Brian Leiter complaining about me

HERE. (Hat tip, Dirk and Peter.)

Leiter doesn’t link to the reader email I quote, and I frankly can’t remember posting it. No doubt I did, but I have to catch a train shortly and can’t look it up right now. A few points in response…

1. Leiter refers to “these people” “making things up.” He’s not clear what he means by that. If he’s trying to insinuate that I fabricated a piece of reader email (as implied by his phrase “alleged ‘reader e-mail'”), I can assure readers of this blog that I don’t fabricate emails. Besides which, the criticisms of Leiter that I quoted are quite mild, I think. Not sure why he would think they must come from fantasyland. Plenty of people say far harasher things about Leiter than that. Surely Leiter must know that he’s a somewhat controversial figure?

2. I think readers of this blog know that I’m not a “party-line continental.” I’ve not been to SPEP in 19 years, have never been invited there, and in fact my approach to philosophy is fairly offbeat in the eyes of mainstream continentals. That’s why Speculative Realism still has quite a number of detractors in the eyes of the Continental establishment.

3. I do, however, continue to have a low opinion of Brian Leiter, and this predates the period when he insinuated that he might file legal actions against me in the Egyptian court system. He has plenty of fans but also plenty of people who find him to be a grey and grisly influence on contemporary philosophy, and I’m really not sure why he would be surprised by that– given the deliberately aggressive and dismissive tone of his blog, the various petitions that have been signed against him, and so forth. Leiter seemingly needs to form a more realistic assessment of the upside and the downside of the style of his public persona. He’s cocky, snobbish, and judgmental, and simply not the sort of person who’s ever going to be universally liked, and he needs to reconcile himself to that as soon as possible.

The next time Brian Leiter quotes from my blog, it would also be helpful if he links to the quote (or at least provides an exact date) so that it can be checked more conveniently by readers, as well as by me personally.