Leszek Kolakowski has won a huge prize for scholarship in the humanities. I was extremely disappointed by his last book, not the least because it was such a departure from his extraordinarily high previous standard; I might particularly mention his history of positivism (titled both The Alienation of Reason and Positivist Philosophy from Hume to the Vienna Circle in translation), and Main Currents of Marxism, both of which I read three or four times in graduate school. This is award is immensely (and eminently) deserved. [Via Chun the Unavoidable, who suggests, not entirely seriously I hope, that it should have gone to Stanislaw Lem; and via Arts and Letters Daily, which puts their usual mendacious neo-conservative spin on it.]
Update, about 15 minutes later: Via Ogged. I see that Brian Leiter has written something very stupid about how Kolakowski didn't deserve the award, and been properly rebuked by Jacob Levy.
Philosophy; The Commonwealth of Letters; The Progressive Forces
Posted at November 06, 2003 22:08 | permanent link