TPM

I didn't organise the extreme injustice of this dreadful planet. In any case, there are very different ways of living one's life. The notion that everybody should be able to read Kant or Plato is absurd, totally absurd.
George Steiner, Times Higher Education Supplement, 5 December

 

I won't talk to my colleagues about philosophy. […] They are too stupid.
Colin McGinn, The Times, 13 January

 

Raimond Gaita confesses that he had no titles for Romulus, My Father until his publisher, Michael Heyward, suggested it. “I like the tenderness it suggests,” says Gaita, for whom Heyward also came up with the title of his latest book, The Philosopher's Dog .
Gaita ‘fesses up to Caroline Baum, The Age, 10 January

 

Gluttony pushes you in a direction you regret, usually. The same with lust. They are all sins which, if you give way to them, take control of you and turn your character in such a direction that you've lost control.
Roger Scruton, Sunday Times, 11 January

 

I've chaired some committees of inquiry that have come up with outcomes that in some people's views have been quite good. But it doesn't mean I'm wise; just an efficient chairman.
Mary Warnock on being nominated one of Britain's 50 wisest people, Independent, 15 January

 

People who think there is a difference between infanticide and late abortion have to ask the question: what has happened to the foetus in the time it takes to pass down the birth canal and into the world which changes its moral status? I don't think anything has happened in that time.
John Harris, Sunday Telegraph 25 January

 

For some time now, contemporary philosophy has viewed “worldliness” – the perfectly natural idea that thought should take a healthy and constructive interest in worldly affairs – as a source of contamination.
Richard Wolin, New Republic, 9 February

 

The only difference between philosophy in the pub and philosophy in the university is that in the latter it is, usually, done sober and with the attempt to try and do it systematically.
A C Grayling, BBC Radio Four, Start the Week, 9 February

 

Kant's greatest interpreters in English, however, have not been professional philosophers, but poets and men of letters.
A N Wilson, Daily Telegraph, 12 January

 

Sadly, universities are not the bastions of academic freedom they should be [...]. Try taking an unpopular line on race or gender in a university department of education or sociology and see how far you get.
Anthony O'Hear, The Times, 28 January