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Colin McGinn Did Not Like Ted Honderich’s Book

Brian Leiter

So many people have been calling my attention to Colin McGinn’s review of Ted Honderich’s On Consciousness (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004) from Philosophical Review, vol. 116, no. 3 (2007), that I thought I should comment on it.  Here is how the review opens:

This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad.  It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed.  It is also radically inconsistent….The second half [of the book] tries to develop a new theory of consciousness, according to which the positive theses of the first half of the book are all wrong (not that this was signposted while the first half was assertively in progress) and the fact is only slyly acknowledged toward the end of the discussion–hence the radical inconsistency I mentioned.  Throughout, the book is woefully uninformed about the work of others and at best amateurish.  Honderich’s understanding of positions he criticizes is often weak to nonexistent, though not lacking in chutzpah.  And the view he ends up defending is preposterous in the extreme and easily refuted.

That’s just from the first paragraph.  The review makes good (i.e., offers prima facia plausible evidence) on most of these charges.  It concludes:

Is there anything of merit in On Consciousness?  Honderich does occasionally show glimmers of understanding that the problem of consciousness is difficult and that most of our ideas about it fall short of the mark.  His instincts, at least, are not always wrong.  It is a pity that his own efforts here are so shoddy, inept, and disastrous (to use a term he is fond of applying to the views of others).

Perhaps most remarkable of all, the review begins with a footnote that says:  "The review that appears here is not as I originally wrote it.  The editors asked me to ‘soften the tone’ of the original; I have done so, though against my better judgment."  What did the original review look like, one wonders?

Disputes about "tone" almost always mask, of course, disputes about "substance," which is probably why McGinn was disinclined to "soften the tone" since he presumably thought it properly matched to the substance.  Assuming the substance of the criticisms are sound, what do readers think about the "tone" of the review?  Are the two separable?  It seems to me that there are too few honest book reviews out there, and too many puff pieces.  But even if one agrees with me about that one might still think McGinn’s approach to this is wrong.  I find McGinn’s approach refreshing, but I wonder what others think?  As usual, non-anonymous postings are far more likely to appear (and they will have to be signed if you plan on criticizing McGinn or Honderich).  Post only once!  Comments may take awhile to appear.

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50 responses to “Colin McGinn Did Not Like Ted Honderich’s Book”

  1. R. Vangala

    What is it that the review's strident tone is supposed to accomplish? If McGinn is seeking to deter others from committing the intellectual crimes he attributes to Honderich, could he not achieve this end in other, less inflammatory, ways? There is a point, I think, to maintaining a professional tone when reviewing the work of someone else. When the tone of a review is like that of McGinn's, I am left with the impression that the reviewer has a personal vendetta against the author of the work reviewed, which in turn leads me to become suspicious of the substantive criticisms offered in the review. It is not that I am unable to distinguish between the substance of a review and the personal attacks that it may or may not be laced with, but such attacks can lessen the overall impact that an otherwise devastating critique has on my perception of the work discussed. There is something to be said for calm, cool-headed, but unsparing evaluations.

    Reply
  2. Brian

    You make a good point about how harshness might be interpreted, but surely an inference to a "personal vendetta" is only one of many possibilities. If the substance of the review supports the harsh judgments, then a more reasonable inference would be: "exasperation with incompetence," "annoyance with having had one's time wasted" and so on.

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  3. Mark Sacks

    Reviews should, in my view, serve to introduce readers to books the reviewers think are worth taking seriously, for all their flaws. This is a good policy, if only in the interest of maintaining the quality of our journals. The exception, I suppose, might be where a book is otherwise likely to command the attention of the profession.

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  4. David J Watkins

    This probably doesn't speak well of me, but on an entirely aesthetic level I adore these kind of reviews. When I'm having a bad day and am in need of cheering up, I go back and re-read classics of the genre (Pauline Kael's Sound of Music review, Bruce Ackerman's review of Bork, etc). This makes it hard for me to dispassionately assess their place in scholarship. And, of course, if taken too far, they can obscure the actually devastating portions of the review with the unfair portions (Martha Nussbaum's review of Judith Butler in The New Republic for example), so they should only be attempted with extraordinary care. But what I think I would say is that they serve a useful but limited role above and beyond their aesthetic virtues (which shouldn't be entirely discounted). I do think it would be unnecessarily cruel if done to a first book or to someone without tenure. This is not to suggest that one should "go easy" a very bad book in such a circumstance, but pointing out major flaws is entirely sufficient in this case.

