So yesterday, Professor Feser put the rope around his neck; now he’s kicked the chair away. This quote is worth the price of admission to Professor Feser’s professional self-immolation:

“Whatever bland official statement of purpose might appear in the introduction to a modern university’s college catalog, its true raison d’etre is in practice nothing other than to destroy utterly whatever allegiance a young person might have to traditional conceptions in morality, religion, politics and culture, to ‘do dirt’ on the faith of his fathers, on his country, and on what most human beings have historically understood to be the imperatives of decency.”

What to say? Surely it might at least be noted that, on the evidence of the United States, universities have been failing badly at their “true raison d’etre.”

Meanwhile, a philosopher from a University of California campus writes in with a psychological hypothesis, pointing to Professor Feser’s own “resentment theory” from the first article: “Not only in their preparatory years, but also in carrying out their life’s work, intellectuals are bound to see themselves as treated unjustly by their peers.” Certainly, one might imagine that Professor Feser must feel unjustly treated given the likely reception of his paranoid rantings among philosophers and scholars.

Other interesting observations on Professor Feser’s diatribe come from a graduate student in philosophy who writes:

Given Professor Feser’s blurb here, it appears that he doesn’t actually believe the “hegemony of the Left” claim holds, at least in philosophy:

“His most recent publication, On Nozick (Wadsworth, 2004), is an introduction to Robert Nozick, a leading political and moral philosopher of the late 20th century whose major work, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), made libertarian thought respectable within academic philosophy.”

And to think Nozick did it at Harvard!

Perhaps he remains embittered by the hegemonic Leftist rage surely engendered upon his publication of an article in Journal of Consciousness Studies defending the view that “qualia turn out to be features which do not exist over and above the natural world”? Marxists are after all notoriously hostile to arguments sympathetic to materialism.

UPDATE: Pharyngula is having more fun with the “nut du jour”: “Feser is still nuts, and he’s mad at everyone who called him on it.”