Talk:Intellectual

Definition confuses intellectual with social activist

The definition in the lead is misleading and the sort of thing to come from a project in which students in a class are required to edit Wikipedia.

The trouble starts with "engages ... the reality of society, and proposes solutions for the normative problems of society, and thus gains authority as a public intellectual ".

This is an attempted (and wrong) definition of "public intellectual", not "intellectual" which is the actual topic of article. It also confuses intellectual with social activist.

The lead continues: "the intellectual participates in politics, either to defend a concrete proposition or to denounce an injustice, usually by either rejecting or producing or extending an ideology, and by defending a system of values."

This too is a definition of social activist, not intellectual (who may or may not "participate in politics").

Finally the lead gets to a reasonable definition, which would be fine if all preceding material were deleted: "As a descriptive term of person, personality, and profession, the word intellectual identifies three traits: Educated; erudition for developing theories; Productive; creates cultural capital in the fields of philosophy, literary criticism, and sociology, law, medicine, and science, etc.; and Artistic; creates art in literature, music, painting, sculpture, etc."

This is approximately correct, but musicians, painters and sculptors have not generally been considered to be "intellectuals".

The lead and article need an overhaul. 73.89.25.252 (talk) 16:39, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

Older versions of the lead are more reasonable, e.g. this from a few months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Intellectual&oldid=959711764

which does not confuse with social activism and does define "public intellectual" as a distinct concept. 73.89.25.252 (talk) 00:37, 8 November 2020 (UTC)

major rework and cleanup

I just reworked much of the article's sections on the historical use of the term and cleaned up some of the problems with the article. I don't know why it was in such a poor shape (bad referencing, repetitions, unsourced passages etc) and there are many issues remaining, I will continue to work on them.

Added:

• A better etymology section and an overview of the historical uses of the term
• moved a section with historic uses of the term out of the etymology section

Changed:

• Removed massive TLDR footnotes with no purpose
• cleanup of a lot of repetition wrt the Dreyfuss affair
• cleanup of the intelligentsia section
• cleanup of the section on public intellectuals

Needs to be done:

• Fix unsourced statements, there are a lot of them in almost all sections. I added the maintanence tag too
• Fix many of the references, there are so many poor book citations like "McLennan, 2004" (references and sources need to be merged)
• Deal with the criticism section: right now it's just a list of polemics, they would need to be worked into the article.

Thoughts on this are appreciated. --Mvbaron (talk) 10:05, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

What about McCarthyism?

Under the heading "Persecution of Intellectuals", I expected some words on Senator Joseph McCarthy's witchunts. Someone should look into it. Sooku (talk) 02:09, 21 May 2022 (UTC)