Jerry Fodor se deu mal, tal como Bernard-Henri Lévy

As coisas não andam fáceis para os filósofos famosos.

Como vimos, no dia 9/2/10 o Times Online tirou o maior sarro de Bernard-Henri Lévy, pois este eminente filósofo francês simplesmente leu e citou um livro-tiração-de-sarro que poderia ter sido escrito pelo Monty Python como se fosse um livro sério sobre a vida sexual de Kant! Veja mais no Ionline, no Estadão, na Folha e no New Statesman.

Um dia antes, em 8/2/10, o blog Deep Thoughts and Silliness [Pensamentos Profundos e Tolice], escrito por Bob O'Hara e mantido pela conceituadíssima revista científica Nature, dizia que o filósofo estadunidense Jerry Fodor havia rodado na cadeira de Introdução à Evolução, de novo. Isso porque esse filósofo lançou um livro atacando a teoria da evolução a partir de péssimos argumentos, os quais revelam que Fodor simplesmente não faz a menor ideia do que está falando. E ele já tinha cometido esse erro básico antes.

O povo da Nature se esbalda de rir da tola teoria de Fodor sobre o motivo de não haver porcos com asas, a qual deve ser descendente da velha e igualmente tola prova a priori atribuída a Hegel da necessidade de haver sete e somente sete planetas no Sistema Solar.

Basicamente, o que O'Hara faz é mostrar que Fodor está por fora de leituras básicas sobre a evolução. Ele cita trechos de leituras obrigatórias para alunos iniciantes que respondem às "teorias" de Fodor.

Em resumo, essa foi uma péssima semana para os grandes filósofos. Mas a maré ruim já dura alguns meses, pois no final de 2009 foi a vez do até então grande Thomas Nagel dar vexame.

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Bernard-Henri Lévy se deu mal

When France’s most dashing philosopher took aim at Immanuel Kant in his latest book, calling him “raving mad” and a “fake”, his observations were greeted with the usual adulation. To support his attack, Bernard-Henri Lévy — a showman-penseur known simply by his initials, BHL — cited the little-known 20th-century thinker Jean-Baptiste Botul.

There was one problem: Botul was invented by a journalist in 1999 as an elaborate joke, and BHL has become the laughing stock of the Left Bank.

There were clues. One supposed work by Botul — from which BHL quoted — was entitled The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant. The philosopher’s school is known as Botulism and subscribes to his theory of “La Metaphysique du Mou” — the Metaphysics of the Flabby. Botul even has a Wikipedia entry that explains that he is a “fictional French philosopher”.

But Mr Lévy, a leader among the nouveaux philosophes school of the 1970s, was unaware. In On War in Philosophy, he writes that Botul had proved once and for all “just after the Second World War, in his series of lectures to the neo-Kantians of Paraguay, that their hero was an abstract fake, a pure spirit of pure appearance”.

His credulity was spotted by Aude Lancelin, a journalist with the Le Nouvel Observateur, the left-leaning weekly that is de rigueur for the thinking classes. The Botul quotes were “a nuclear gaffe that raises questions on the Lévy method”, she wrote.

Mr Lévy admitted last night that he had been fooled by Botul, the creation of a literary journalist, Frédéric Pages, but he was not exactly contrite....

Ms Lancelin told The Times she was surprised that none of the journalists who had been giving Mr Lévy the celebrity treatment had noted that he spent two pages using a non-existent philosopher to prove his argument. “I came across the quotes from Botul and burst out laughing,” she said.

Leiter Reports ← Times Online

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