    This sort of tone is appropriate, I think, when dealing with unserious mediocrities who are mysteriously accorded stature well beyond what they deserve in the profession. I'm not a philosopher, but from what I gather a good many serious philosophers believe Honderich fits the bill here. In such cases, this sort of review serves as a signal–to non-philosophers and perhaps to Honderich himself–that he has abjectly failed to live up to the professional standards of philosophers.

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  5. R. Vangala

    Brian,

    That is fair. A harsh tone need not be interpreted so uncharitably. Still, I suspect that the kind of mean-spirited language employed in McGinn's review will make some of his readers suspicious of his motives, and that, it seems to me, is reason enough to refrain from using such language when critiquing others.

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  6. Brian

    Is McGinn's language really that "mean-spirited"? He uses largely descriptive terms–"poorly thought out," "uninformed," "radically inconsistent," "preposterous" etc.–which are either apt or inapt. Surely a philosopher can have "preposterous" or "ludicrous" views, and if he does, why not call them that? I guess that's the issue.

    I should add that I largely agree with Mark Sacks: if a book is as bad as Honderich's appears to be, then it probably shouldn't be reviewed, unless there is some reason to think that it will garner attention and therefore readers need to be warned. But a book from the University of Pittsburgh Press seems unlikely to garner much attention, absent its merits. (Maybe the thought is that Honderich is prominent enough that it ought to be reviewed for that reason?) As someone who is, admittedly, an author of some fairly scathing book reviews (though not nearly as fierce as McGinn's), I can at least point out that in every case I was reviewing a book from Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard that was bound to be "visible" and thus likely to prey on the uninformed.

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  7. Anonymous

    Is it of any relevance that such reviews may hurt the reviewee's feelings? Are the feelings of one's interlocutor something one should in general be mindful of in one's work? These are meant as genuine questions, not veiled criticisms.

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  8. Roger Ariew

    I usually agree with Brian Leiter's opinions, but I don't in this case. Reviews are voluntary. And in this case, I can only assume that the book being reviewed is not radically different than the other books written by the particular author for the last few decades. So when the reviewer chose to review this particular book, his choice of emotive language can't have been the result of "exasperation with incompetence," "annoyance with having had [his] time wasted." If it was time wasted, he must have known that it would have been so. At my most charitable interpretation, this review looks to me more like missionary work, that is, trying to lead the natives to the light; at my least charitable reading, it is just self-aggrandizement, or the display of a very big ego, having little to do with the target being hit. As an editor, I would not have been pleased to receive a review written in such language, though I would not have minded a negative review; perhaps the editor who commissioned the review might have also chosen his or her reviewer more wisely.

    Reply
  9. C. Mag Uidhir

    A quick point. Given Phil Review's procedure for reviewing books, it is most likely the case that someone other than McGinn was asked to look at Honderich's book, either recommend it for review or reject it, then recommend potential reviewers (which is where presumably Colin came into the picture).

    Also, for the most part, Honderich's book is roundly reviled in phil mind circles–very few if any that I am aware of, take it seriously. Colin said exactly what most of us think, just with a bit more panache.

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  10. R. Vangala

    Brian,

    I would argue that McGinn could have conveyed his 'descriptive' claims in slightly more benign terms. You are right to note that a philosopher can have preposterous views — for example, David Lewis's "modal realism" is, in my judgment, an absurd position to adopt, and it would be fine to note this in a review of his work. The difference, though, is that what is preposterous is Lewis's position, and not the reasoning he offers in support of it, whereas McGinn appears to be commenting not only on Honderich's position but also on his reasoning. My sense is that this second type of criticism is likely to be taken somewhat personally if worded too harshly.

    I am not suggesting that one should never call out someone for putting forward ridiculous arguments. I just think that when one does this, one might as well phrase such criticisms politely. Contrast, "___'s defense of ___ is insane," with, "___'s defense of ___ could use some work."

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  11. David Corner

    If my students were to write about Nietzsche, say, I would not want to see: "This reading runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad. It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed." Is Colin McGinn exempt from what we would expect from an Intro to Philosophy student?

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  12. Ed

    If McGinn is right and the book is so pathetically bad, why bother writing a review of it in a philosophy journal? Aren’t professional philosophers capable of distinguishing a worthless book from a minimally descent one? If they are, then I see no point in a review like this. A negative review is valuable to the profession when, among other things, it succeeds in pointing out a work’s flaws. But the assumption is that there is some value in it. A negative review contributes to the profession when it shows explicitly errors that otherwise would have been persuasive. But if the efforts of an author are so obviously disastrous as McGinn suggest, then the review is serving other purposes.

