How *Not* to Write about Phenomenology

Taylor Carman (Philosophy, Barnard/Columbia) has instructive things to say about a recent, not very satisfactory book on Merleau-Ponty.  Many of the faults Professor Carman finds in the book under review--e.g., "These sentences [from the book] seem to be spinning their wheels, repeating and recasting Merleau-Ponty's jargon, rather than advancing our understanding of either the texts or the things themselves"--could be generalized to other scholarly writing one often encounters on post-Kantian German and French philosophers.  We are, happily, living in a golden age for English-speaking scholarship on post-Kantian philosophy, though, alas, a lot of obscure and philosophically superficial work still appears.