A good article by Stanley Fish in the Times, as good a summary as any of an issue near and dear to my educationed heart.

Some thoughts:

-There are occasions, especially in Philosophy but in any field, when dense and complex writing is a result of a bad writer. There are also occasions when it the obfuscatory nature of the text is a virtue of the subject itself, and in particular a inexorable byproduct of the writers ambitions. No one of whom I’m aware has ever been able to produce a clean paraphrase of Hegel, and there is a reason for that. Folks (like many of comments, above) who don’t admit this second possibility drive me crazy.

–“The problem was how to get the “I” and the world together, how to bridge the gap that separated them ever since the older picture of a universe everywhere filled with the meanings God originates and guarantees had ceased to be compelling to many.”
Indeed. A good analogy here is that of Newton and Einstein: different narratives/theories for different levels of meaning and interrogation of the world. Not incompatible or even contradictory.
When I started taking upper-level college history courses, I was dismayed at the approach of being topical instead of drawing a causal, linear, past-to-present narrative. Later I decided that not only was this a more useful way to learn history, as one could never begin to learn everything, but it was also a reflection of methodology.

-I have nothing useful to say about Francis Bacon.

–“…what we think with thinks us. It also thinks the world. This is not say that the world apart from the devices of human conception and perception doesn’t exist “out there”; just that what we know of that world follows from what we can say about it rather than from any unmediated encounter with it in and of itself.”
This is where Fish comes across with his Poststructuralist lite. Nietzsche (which in my training is where most of this got it’s first full iteration) would say that “the world apart” is an irrelevant idea. If we can’t know anything about it that isn’t “clouded” by our own perspective, why bother? Indeed, most of the work of the last century has consisted of investigations of just how certain claims to “truth” and “reality” of perspective are themselves interesting (and often pernicious) manifestations of a certain person’s or group’s bias.

-Fish does some interesting work at end bringing the Anglo-American tradition, since Wittgenstein so preoccupied with language, back into the fold of cultural criticism. This is a huge divide in American Philosophy programs, and an unfortunate one. Not that I bothered to take any logic or linguistics classes in undergrad.

Lesson over.

Edit:
Holy shit.
Good thing I got my pictures last year.