    Reply
  13. Dean C. Rowan

    First, congratulations on your family's imminent move to Chicago.

    As for the call for responses to this post, I was struck by this remark:

    "Disputes about 'tone' almost always mask, of course, disputes about 'substance'…"

    I'm not sure that this is at all a matter of course, let alone almost always so. To the extent tone and substance are entangled, this is a query about aesthetics, even poetics of a sort, as much as politics or ulterior motives. (I admit I share David J. Watkins' appreciation of these piss-and-vinegar attacks–think Stanley Fish at his most aggravating. They can be refreshing and fun, but not necessarily more "honest" than more civilly couched critiques.) But judging from the comments, folks have had little trouble distinguishing the two aspects of the review, and where the remarks about tone are justified as fitting corresponding opinions of substance, little has been "masked." McGinn is perhaps righteously angry about incompetence or time wasted, but I'm inclined to suppose it's what he regards as a frustrating fact of publication of a sub-standard work of scholarship, despite formal and informal systems in place that are supposed to be filtering for such an egregious lapse.

    This post reminds me of earlier posts regarding civility, and I'm not surprised that Prof. Leiter sympathizes to a degree with McGinn's directness. Frankly, I'm torn. I disagreed with the prescription against an "excess of civility," yet I enjoy heated rhetoric like McGinn's here (or Fish's outside of his work on Milton). Perhaps it does boil down to an appearance of honesty, but I'm in no position to know whether or not McGinn simply had a chip on his shoulder or an ego on display, rather than a genuine, professionally informed dispute with the work.

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  14. Eric

    Whenever I read reviews like that, I'm reminded of Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy" where Anscombe accuses Hume of sophistry, claims Kant's central thesis (of legislating for oneself) is absurd, calls Butler ignorant, and classifies Sidgwick as 'a dull author.' While Anscombe is clearly offering a harsh criticism of these figures, it never sounds to me like anything less than a true dispute over the nature of moral philosophy.

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  15. Jussi Suikkanen

    The review reminds me a lot of Colin McGinn's review of Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other ('Reasons and Unreasons' in New Republic 1999). At least the tone of that review seemed quite too harsh when compared to the importance of Scanlon's book. It would be interesting to see whether McGinn writes in the same frank style when he praises the books he finds excellent.

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  16. Ed Lake

    @ Jussi Suikkanen: Take a look at his blog. He certainly seems to rate Kingsley Amis…

    http://www.colinmcginnblog.com/index.php?entry=entry070928-080156

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  17. Tony

    Having also authored a couple of resoundingly negative reviews, of books by which I was seriously aggravated, I have to say that McGinn's language simply strikes me as unprofessional. Whatever might one think about the virtues of bluntness, McGinn's choice of words goes far beyond the informative. You can say a book has no value and should be avoided without without a mocking or abusive tone. The issue really is that this is a book review, not a comment to a colleague, a note to Honderich himself, or even an independent article by McGinn. As much as a book reviewer has to, and should, express his/her own views on the book, book reviews aren't soapboxes. There is such a thing as the reviewer's obligation to the reader, which goes far beyond that incurred by a regular article. Reviews are a service, and we read them to find out about the book, not just to find out what Colin McGinn thinks about the book. Anyone who's written a negative review has undoubtedly started out with a first draft that is at least somewhat similar to McGinn's (I have, although a bit milder). But to leave it in that form is to ignore your role as a reviewer. That's where the unprofessionalism comes in. You can be a rude jerk (no implication this is McGinn as a person) and still be a professional, so long as you know when to rein it in. You can destroy a bad book by showing it is silly. Going to this extreme adds nothing to the review that is worth anyone else hearing.

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  18. doris

    If a position is "easily refuted," do so, in a way that makes the ease manifest, and be done with it. The quality of the work will thereby be made evident. There are enough problems about atmosphere in the profession (see Brian's recent post of Sally Haslanger's editorial) without resorting to terms of abuse like "preposterous" (which I, at least, have a very hard time reading as "purely descriptive"). When one reflects that one person's "preposterous" may be another's "deep," one has further reason for restraint. –jmd

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  19. Christian Perring

    I know that many people hold to the view that if a book is bad it should not be reviewed, but I've never seen any justification for this view, and it is easy to give a justification for reviewing bad books. There is a huge number of books being published, and many of them get few or no reviews, so silence on a book's quality does not help potential readers conclude whether they good or bad. Obviously reviewing academic books is different from reviewing movies, but it isn't that different. People want to know when a movie is bad, so they can avoid wasting their time on it. The same holds for academic books. The only time I can see that one should not publish a (justified) negative review is when doing so would draw more attention to the book than it deserves, and not publishing the review would allow the book to remain deservedly unnoticed. So I don't fault the Philosophical Review for publishing a negative review, assuming that McGinn's criticisms are reasonable.

