My favourite twentieth-century philosopher is David Stove (1927-1994), an Australian atheist, positivist, anti-Platonist and anti-Darwinian. A third of what he says I don’t understand, half of what I do understand I don’t agree with, but I always find reading him a pleasure.
Here are three quotes from The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, 1991.
The Great Schism of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which split the Western from the Eastern Church, took place, on its theological side, over a question concerning the Trinity. This was, of course, that most famous of all theological questions, the question of the procession of the Holy Ghost, or of the filioque. The Orthodox theory was that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father alone. The Western bishops, however, were equally adamant that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father filioque – “and the Son”. It is obvious enough that these two opinions could not both be right, though both could be wrong. It is equally obvious that both opinions are wrong, or at least, that they each have got something dreadfully wrong with them, and the same thing. They both have some fatal congenital defect, whatever the exact nature of this defect may be. And it is equally obvious too, that this defect will also be shared by any other answer to the question, what or whom the Holy Ghost proceeds from. It does not matter much how you answer this question: something has already gone fatally wrong with your thoughts, once you find yourself so much as asking it.
Nothing which was ever expressed originally in the English language resembles, except in the most distant way, the thought of Plotinus, or Hegel, or Foucault. I take this to be enormously to the credit of our language.
For Professor Harris, however, no manuscript, no scrap of paper, quite literally no doodle even, lacks profound significance, as long as it is Hegel’s. Indeed, all previous instances of philosopholatry, even the one which had Plato as its object and perhaps as its founder, are thrown entirely into the shade by Professor Harris. He does not actually say that Hegel’s philosophy can cure wooden legs, but I do not think he would like to hear it denied.