Everything I have written in these lectures underlines the importance to the intellectual of passionate engagement, risk, exposure, commitment to principles, vulnerability in debating and being involved in worldly causes. For example, the difference I drew earlier between a professional and an amateur intellectual rests precisely on this, that the professional claims detachment on the basis of a profession and pretends to objectivity, whereas the amateur is moved neither by reward nor by the fulfillment of an immediate career plan but by a committed engagement with ideas and values in the public sphere.
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About Edward Said
Edward Said was a 20th-century American palestinian-american academic. Edward Wadie Said was a Palestinian and American academic, literary critic, and political activist. As a professor of literature at Columbia University, he was among the founders of post-colonial studies. Read more on Wikipedia →