    As for McGinn's tone, I don't really see a problem. If it were a review of a book by a young scholar, just starting out in the field, I might think the tone unkind and potentially damaging to the person's career, although it is also possible that such a review would draw attention to the book and make the person's reputation. But Honderich is not a young scholar, and I doubt that his career will be at all affected by this review.

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  20. John Oberdiek

    Jussi's post reminds me of McGinn's nasty review of Peter Unger's book, Living High and Letting Die, in a 1996 issue of The New Republic. One need not agree with any of the substance of Unger's high controversial claims about our duties to distant strangers to think that McGinn's review in that case was over-the-top. This much is demonstrated by David Lewis's review of Unger's book in the Australian literary magazine Eureka Street, where despite thoroughly rejecting Unger's claims, Lewis nonetheless judges Living High and Letting Die "A very fine book…carefully argued, imaginative, fearless." Ours would be a better profession, it seems to me, if more people followed Lewis's lead — academic seriousness need not come at the expense of civility.

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  21. Tamler Sommers

    I'd like to echo David Watkins' point: these kinds of reviews are a lot of fun to read. Case in point (in another context): Anthony Lane's New Yorker review of Star Wars episode 3:

    http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/05/23/050523crci_cinema?printable=true

    Best passage:

    "No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would know what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in “Gremlins” when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender. A fittingly frantic end, I feel, for the faux-pensive stillness on which the Yoda legend has hung. At one point in the new film, he assumes the role of cosmic shrink—squatting opposite Anakin in a noirish room, where the light bleeds sideways through slatted blinds. Anakin keeps having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose,” he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time. If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you’d leave them behind at the first sniff of danger? Also, while we’re here, what’s with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a fucking give.

    If Yoda is fair game, why not Honderich or any other philosopher for that matter?

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  22. Anonymous

    Might the relevant difference between Honderich and Yoda be that Honderich actually exists? Is it of no significance that a reviewer's remarks are ordinarily cases directed at a real human being who, whatever his philosophical faults, may well be devastated and humiliated as a result? Is it not perhaps immoral to abuse someone in this way? Whenever I read a scathing review, my first thoughts are of the miserable creature on the receiving end. I'm surprised that no one has addressed this issue in the commentary. Are the subject's feelings simply irrelevant?

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  23. Robert Talisse

    It seems to me relevant that the harshest of McGinn's comments are directed towards those places in the book where he thinks (and provides some reason for thinking) that Honderich is being unfair to or dismissive of others' views. Where McGinn is addressing Honderich's own view, the tone becomes decidedly less harsh, but nonetheless philosophically forceful– as it should be.

    I think that, apart from special cases involving junior people, etc., philosophers *should* get hauled out for strawmaning, cherry-picking, or otherwise failing to pick up their fair share of the dialectical burden. Well-established, distinguished philosophers know better than to do this; and when they do it anyway, they should be called on it in harsh tones.

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  24. Sharif

    Public discussion of a work is probably more likely to achieve its goals if conducted on that basis, mutually understood, that errors, confusions, trivialities may be pointed out publicly but not condemned or ridiculed.

    There may be myriad benefits to saying or writing things that are wrong or confused. A subset of the wrong or confused may be of no benefit at all – it may only be wasted effort, it may only harm understanding and so on.

    Brian appears to suggest that using harsh terms to condemn an author's work may be appropriate and permissible where there's a (wide) readership which can't be expected to understand arguments which expose a work's error, falsity, triviality etc. It can undermine any authority that the undeserving work would have over the uninformed (since they can understand the harsh adjectives at least). Assuming that harsh judgments are well directed at the only useless false/confused/trivial work, it's plausible to think that the practice could assuage some of the bad effects of work that is wrong/confused/trivial.

    On the other side, it's plausible to think that there are greater costs: the discouragement of valuable but false/confused work and of valuable accurate work. Not because such work would be the object of harsh judgment (by assumption it wouldn't be) but because the author won't know in advance which side of the line she falls. The missing premisses are fairly obvious – that many authors able to contribute work of that sort are, to greater or lesser extents, averse to ridicule/harsh judgment and uncertain about the value of their own work.

