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Top Intellectuals

CBL4

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[Foreign Policy] and Britain’s Prospect magazine asked readers to vote for the top five public intellectuals from our Top 100. The results are in. See who came out on top and what the results say about the world’s leading minds.
[The top 10 are:]
1 Noam Chomsky
2 Umberto Eco
3 Richard Dawkins
4 Václav Havel
5 Christopher Hitchens
6 Paul Krugman
7 Jürgen Habermas
8 Amartya Sen
9 Jared Diamond
10 Salman Rushdie
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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3260&print=1

I think it is an exceedingly good list for a popular vote. The fact that Dawkins finishes third is great news. (I imagine there is strong British bias in the voters.) I admire four of the top 10 quite a bit (Dawkins, Havel, Diamond, Rushdie) and have favorable views of some of the others. I admit not to being familar with all the people.

Two of the top five (Dawkins and Hitchens) are famous atheists and Diamond is on the Skeptics board.
ETA: I just read that Chomsky is an atheist as well. That makes 3 out of the top 5.

One note from the web page:
The poll was in one sense a victim of its own success. Word spread around the Internet very quickly, and at least three of our top 20 (Chomsky, Hitchens and Abdolkarim Soroush), or their acolytes, decided to draw attention to their presence on the list by using their personal Web sites to link to Prospect’s voting page. In Hitchens’s and Soroush’s case, the votes then started to flood in.
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CBL
 
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10 people who don't know when they've been insulted with the label of 'intellectual'.
 
American said:
10 people who don't know when they've been insulted with the label of 'intellectual'.
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Intellectual:
-appealing to or using the intellect; "satire is an intellectual weapon"; "intellectual workers engaged in creative literary or artistic or scientific labor"; "has tremendous intellectual sympathy for oppressed people"; "coldly intellectual"; "sort of the intellectual type"; "intellectual literature"

-of or associated with or requiring the use of the mind; "intellectual problems"; "the triumph of the rational over the animal side of man"

-cerebral: involving intelligence rather than emotions or instinct; "a cerebral approach to the problem"; "cerebral drama"

-a person who uses the mind creatively; an intellectual is a person who uses his or her intellect to study, reflect, or speculate on a variety of different ideas.

Doesn't sound insulting to me. Does it sound insulting to you?
 
Orwell said:
Intellectual:
-appealing to or using the intellect; "satire is an intellectual weapon"; "intellectual workers engaged in creative literary or artistic or scientific labor"; "has tremendous intellectual sympathy for oppressed people"; "coldly intellectual"; "sort of the intellectual type"; "intellectual literature"

-of or associated with or requiring the use of the mind; "intellectual problems"; "the triumph of the rational over the animal side of man"

-cerebral: involving intelligence rather than emotions or instinct; "a cerebral approach to the problem"; "cerebral drama"

-a person who uses the mind creatively; an intellectual is a person who uses his or her intellect to study, reflect, or speculate on a variety of different ideas.

Doesn't sound insulting to me. Does it sound insulting to you?
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There's a definition you left out. You won't find it in any dictionary, but it is still sometimes true:
-someone having a particular political point of view, and is therefore considered intelligent by those with a similar point of view, regardless of intellectual capability.

ETA: I haven't relaly bothered looking at the list too much. I was just explaining a possible view that American was expressing. I do think my definition is often used, though.
 
Freakshow said:
There's a definition you left out. You won't find it in any dictionary, but it is still sometimes true:
-someone having a particular political point of view, and is therefore considered intelligent by those with a similar point of view, regardless of intellectual capability.
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"Intellectual" doesn't mean "intelligent". It just designates someone who uses her or his intellect to make a living. The word has no ideological connotations. It can be used to describe Bill Buckley, and it applies to Chomsky. It also applies to a rather large segment of the population of any developed nation.

It is not an insult, and shouldn't be considered one, the same way "carpenter" or "manual worker" is not an insult.
 
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Orwell said:
"Intellectual" doesn't mean "intelligent". It just designates someone who uses her or his intellect to make a living. The word has no ideological connotations. It can be used to describe Bill Buckley, and it applies to Chomsky. It also applies to a rather large segment of the population of any developed nation.
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It was a poll. People could have been thinking all sorts of meanings to the word when they answered the poll.
 
Been a fan of Eco for years, and met Dawkins and Hitchens at TAM. Hitchens seems more of a scoundrel, and because of that I liked him more than Dawkins. But I find lists like this to be about as valuable as those for the best rock song ever, or the best book ever written. They don't really mean anything.
 
Phil said:
Been a fan of Eco for years, and met Dawkins and Hitchens at TAM. Hitchens seems more of a scoundrel, and because of that I liked him more than Dawkins. But I find lists like this to be about as valuable as those for the best rock song ever, or the best book ever written. They don't really mean anything.
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Yep! Personally, never liked Eco's writing much...
 
I never would have brough up the poll except for Dawkin's inclusion. He is one of my favorite scientific authors and the person who caused me to turn from an agnostic to an atheist with just a few words. I have also seen him lecture twice and enjoyed that as well. The fact that a famous anti-theist like him gets widespread support is wonderful.

CBL
 
CBL4 said:
I never would have brough up the poll except for Dawkin's inclusion. He is one of my favorite scientific authors and the person who caused me to turn from an agnostic to an atheist with just a few words. I have also seen him lecture twice and enjoyed that as well. The fact that a famous anti-theist like him gets widespread support is wonderful.

CBL
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Well, it's good to know that you can admire someone who doesn't share your political affiliation. ;)
 
Upchurch said:
When did "intellectual" become an insult?
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In the United States? Quite some time ago -- the "antintellectualism" element of US culture is well-documented. For example, see Nixon's use of the term egghead against Adlai Stevenson during the 1952 presidential campaign. But it goes back much, much further (Wikipedia comes up with a quote from a 17th-century Puritan speaker that : "The more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee."

There is a general perspective in US culture that "intellectuals," broadly defined, are out of touch with what is "really" happening (popular culture); intellectuals listen to NPR while "just plain folks" listen to conservative talk radio, and so forth. To be "intellectual" is be superior in a particularly unpopular way.
 
ZN,

It took a lot of restraint to avoid describing Chomsky as anything other than an atheist. I was surprised that it took more than 10 posts for someone else to do so.

CBL
 
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