I feel like any suitable definition will also comprehend the phenomenon of the “rock star intellectual”. For instance, Jordan Peterson is an intellectual. Of a funny American televangelist type. But I think he has to count. Otherwise you’ll just end up defining philosophy etc.
Sure, so long as he arrives on the island with a brain primed with received knowledge etc and choose too. But if he arrives there with only basic literacy and no such membership, and becomes the island's only expert on breadfruitology from scratch... he still counts for me
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I think this is where our relative subject matter biases are showing. Subjects like history fundamentally need a symbolic tradition to work with as raw material. Many subjects don't need such a symbolizing base layer, just observation of the environment.
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That’s probably right. I do tend to think of intellectuals in symbolic terms. (“Scientist” is something else, because that depends not just on thinking and writing but on actually “doing” science — which in the contemporary world is very often a capital intensive pursuit.)
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Yeah, which is actually the case of Mr Crusoe. This isn’t just a idle idea. Gramsci wrote his exegeses on Marxism from jail with few of any texts available to him. Ezra Pound also wrote the Cantos from prison.
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is a poor person’s idea of a rich person)