Talk:Philip Rieff

message: This page submitted for deletion April 17 2005.  The result was keep.  See Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Philip Rieff. Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 19:43, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: VfD

message: Where was he born? Was his marriage to Sontag his only marriage? Did he only ever have one child? Where did he die, and what of? Nietzsche 2 (talk) 11:24, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Basic info missing

message: It seems that SlimVirgin has now banned me from replying to her criticisms on the Roger Scruton talk page! What a truly nasty woman. I therefore give my reply (given that she is mainly talking about this article) on this talk page. 
I am very familiar with Philip Rieff's writings. I have several of his books (6 to be precise - nearly all his output) and I am happy to discuss with others who are familiar with his work (which of course excludes the increasingly hysterical "Slim Virgin" whose knowledge of the writer being discussed is as usual approximately zero) what is the best short summary of his ideas, but SlimVirgin has now blocked my access to the Rieff article as well!
I recall there was an existing entry (written by others) on Philip Rieff which I updated by adding some information on his last books (not "Charisma" that I can recall but certainly his "Sacred Order/Social Order" trilogy) the summary of which I took directly from my reading of his books. I also recall adding (in the hope that I was improving them) to the summaries that people had already given of his previous books.
"Slim Virgin" objects that some of the phrases used (I presume my additions) in the summaries were taken (without acknowledgement) from a summary of these books already given by David Glen. I think it is wholly appropriate that David Glen should get a reference, and as far as I am aware nobody is disputing that an addition of a reference to David Glen would be an improvement, and that it would have been better if I had made an explicit reference to his summaries, but I do not think that SlimVirgin has quite grasped the fact that David Glen (at least in those phrases that were used in his summaries of his early books) is supplying a precis of the words and sentences and paragraphs and thoughts of David Rieff! What is being attempted by David Glen (and the Wikipedia article on Philip Rieff) in other words is a short summary of the contents of the early books by Philip Rieff. The focus is not on David Glen or myself, or on anybody else, except David Rieff! The most important question is - Is it an accurate summary of the words, sentences, and paragraphs and thoughts written by David Rieff?
In "The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud" Rieff does indeed argue that Freud's renegade disciples disciples, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, D.H. Lawrence, failed to grasp his fundamental pessimism, and instead spun off utopian fantasies about cultural liberation. More broadly, Rieff did indeed warn that urbanization and modernity were giving rise to a hollow gospel of self-fulfilment, and that the central fact of our age is the emergence of psychological man, a figure with no sense of duty, and little sense of history. When talking about Kant Rieff does claim that an authentic religious culture is not about the citizens' intellectual understanding of rules of right and wrong, but about structures of authority, myth, and meaning that are so deep that people are only half-aware of them. A lot of that is a direct paraphrase of Rieff's own words. It is a summary in short by David Glen of Rieff. In other words it is a reliable summary of what Rieff is saying in those early books. All credit to David Glen for producing an accurate brief summary, or at least, credit should have been given to David Glen, but it is precisely because they are an accurate summary of David Rieff's words that they ended up being used in the Wikipedia entry. 
Looking at the Glen article I note the phrase explaining Rieff's use of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's notion of the "clerisy", that is, an informal class of learned people who preserve and maintain a country's cultural heritage, also came from David Glen. I do not know if SlimVirgin is familiar with Coleridge, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge does talk about a "clerisy" which is the informal class of learned people who preserve and maintained a country's cultural heritage. That probably explains why I used that phrase. I have no objection to David Glen getting credit for using that precise sequence of words, although I am wondering why the use of such a straightforward definition of what clerisy means without crediting David Glen for putting together that exact phrase is causing SlimVirgin such hysterics? 
Slim Virgin then complains that I "did the same in the Scruton article" copying Roger Scruton's words without in-text attribution (although she admits that I provided citations) and sees herself as very loving and tolerant for not removing it. I have to remind myself at this point that it is an article about Roger Scruton. It is not about me, or SlimVirgin, it is about the words, sentences, paragraphs, and thoughts of Roger Scruton." Yet again the key question is - Are they an accurate summary or not? The complaint is not that they are inaccurate, it is that they are too accurate because they are taken from his words! 
She then repeats the false allegation that I am User Yorkshirian (on the grounds that somebody once said it) and that I was banned from contributing to the talk page on Right-Wing politics (another lie) or at least I should have been for being so rude, and tops it off with her claim that I "cannot be trusted" - her clinching evidence for this being that I too closely based my summary of Roger Scruton on his actual words.
This would be laughable if it were not so pathetic.
P.S It seems that the phrase "The book uses 39 paintings and other artworks as launching points for meditations on what Mr. Rieff calls the "third culture" -- an empty, permissive realm where no authority is recognized." (which is nearly all a direct quote from Mr Rieff) was also mentioned
(85.211.84.10 (talk) 03:25, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Plagiarism!