    There are good reasons to think that younger scholars are likely to be more prone to that aversion and uncertainty. So perhaps the practice is best confined to judgments of established scholars, assuming their judgments are well directed. Perhaps the constraint that Brian suggests – that the work has a wide, uninformed readership would confine harsh judgment to senior authors anyway.

    Even the practice were so confined, one would have to be sure that the tone and register of public discussion about the work of senior scholars wasn't reproduced in discussion of the work of a more junior scholar. In my experience and unsurprisingly, younger academics learn the style of academic discourse from how it is carried on by senior academics.

    So the concern boils down to this: the cost of well directed incivility in a book review (or other public discussion of a work) isn't just the unpleasantness for the author whose work is on the line. Uncivil public judgments of an author's work may have a chilling effect on valuable contributions. That chilling effect seems quite likely to be a greater cost, over time, than the benefits (in particular those linked to removing the authority that an undeserving author may have over the uninformed).

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  25. Kevin Schutte

    I think the issue of appropriateness is dependent upon the personal relationship between these two individuals. I know nothing about how McGinn and Honderich relate to each other, but a more earnest investigator might see if details about their time at UCL might be found in Honderich's Philosopher: A Kind of Life and/or McGinn's The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy. Personally, I know some individuals whose teaching ethics are so low that I would very much enjoy writing or reading such a review about their work. But I can't tell whether this is an intentional indictment of Honderich-the-educator or merely a distastefully harsh review of Honderich-the-philosopher.

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  26. Paul Raymont

    McGinn's tone is right on the money for reasons having to do with how contemporary analytic philosophy is perceived in the wider culture. There's a tendency in some quarters to breezily dismiss analytic philosophy as being downright silly. One expression of this tendency is the hasty dismissal of contemporary analytic accounts as relying on obvious errors (sort of like when Johnson thought he'd refuted Berkeley by kicking a stone).

    Honderich's writings promote this tendency. This is established by his evident failure to have even bothered with much of the recent literature on the topics about which he writes — what clearer, implicit expression of contempt for a field of study can there be? It's also implied by Tim Crane's polite debunking of some of Honderich's recent work in Crane's contribution to *Radical Externalism* (2006), which exposes Honderich's tendency to outrageous misrepresentation of other analytic views (Crane puts the point in more polite terms). After erecting such pathetic straw men, Honderich then quickly dismisses them as downright silly.

    To readers outside the profession, this makes analytic philosophy look pretty feeble. And Honderich has enough prominence to be read by many outside the profession — he was the Grote Professor at UCL, his autobiography was widely reviewed, and he's attracted enough public controversy to have had riot police in the lecture hall during his recent talks in Germany (on the mideast and terrorism).

    In this very peculiar context, McGinn's tone is entirely appropriate. In fact, it's obligatory for someone with McGinn's prominence (within and beyond the profession) to show to the broader culture why exactly analytic philosophy is so much more important and impressive than Honderich has made it appear.

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  27. Tamler Sommers

    In response to "Anonymous"–no, I don't think that's a relevant distinction. Yoda is fictional, but George Lucas is real. (Yes, I know I made the Yoda/Honderich or other philosopher analogy, but that was artistic license.)

    In any case, when Lane writes…

    "The general opinion of “Revenge of the Sith” seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, “The Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones.” True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion. So much here is guaranteed to cause either offense or pain, starting with the nineteen-twenties leather football helmet that Natalie Portman suddenly dons for no reason, and rising to the continual horror of Ewan McGregor’s accent."

    …he is targeting real people. I think the key question is whether the target is someone with enough stature that the attack doesn't seem like bullying. Lucas and McGregor can handle the abuse of Anthony Lane, even if they might not like it. The same is true, it seems to me, of someone like Honderich.

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  28. Mr. D. Evans

    Kevin Schutte:

    I'm sure people can draw their own conclusions, but ask and you shall receive. Having previously read both books, here are the relevant passages.

    From Honderich's Philosopher: A Kind of Life:

    "The envy of my small colleague Colin McGinn, also a vegetarian, extended even to wanting to be Martin Amis." (222)

    "But nor were actions to be taken as compounds or mixtures made up of movements and of mental facts before them, perhaps intentions or volitions, as Colin McGinn and predecessors had supposed. Maybe he'd got the idea in an afternoon of practising his rock-band drums next door to my eyrie, but he should have had second thoughts afterwards." (293)

    "My old colleague McGinn had announced this in an article, but for such philosophical reasons as to put me in mind of someone's earlier observation that he distinguished himself not only as the Wilde Reader in Oxford but also as the Wilde Writer. Conceivably out of justified spite about a line of mine, he had earlier said in a review of Freddie's posthumous collection of essays that my memorial-meeting speech for him, reprinted as the introduction, was ill-written, plodding and faintly nauseating in places. Was it for this reason that I was disinclined to his stuff about giving up in the philosophy of mind? Not only, cynic, not only." (365)

    "As executor with Dee of the literary estate of Freddie Ayer, it is good that the biography of him by Ben Rogers is so fine. Still the mighty little McGinn in reviewing it could write that Freddie not only never had an original idea in his life, but also never had a good idea, his own or anyone else's. I thought he had one or two." (387)

    As far as I can tell, Honderich is not mentioned in McGinn's The Making of a Philosopher.

