March 12, 1998
Dear Professor Swartz,
I recently read your essay on philosophy as blood sport, and largely agree
with you. I'm not sure though that other disciplines are less problematic.
For example, Geoffrey K. Pullum, in his book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary
Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language (Univ. of Chicago,
1991), devotes several essays to the combative nature of linguists and
goes into a case of mathematicians gleefully taking bets that a purported
proof of one of Poincare's conjectures was fatally flawed. The blood sport
problem may be more widespread than your essay suggests.
Regards,
Graham Solomon
Dept. of Philosophy
Wilfrid Laurier University
email: gsolomon@mach1.wlu.ca
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