"(J. L. Austin's) admirers claim that his supreme preoccupation was truth. His work, with its sad conjunction of extraordinary cunning in presentation with very thin content, leaves rather the impression of a man who had little sense of real problems but who liked winning arguments and dominating people in the course of them, and who was well equipped to gratify his taste. He was the supreme dialectical poker player, unsurpassed at making people believe that their bluff had been called when in fact they weren’t bluffing, and at stone-walling any attempt to call his own. It would be hypocritical not to say all this. Hypocrisy might not matter, but it would also be unfair to those students who are still conned into supposing that this kind of philosophizing has much in common with serious intellecual endeavour."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
University of Cambridge facultyPhilosophers from the United KingdomAcademics from the Czech RepublicAnthropologists from the United KingdomPhilosophers from the Czech Republic
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Poker Player (1969), reprinted in The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ernest_Gellner
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Ernest Gellner
Ernest André Gellner (9 December 1925 – 5 November 1995) was a philosopher and social anthropologist, cited as one of the world's "most vigorous intellectuals."
36 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Ernest Gellner →
Related Quotes
"Just as every girl should have a husband, preferably her own, so every culture must have its state, preferably its own."
"Dr J. O. Wisdom once observed to me that he knew people who thought there was no philosophy after Hegel, and others w…"
"What are the motives of those who wish to endorse all cultures? A part of their motive is, no doubt, a kind of univer…"
"Wittgenstein's appeal lies in the fact that he provides a strange kind of vindication of romanticism, of conceptual G…"
"When knowledge is the slave of social considerations, it defines a special class; when it serves its own ends only, i…"
"It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round."
"[I am a humble adherent of]...Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism."
"Knowledge which ... transcends the bounds, the prejudices and prejudgements of any one society and culture is not an …"
"It is this which explains nationalism: the principle — so strange and eccentric in the age of agrarian cultural diver…"
"The way forward does not lie in amateur and comically timeless linguistic sociology which takes ‘forms of life’ for g…"