Date: Fri, 03 May 1996 11:12:16 +0100
Subject: Re: Bhaskar and Bad Writing...


Dave,

Congratulations. I must be perverse, but I actually like these rambling
all-embracing tirades. They seem to have a life all of their own, dragging
you in, forcing you, without drawing breath, to indulge yourself. It almost
like being on a roller-coaster. Can you _feel_ the speed.


>
>As some of you may recally I entered some sentences from _Plato etc._ 
>in the PHIL-LIT bad writing contest. Yesterday I heard the following:
>
>> The PHIL-LIT/_Philosophy and Literature_ Bad Writing Contest:
>> Results for round two.
>
>> First prize goes to David Spurrett of the University of Natal in 
>> South Africa.  He found this marvelous sentence--yes, it's but one
>> sentence--from Roy Bhaskar's _Plato etc: The Problems of Philosophy
>> and Their Resolution_ (Verso, 1994):
>
>> "Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of 
>> Foucauldian strategic reversal--of the unholy trinity of 
>> Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the Cartesian-
>> Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, 
>> fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, 
>> capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other 
>> ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old  
>> alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy,
>> ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy 
>> with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by 
>> Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist 
>> monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling 
>> dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute 
>> idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean 
>> eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism 
>> through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a 
>> Baudrillard."
>
>Says the list-owner:
>
>> It's a splendid bit of prose and I'm certain many of us will now 
>> attempt to read it aloud without taking a breath.  The jacket blurb, 
>> incidentally, informs us that this is the author's "most accessible 
>> book to date."
>
>Just thought you'd like to know.
>The "Instant Intellectual"
>(just add funding)
>---------------------------------
> Say that you do no work,
> and that you will live forever.
>                    - Ezra Pound
>


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Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Aberystwyth
SY23 3DA

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