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  29. anonymous

    In case anyone is interested, there is a list of other harsh philosophy reviews here:

    http://ideasofimperfection.blogspot.com/2006/04/utter-rubbish.html

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  30. John Turri

    Dear Paul Raymont,

    Just curious: How deeply into the broader culture do you think a book review in Phil Review will penetrate? How, exactly, will this disabuse those outside the profession of any misleading impressions of analytic philosophy that they've picked up over the years?

    Most philosophers won't even read this book review. I can't imagine many non-philosophers will read it. More poignantly, it's hard to believe that many, if any, non-philosophers who bother to read Honderich's book will actually read McGinn's review alongside it.

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  31. Paul Raymont

    Hi John Turri,

    You ask, "How deeply into the broader culture do you think a book review in Phil Review will penetrate?"

    Generally, not very far, but this review has already gone much further than most from that journal. It's been extensively quoted on this popular blog, which is read by people outside philosophy. Granted, it wasn't certain that his review would attract such attention, but perhaps that's why McGinn adopted such a strong tone — polite reviews with the standard academic tone are much less likely to get noticed by non-specialists. The strong tone together with McGinn's prominence made it likely that the review would get noticed by people in other branches of academe (esp. over the long term). (In this connection, I hope that McGinn bundles some of his reviews together into book form.)

    You then ask, "How, exactly, will this disabuse those outside the profession of any misleading impressions of analytic philosophy that they've picked up over the years?"

    It probably won't, but it will (hopefully) slow the spread of those misleading impressions to others.

    You conclude, "More poignantly, it's hard to believe that many, if any, non-philosophers who bother to read Honderich's book will actually read McGinn's review alongside it."

    But it's not so hard to believe that non-philosophers will know that an important representative of analytic philosophy has made a good, public case for his grave reservations about the quality of Honderich's work. Hopefully, that will render that work less likely to promote low esteem for analytic philosophy.

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  32. Anon

    Philosophy and sensitivity need a divorce. Their attraction was never more than facile and their marriage was entirely for professional convenience. It prevents any kind of flourishing and is a living hell for both. Occasional spats need not be lamented if they duly precipitate seperation (and of course, the sooner the better).

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  33. John Turri

    Thanks, Paul, I see where you're coming from.

    I think you'll agree that if the goal is to promote higher esteem for analytic philosophy, then in conjunction with helpful book reviews, it'd probably be best to, for example, avoid saying things like this when interviewed by The Times:

    "I won't talk to my colleagues about philosophy. It is too boring to me. [… Because] They are too stupid.[…] They don’t get it. And I don’t want to have an hour’s conversation about it.”

    And:

    "[Philosophers] look terrible to start with. I don't like people looking terrible. Their clothes are terrible. They will be intolerant of people whom they don't think of as at their intellectual level. People who are very nice, interesting people, they're just not interested in them."

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  34. anonymous

    One puzzling thing about those quotes from Honderich's book is that they suggest that he and McGinn were on rather bad personal terms. If that is in fact so, then any ordinary periodical with knowledge of that fact would likely have disallowed McGinn from reviewing the book. Do the same standards not apply in academic journals?

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  35. Paul Raymont

    OK, John, point taken. I didn't know he said those things.

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  36. Andrew Black

    I can't help feeling, having been tutored by both Honderich and McGinn at UCL and having read each of their autobiographies, that there was never any chance Colin McGinn would write an impartial assessment of Honderich's book. I suspect he knew before he picked the book up that his review would be scathing. I don't find it hard to believe that the substantive criticisms are on the mark, but I do find it hard to take McGinn's review as evidence for that fact. In fact, I've never read a McGinn review in any context without getting the sense that it's all about self-promotion.

    For those reasons, I think the language and tone of the piece are defeating of what ought to be its purpose. However, I don't fear for Ted Honderich's feelings. Readers of the two autobiographies will recognize that McGinn is far more likely than Honderich to wither in the face of hostile criticism.

