If Obituaries Were Objective . . . II

I found the following in this morning's mail bag.  From a philosophy professor who enjoyed my  If Obituaries Were Objective . . . :

Perhaps a more realistic, and to my mind a more depressing objective obit would read as follows:

Philosophy professor x showed great academic promise from early in his career. He published a revised version of his dissertation to great acclaim. He followed this work by well over one hundred articles and scores of books. His third book was for three weeks on the NYT bestsellers list. Within the discipline, professor x is perhaps best known for his famous counter-example to the such-and-such argument. He was, in short, one of the rare examples of a successful professional philosopher.

 

On the other hand, professor x was known to have been an insufferably arrogant boor and a notorious seducer of his graduate students. His work was motivated almost exclusively by a desire to improve his reputation and advance his professional career; he was driven by appetite and thumos, rarely if ever by nous; he really had no genuine personal connection to what the great ancient philosophers would have recognized as "philosophy." 

 

In sum, professor x was a successful professional-philosopher, but he was no philosopher.

 

(Have I just composed the obit of the typical follower of the Leiter Report?)