Booknotes

Abstract

Polemical Papers by Jenny Teichman (Ashgate 1997) will certainly engage and amuse the bystander. They will not amuse Jonathan Lear or Martha Nussbaum or Peter Singer or Ronald Dworkin or Richard Rorty or Jacques Derrida, to name only some of the most prestigious of Teichman's targets. But then home truths usually do not amuse their recipients. Teichman's points are certainly not unsubtle, but they are expressed with the directness characteristic of the home truth, and indeed of good thinking.

This, doubtless, is part of Teichman's object. Through the directness of her writing and her own rootedness in good sense, she communicates to the reader that a big reputation and inflated style are no guarantees of good sense. She says that in her essays she is discussing cases where philosophers are explicitly or implicity recommending or condemning various important human practices and institutions. There is, therefore, a sense in which her targets are already polemical and ought to be ready for ‘replies of a somewhat polemical character’.

Another reason for polemic ‘has to do with puffs and blurbs’. Puffs are ‘brief recommendations signed by authoritative people, usually but not always friends or colleagues of the authors’ and put on the covers of academic books. Blurbs are usually written by the authors themselves. Despite being aware of the provenance of puffs and blurbs, even seasoned academics are taken in occasionally. But the case is far worse with students who don't understand the conventions, and who are discouraged from intellectual self-reliance by what appears to them to be the weight of authoritative opinion.