Further on the subject of Baudrillard. If anyone alive today deserves the position of celebrity philosopher, it is Celia Green. Here is the Foreword I wrote for her most recent book Letters from Exile which explains why I think so.
Instead, she is almost totally ignored. Partly because the things she says are completely at odds with contemporary ideology. Being a woman, but not one supportive of political correctness, probably doesn't help. And anyway, you do not get recognised as a philosopher these days unless you either (a) produce gobbledygook at a university or (b) generate dumbed down pseudo-intellectual panaceas for the masses.
Green has just blogged another previously unpublished aphorism. It is marked by her usual ultra-cynicism about human society.
Update
Reading the summary obit of Baudrillard in The Week reminded me of the fact that B. is said to have been a major inspiration for the concept of virtual reality. In my view Green was a much more important influence, via her pioneering work on lucid dreaming and similar phenomena. Green was the first to suggest that certain conscious experiences could involve the replacement of the whole perceptual field by a hallucinatory one. A film like Vanilla Sky, for example, is difficult to imagine without the thread of research (started by her) which shows that the Cartesian dream argument has an empirical analogue.
