I think I read that article a couple of years ago. Instead of congratulating Dawkins on the much-needed article, I decided to open up a few of my old philosophy books on the guys Mr. Dawkins was mentioning.
After brushing up on my Deleuze, Lacan, Lyotard, Guottari, Marcuse, Bourdieu, Greimas and especially that hack Levinas; it seems to me that Dr. Dawkins, Sokal, Bircment exposed them as only not knowing what they were talking about when the collection of philosophers were outside of their element. Dr. Dawkins never mentioned their other, more lucid and intelligent yet still more confusingly written, work as either structuralists or crits.
Dr. Dawkin's article is nice; and it definetly makes some good points so future philosophers/idiots can refine themselves on; but by and by, Dawkin's article is seemingly just a reactionist piece against 'intellectuals' going outside their field by applying their proposed universal structuralist or philosophical theorems into other subjects. This article does not to understand that point. Instead, it seemingly relishes on the pot shots given to Dawkins, Sokol, and Bircment in order to discredit Postmodern and Critical theory as if fulfilling some secret disgust with the whole 'pretentious business' of non-pragmatic French philosophy.
That's an awesome article to read. But it's about as fair and balanced as a Fox News broadcast where Dawkin is O' reily and Sokol is Hannity.. and serves Dawkin's appearance on the show South Park rather well.
edit: About the speech used by most philosophers today.
I believe it was Herbert Marcuse that said there were two fundamental ways of writing philosophy. 1) Through plain english, where everyone can understand it. or 2) Through 'complicated' english that implicates strange new undefined buzz words into the sentences in order to exactly express what you mean.
Accordingly, most 'serious' academic philosophers are forced to take the second road. Hegel and Marx, two very influential writers in Western thought, did absolutely no less (although Marx eased up a little after a while.. ) And while it easily alienates others to believing that their writing is just 'pretentious, stupid, intelligible, and "tautologous",' most writing in such a format has good points. It's up to others to discredit them that way. After all, they don't exactly write to sell the books...
But am I saying the philosophy field didn't deserve it? Absolutely not. Most philosophers (and philosophy students) are pretentious undeserving dolts.
