Champion of truth …

… Resisting the arrogance of intellect - Indian Express. (Vikram sent this to me earlier.)

Kolakowski had an ability to produce paragraphs of startling luminosity. Witness his riposte to the arrogance of intellect. “A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.” As an undergraduate I accidentally ended up in lectures he was giving at All Souls. I mistakenly assumed the lectures would be on Marxism. But the lectures were on medieval philosophy. The clarity and verve with which he explained obscure sounding figures like, Duns Scotus and Pascal, had even a small group of nineteen year olds hooked and I stayed on for the term.