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  37. Brian Leiter

    As usual, an excellent and perceptive set of comments by readers, for which my thanks. As the excerpts from Honderich's biography supplied by D. Evans make plain, there is, in fact, a "personal" history at work between McGinn and Honderich (though Honderich's autobiography, which I've looked at again, pisses on so many different people it's hard to imagine that McGinn took *special* offense!). Given that history, one might think McGinn ought not to have reviewed the book, even if he is right on the philosophical merits. So, too, as Roger Ariew suggests, one who has reason to think a book will be quite bad can hardly then properly complain after agreeing to review it nonetheless. John Oberdiek's comments particularly caught my attention. He contrasts McGinn's review of Peter Unger's book with David Lewis's, as though this were a matter of differences in tone, yet Lewis's view that Unger's book was "a very fine book…carefully argued, imaginative, fearless" was certainly not McGinn's: so once again a substantive dispute explains, I think, the difference in tone. Professor Oberdiek concludes that "academic seriousness need not come at the expense of civility," which, as a general principle, is surely right, but not apposite in this context, since lack of "civility" was apparently necessary for McGinn to render a serious verdict on Unger's book. It may not be nice to say that a book is "preposterous" or an argument "ludicrous," but sometimes that is the only "serious" thing to say. (I don't know that McGinn's review of Honderich is such an occasion, I should add.) Too often, I fear, "civility" is the pretext offered for what is really intellectual dishonesty.

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  38. Alan Thomas

    There is one important issue that this discussion has thrown up (apparently in passing) which is the view expressed that only good books get reviewed. With this preliminary screening by reviews editors one can infer from the mere fact that a book is reviewed that one can take it seriously. If this is a widely understood general convention then (a) I am getting old [I think I knew that anyway] and (b) this does seem to me a general shift in practice. In ye olden times – maybe twenty years ago – anything other than the clearly lunatic was reviewed and reviewers just told the truth, good, bad or ugly. I can remember some reviews that pulled no punches, even when it was a senior person reviewing a junior academic at the start of his or her career. (I think in those days you were just supposed to take your lumps and get on with it if on the receiving end.) I would be interested in the rationale for the change if anyone can venture one – it can hardly be shortage of space for reviews as there have never been so many journals, electronic or paper. I also think both Colin McGinn and Ted Honderich take the "old school" approach – maybe why their "exchange" seems so inappropriate to those who have adopted the new convention?

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  39. anonymous grad student

    A question: what if McGinn's tone is justified in Honderich's case just–or at any rate largely–on the basis of Honderich's experience and relatively high profile? That is, we might think that (i) as a result of his experience he really, really ought to know better–in a way that makes (if McGinn's criticisms are apt) the carelessness of his book almost insulting–and that (ii) since inexperienced or lay readers might, vaguely thinking of Honderich as a serious philosopher, be disproportionately likely to read and take seriously the book in a way that might require particularly fierce criticism to counterbalance (if criticism in an academic journal can counterbalance that sort of thing at all).

    Compare (and here one's status as a hapless grad student is made manifest) Honderich's case to the hypothetical case of a book with largely identical content, written by a young, inexperienced, and relatively unknown philosopher not long out of graduate school. (We might legitimately wonder how the philosopher got out of graduate school at all–especially if such a terrible book were the basis of his dissertation–but suppose we can bracket that.) Would a review like McGinn's be justified in that case? I would think not–I'd think it would seem nasty or even bullying. Rather, a crisp but authoritative refutation, in a polite (if slightly pitying) tone seems much classier.

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  40. Dave Estlund

    I'm surprised there's so much controversy about this. The paragraph from the Honderich review is so clearly and wildly inappropriate that the editors should not even have let it appear. (For those of you who remember journals, they have always been what is now called "moderated.") "Tone" is what allows academic discourse to proceed.

    We all know that much of the philosophy we read strikes us as seriously and sometimes culpably deficient. And we know many people might feel that same way about our own work. And of course it is fair game to publicly critique each other's work even though this will cause some pain. But McGinn is practically raising his fists and daring someone to fight. We don't say everything we think or feel in any part of our life, nor should we, because if we did many of us would be fighting (not just arguing) all the time. Others of us (and not only the worthless ones) would simply get out of the field rather than risk such treatment.

    It is not dishonesty to modulate our rhetoric to the context, doing so in the service of more important goals than getting something off our chests. McGinn could certainly have written a strong and frank critical review, advancing the cause of truth at least as much as his vitriolic review did, without all the spitting and bullying. Other writers prove that this is possible on a regular basis. I'm pretty sure we're not better off for McGinn's extra "honesty."

