From the bowels of Cyberspace...

...come bountiful pearls of human wisdom.  Sometimes readers send them, sometimes I happen to follow back a link to the blog and am rewarded with a find.   I've collected a few for your reading pleasure.

The other day, a reader forwarded the following gem from the Facebook page of a conservative Christian philosophy student.  This student posted:  "Who thinks Brian Leiter is a jerk?"  To which one of his friends replies: 

A lot of people. Mostly Continental [sic] philosophers and putative Christians who use their faith as an excuse for advancing monstrous social and political agendas. I suppose that a great many Washington and Wall Street power-mongers would think he's a jerk too, if they weren't too busy counting our money and thinking up new ways to separate us from more of it to care. But, yeah, he's just as good about calling them on their bullshit as he is about calling the former two groups on theirs. That said, he does often do things in a really jerky way. I just agree with him so damn often that I find it difficult to fault him for it.

Being called a "jerk" in these contexts is a bit like being called "shrill":  it's a dodge on the substance.   

Meanwhile, just yesterday, Christopher Roussel (whoever he is) promised to "suckerpunch" me.  Oh dear.  I am guessing he's a fan of Jewish poker philosophy, but I'm really not sure.  Someone will have to send me Mr. Roussel's photo so I know not to turn my back on him should our paths cross!

A German philosophy blog took a more amusing approach, dubbing me "der Don Corleone der Philosophie-Blogszene," though breaking blog legs isn't like breaking real legs.  And the blogosphere is uncontrollable in any case.  A long metafilter thread on Daniel Dennett's book about religion (discussed here, in the context of Wieseltier's silly review of it) yielded, however, the following friendly endorsement:

Brian Leiter rules. His dismantling of the pretentious Leon Wieseltier is just one example of what he does all the time on his blog---exposing bigotry, fraud, and incompetence with a kind of ferocious candor that is unusual, even in the blogosphere, from someone of his professional standing and intellectual caliber.

It would be fair to say that enthusiasm for such exposures is not evenly distributed across the population.  I was recently sent a long excerpt from some political theory blog, where I was apparently being trashed by an unholy alliance of Straussians and postmodernists, when, finally, one (anonymous, of course) commenter intervened with the following gem, in response to a query about why many other posters on the same site were defending my scholarship:

I don't think anyone is particularly shocked that some people don't like Leiter. That's well-known. What's a bit surprising are the flimsy and apparently motiveless attacks in the posts on this thread. If the posters would just come out and say "I'm a Straussian/postmodernist, and Leiter hurt my feelings" then the thread would be both shorter and more intelligent.

That kind of confession would make things simpler, wouldn't it?

My favorite line of recent vintage, though, comes from Todd Gitlin (Columbia), writing on Robert Paul Wolff's blog:  "I only learned of your blog a couple of weeks ago, per Leiter, whom I've been reading in search of intelligent life online."   "In search of intelligent life online":  good luck!