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    Gabriele Taylor was my undergraduate philosophy tutor at St Anne’s College, Oxford from 1989-1992. I remember her as an incisive…

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Susan Haack exacts her revenge…

under the guise of an intellectual autobiography.  Some of the revenge is amusing, but it does bring to mind the even more extreme "score settling" in Ted Honderich's autobiography.  Two things that lept out at me.  First, her praise for her own "independence" of mind often reflects a rather parochial conception of philosophy, and can look rather like the narcissism of small differences to someone with broader horizons.  (In other respects, she has indeed followed her own path, and avoided political fashions.)   Second, it struck me as funny that she proclaimed her own aversion to "self-promotion":  anyone of the right age can recall when the New York Review of Books ran month-after-month-after-month an ad for her book Evidence and Inquiry, an ad that no publisher would have paid for.   Self-promotion on social media can hardly hold a candle to that!

ADDENDUM:  In order to access Professor Haack's essay, you may need to create a free SSRN account:  go here, click to download, then follow the instructions.

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