Encountering the world …

… Entitled Opinions: Philosophy Outside Academia | Blog of the APA. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

“I believe in it,” Harrison said. “And the reason I believe in it is that at Stanford we are dwelling in a garden of ideas. I know how much desire there is outside academia to have an ‘in’ on the kinds of conversations we have.” He said in a 2008 interview that he wants to “show people what exactly it means to devote your life to an author like Proust or the idea of mimetic desire, as René Girard has done. In other words, I wanted to turn to all the people I know and have come to know for 20 years and get them on the air for an hour. All of them, almost invariably, have been fascinating.”

Of course, the academy needs to learn from the world also.