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Rank intellectuals

A NEW LIST OF the world’s top public intellectuals

contains a good few philosophers, along with other academics and intellectuals who have a foot if not a

whole leg in the philosophical camp. The list compiled by the magazines Foreign Policyand

Prospectcontains the philosophers Kwame Anthony Appiah, Daniel Dennett, Alain Finkielkraut, Jüürgen

Habermas, Martha Nussbaum, Fernando Savater, Peter Singer, and Charles Taylor; along with Noam

Chomsky, Michael Ignatieff, Amartya Sen, Michael Walzer and Slavoj ŽŽižžek who work in other

disciplines, but with a strong philosophical bent. The first and thus far only Foreign Policy/Prospect

list, published in 2005, was a little different. Chomsky, Habermas, Sen, Dennett, ŽŽižžek, Singer,

Ignatieff, Nussbaum, Walzer and Finkielkraut were there, but Appiah, Savater and Taylor were not. The

now deceased Jean Baudrillard and Richard Rorty were there, along with the still very much alive Julia

Kristeva and Peter Sloterdijk. The top five by reader ballot were Noam Chomsky, Umberto Eco, Richard

Dawkins, Vááclav Havel, and Christopher Hitchens; Habermas was at seven and Sen at eight.

The results of this year's poll will be published

soon after we go to press. See www.prospectmagazine.co.uk.

Martha Nussbaum

Michael Ignatieff

tpm3RD QUARTER 2008

Peter Singer mediawatch

Philosophy and philosophers in the mass media

You can learn to live with grief or tragedy or trauma by having a strategy for dealing with it. ... I’ve become a workaholic, and I work every moment I’m awake if I can, partly because it does have this liberating and relieving effect.

A C Grayling, The Sunday Times, May 11

It is the role of legislators to be consequentialists. They must not ask, “What does my religion teach about this measure?” but “Will society benefit from it in the empirical world?”

Mary Warnock, New Statesman, April 10

If teachers of philosophy want to call themselves philosophers, I can't say that I shall feel very upset. They can call themselves greengrocers for all that I care.

Jonathan Barnes, Eurozine, May 9

Is flying an airplane into a building best understood as a contribution to a conversation? If students lynch their lecturer because of his heretical opinions, as seems occasionally to have happened in the Middle Ages, is that a contribution to the conversation of humanity?

Raymond Geuss, Arion, Winter 2008

You would not guess how little we know or understand from the hyping of popular neuroscience in which some quite reputable neuroscientists seem to collude.

Raymond Tallis, Times Literary Supplement, April 9

If you're a philosopher, the easiest way to introduce yourself is not by elaborating a doctrine, but by telling a story.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Slate, May 27

If religion isn't the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress, what is?

Daniel Dennett, The Guardian, April 22

Democracy may be the least bad system of government, but it is a long way from being any use elsewhere.

Simon Blackburn, Times Higher Education, April 24

Don’t feel guilty for withdrawing from immediate engagement and for trying to understand what’s going on.

Slavoj ŽŽižžek, Democracy Now, May 12

It's soul rape when people try to get people to believe something that they don't really believe.

Martha Nussbaum, Bill Moyers Journal, PBS, April

18

University graduates are as likely as anyone else to be hasty, prejudiced, and selfregarding.

Michael Walzer, Dissent, Winter 2008

Raymond Tallis can digress entertainingly on anything from Heidegger to hiccups, from Samuel Beckett to the basilar membrane.

Kenan Malik, The Daily Telegraph , May 5

actions&events/mediawatch

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3RD QUARTER 2008 tpm