I don't engage in hypotheticals.
In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny.
I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.
At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.
Challenging is good, like good conversation, yes? Who wants to have dinner with the same old easy listening music sounding friends all the time?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau--history’s greatest militant lowbrow
Christians would show sense if they dispatched these argumentative Scotists and pigheaded Ockhamists and undefeated Albertists along with the whole regiment of Sophists to fight the Turks and Saracens instead of sending those armies of dull-witted soldiers with whom they've long been carrying on war with no result.
These esoteric, intellectual debates-I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation.
Quite a few people feel uncomfortable when faced with the claim that the Jews are the world's smartest people. In our politically correct era, one is not expected to argue that one group within humanity has an advantage over all the others.
Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored.
Christopher Hitchens was a great warrior, a magnificent orator, a pugilist and a gentleman. He was kind, but he took no prisoners when arguing with idiots.
Like Rick in Casablanca: "We'll always have Paris." When what we'll always have is, like, Brooklyn and arguments about [Lev] Trotsky.
Atheists in C.S. Lewis' day were as snobbish and arrogant as they are now, but better educated and more capable of debate.
The reason academic disputes are so vicious is that so little is at stake.
