But things can get worse. In France, for instance, a cappuccino is a coffee with cream. Yet a coffee with cream isn’t a cappuccino, is it?

I hope I find the time to consider specific points of your review later. But I’d like to start with these general remarks, for they give me the chance do do a bit of sociology of philosophy (hoping this is not a problem):

“Berto has an odd conception of what makes a chapter … the expository half of this book has been put together in a bit of a rush … and the chapters have not been tried out on enough hyper-critical students and colleagues … which is probably what Berto meant, but isn’t what his sentences actually say. This sort of casual carelessness is too frequent”

This is totally right.

At the age of 35 I had written 6 books and about 30 papers in three different languages (English French and Italian)… There might be 3,000 pages of stuff published by me out there.
One doesn’t need to bother the “paradox of the preface” to guess that there should be lots of inaccuracies and actual mistakes out there.

That was caused by various things… Among them, the fact that I’m a workaholic and nobody ever taught me how to work. In particular, in Italy and France – the places where I’ve been studying and working – lots of philosophers don’t care about international, peer-reviewed journals. They just care about big monographs. Different academic and cultural standards.

Talking specifically of “There’s Something About Goedel”, that was written (in Italian) in less than two *months*, in the summer of 2007, and (as mentioned in the Italian preface, not in the English edition) mainly for one reason: I needed the publisher’s money. For I was jobless and, well, I had nothing better to do to get some money than writing a book.
It would have been very useful to have “hyper-critical students and colleagues” to discuss drafts of the book. However, I had no colleagues and no students to do me such a favour, no workshops to present stuff to, and even if I had, I could not wait months or perhaps years to gather such comments.

It worked – the book had four editions in Italy in less then a year, so the bills were paid. The publisher thought about an English edition, of which I was happy of course. But I had to translate it myself, for hiring someone to do it would have been too expensive. The translation was anonymously refereed by two major publishers (Wiley-Blackwell and another one), and both accepted to publish it. The rights of the book were owned not by me, but by the Italian publisher, and they opted for Wilwy-Blackwell – it was up to them.
Blackwell hired someone to revise my English, since it’s not my native tongue. But the person revised only the prose, of course, not the technical vocabulary. So I’m sure there are several terminological imprecisions in TSAG. Translating a whole book is a hell of a work.

I discovered the existence of the world of international reviews after I had finished my PhD in Italy (this may give a feeling of how narrow certain environments can be). Having understood that there might have been no chance for me to get even a temporary position in Italy, I thought I had better start to publish in these reviews. Since then, I’ve had papers in American Phil Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Dialectica, the Australasian J Phil, Philosophia Mathematica, the Philosophical Quarterly, and other places. Luckily, now I have a job, thanks to this work. Unfortunately, not a job in my home country – I had to emigrate in the UK. But it’s ok – given where I started from, it’s a miracle that I’m here.

I don’t think anyone would accuse Aquinas, Descartes, Pascal, or Foucault, of lack of seriousness; yet each was very seriously involved in reflection upon the new circumstances of life in his age. A significant part of Aqinas’s attention was devoted to the problem of Christians and Muslims living in close proximity (e.g. Summa Contra Gentiles) — a scholar of the time might reasonably have grumbled about being “off to read Lombard.” Pascal and Descartes both explored the limits of the rationalism and empiricism then current (among much else) — where were the serious scholars like Scotus? Foucault wrote extensively on how modern civility masks power exercise — Where was the meat we used to see in, um …. Descartes?

Every age of scholars must investigate the life that’s presented to it. In every age, there is quite a lot of fluff, marshmallows, trendiness, and nonsense. And in at least the lucky ages, a few people find the serious meaning of what’s going on. Perhaps “Performing Split Selves” will be completely forgotten, but Baudrillard will be remembered — or maybe the reverse; I don’t know (although I can guess).

But I do know that each of the known serious scholars I have named flourished best in scholarly community — which must include more than one or two people in an age. The fluff must exist to provide a context in which the serious can work.

I think ‘cyberculture’ does, or certainly can, identify a real thing. And anything can be studied, and any activity that can be done can be done seriously (or jokingly, or earnestly but with little care,…). I do not know how Professor Dixon goes about it.

In short, I think that calling into question the status of this type of study as serious academic work is a rhetorical side-step to the difficult question of allocating funds in academics.

That said, I DO agree with the implicit point that funding often goes to popular or attractive avenues of study which, upon consideration, have less to offer us than what may seem tired, dead, or simply boring.