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Philosophers no longer write for the intelligent, only for their fellow professionals. The few thousand academic philosophers in the world do not sti… - Jacques Barzun
" "Philosophers no longer write for the intelligent, only for their fellow professionals. The few thousand academic philosophers in the world do not stint themselves: they maintain more than seventy learned journals. But in the handful that cover more than one subdivision of philosophy, any given philosopher can hardly follow more than one or two articles in each issue. This hermetic condition is attributed to "technical problems" in the subject. Since William James, Russell, and Whitehead, philosophy, like history, has been confiscated by scholarship and locked away from the contamination of general use.
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About Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun (November 30, 1907 – October 25, 2012) was a French-born American scholar, historian, critic, teacher and editor.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Jacques Martin Barzun
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Additional quotes by Jacques Barzun
Scholarship has yielded to the irresistible pull that science exerts on our minds by its self-confidence and the promise of certified knowledge. But, to repeat, the objects of culture are not analyzable, not graspable by the geometric mind. Great works of art are great by virtue of being syntheses of the world; they qualify as art by fusing form and contents into an indivisible whole; what they offer is not "discourse about," nor a cipher to be decoded, but a prolonged incitement to finesse. So it is paradoxical that our way of introducing young minds to such works should be the way of scholarship.
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