer's] book, Practical Ethics, is full of fallacies,
half-truths, and the most obnoxious philosophical errors. I think it
morally questionable that Singer should have a place at Princeton.
Already we allow the killing of the infant in his mother's womb. But
Peter Singer wants to take it one step further. He wants to justify the
killing of the infant outside the room, in the rocking chair.
Richard Oderberg on Peter Singer's controversial appointment to
Princeton, Guardian Weekend 6/11/1999
The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is
medieval.
Peter Singer (above), Independent on Sunday 12/11/1999
There can hardly be an educated football fan in the country who does
not know that A J Ayer seldom missed a match at White Hart Lane, home of
Tottenham Hotspur. [...] The argument goes that if a philosopher likes
football, then liking football makes you a philosopher: a strange use to
which the name of a professor of logic should be put.
Theodore Dalrymple, the New Statesman 22/11/1999
For a secularist such as myself, it is a matter for regret that
people should live by false or absurd beliefs, and a matter of scandal
that they should indoctrinate their children, yet incapable of thinking
for themselves. The thought that public money - my taxes included -
should go to support any group of people, Christian or otherwise, in
doing so, adds to the scandal.
Anthony Grayling, the Guardian 11/12/1999
The apparent threat to the traditional notion of free will has
nothing to do with genetic, neurobiological, or evolutionary explantions
of behaviour. It is raised by any explanation of behaviour.
Steven Pinker, the Guardian 6/11/1999
http://www.philosophers.co.uk/current/media10.htm
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