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  41. Brian

    Dave, yours is certainly one way of striking the balance between competing considerations in a case like this, but why you think yours is the obvious way to do so is, I must confess, completely mysterious.

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  42. C. Mag Uidhir

    Those interested in comparisons and contrasts should check out Barbara Hannan's review of Honderich's On Consciousness.

    http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/114/455/743.pdf

    Having read Honderich's book, my reaction to Hannan's review is that it is far too polite (forced and grimace-laden perhaps). Notice how the positive things she has to say about Honderich's views (esp. his radical externalism) come off as really backhanded.

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  43. Mark van Roojen

    Brian,

    I don't really think there's anything too mystifying in what Dave is saying. If a review in a public forum can get the content across — that the book has this particular bunch of failings — without employing the quite obviously disrespectful tone, there is reason to prefer that because of the ancillary costs to the profession that come from the more belligerent policy. Dave mentions one such cost, silencing (or at least muting) what the less confident may want to say.

    So that puts the issue back on the question of whether you can make the serious criticisms without the extra vitriol. If he in fact "makes good" on the criticisms in the remainder of the review it seems like there's some reason to think he could do the one without the other. Clearly there is a real issue here and it might be that when we look at the criticisms in more detail we could find that they can't be divided off from the accompanying angry language without loss of content. But probably we won't make much progress on that issue without looking at the particulars of the criticisms in some detail. Is there a particular line of criticism in the review that you think would not survive a change in tone?

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  44. Brian

    I don't know how to say the book is "painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed" as well as "radically inconsistent" without saying all those things. Maybe the thought is that one could just show those things to be true (perhaps), but it is perfectly legitimate for a reviewer to "sum up" his assessment, and often readers of reviews, especially reviews outside their area, look for a "summing up" to decide whether it is worth reading more.

    What is puzzling about Dave Estlund's intervention is that, notwithstanding the conflicting responses evidenced in this thread, he thinks it obvious how the balance is to be struck between candor, intellectual honesty, and "decorum."

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  45. John Turri

    Brian,

    Dave of course can answer for himself, but I did want to add something that seemed relevant and related to his points.

    Many philosophers are presently wondering whether and how to make our discipline more welcoming to women and minorities. Sally Haslanger and others have suggested that the tone and style of philosophical discourse itself might be part (and I emphasize a *part*) of what keeps women and minorities away. In her recent paper on this, she pointed out that Anglophone philosophers often take it as their objective to "attack, target, demolish an opponent." She suggests that this is part of what discourages women and minorities.

    In any case, then, I'm thinking that maintaining a civil, respectful tone would at least avoid that sort of discouragement, and so to that extent is advisable.

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  46. Brian

    This strikes me as a rather speculative worry. Are we to believe that women and/or minorities are not entering the profession because one 50ish white guy savages an even older white guy in a book review? Treating, say, students (undergraduate or graduate) with respect is important (and obligatory it seems to me); I'm less sure being kind in book reviews is.

    Look, there is another problem here, which I suppose leaves me better disposed to McGinn's approach: namely, that book reviews in our profession tend to be unreliable, erring almost always on the side of being far too generous to work that is indeed culpably deficient. Perhaps McGinn has erred in the opposite direction, but that kind of error is more rare.

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  47. Jonathan

    I'm an English Professor with an interest in philosophy, not a professional philosopher. Nevertheless, the topic seems pertinent across disciplines. The important question seems to me one of rank. That is, had McGinn written an extremely negative review of a younger philosopher, especially a younger untenured philosopher, I would say he had acted in bad form and breached professional etiquette. Were Honderich a younger untenured philosopher, McGinn should have declined to do the review and sent it back to the journal for another reader. But this is a case of one established philosopher writing a very negative review of another. The stakes are significantly lower.

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  48. John Turri

    No, I'm not proposing a direct causal relation between one book review and the discipline's demographics. But when I put myself in the shoes of people who are antecedently worried that their ideas will be judged too harshly or unfairly dismissed, I can see how it'd be easy to think, "Wow, if that's how this guy gets treated, I wonder what's in store for me? Maybe this isn't the place for me."

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  49. Brian

    Sorry, I put that badly, I didn't take you to mean this one book review would have the exclusionary effects. But I am still skeptical that the genre of harsh philosophical book reviews is likely to be a big factor in keeping philosophy white and male, as compared, e.g., to how faculty treat their students and their colleagues in pedagogical and communal settings of face-to-face interaction.

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  50. John Turri

    I agree with the comparative point.

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