Two Reviews
Two Reviews
Kerry McKenzie’s laughable, ignorant, foolish review of Colin McGinn’s Basic Structures of Reality (2011) could only have been published by Mind because she is a woman of junior rank. She clearly had never read the book she was reviewing, given how wide of the mark her observations are. She is completely out of her depth philosophically but vain enough to press on regardless with her misguided “criticism” of the book in question. Mind should be ashamed of itself.
Nina Strohminger’s flatulent, stinky, embarrassing review of Colin McGinn’s Disgust (2011) in Emotion Review demonstrates total ignorance of the philosophical literature on disgust and indeed of philosophy in general (she is some kind of psychologist). Mistaking her own incompetence for superior wisdom, she indulges in puerile “humor” while completely missing the point of what she is discussing. She would have acquitted herself better had she held it in till she was in a private place. Her review belongs in the toilet.
Nicol G. Minnc
What a charming rant Nicol 😉 Just to make things even funnier, in 2012 McKenzie wrote an article against the philosophical notion of fundamentality borrowing the apparatus of S-Matrix theory from a discarded — by physicists not just philosophers – pre-cursor to String theory which, in turn, is a paradigmatic embodiment of vacuous mathematics in physics. Nobody said this better than Peter Woit in his book Not Even Wrong :
The possible existence of, say, 10^500 consistent different vacuum states for superstring theory probably destroys the hope of using the theory to predict anything. If one picks among this large set just those states whose properties agree with present experimental observations, it is likely there still will be such a large number of these that one can get just about whatever value one wants for the results of any new observation.
McKenzie evidently has little knowledge of philosophy, but she won’t let that stop her. I hope it was obvious that Nicol’s reviews of reviews are written as parodies of the two reviewers, both in style and content. I would never write anything like that in propria persona.
Many people seem unable to distinguish simple bitchiness from scholarly criticism. Is this the result of the internet?
I wonder whether any senior colleagues of these two junior women saw fit to warn them of the folly of writing in such an intemperate and ad hominem manner. They should have.