France's most famous intellectual revealed to be inept Googler. From the Times of London:
When France’s most dashing philosopher took aim at Immanuel Kant in
his latest book, calling him “raving mad” and a “fake”, his
observations were greeted with the usual adulation. To support his
attack, Bernard-Henri Lévy — a showman-penseur known simply by his
initials, BHL — cited the little-known 20th-century thinker
Jean-Baptiste Botul.There was one problem: Botul was invented by a journalist in 1999 as
an elaborate joke, and BHL has become the laughing stock of the Left
Bank.There were clues. One supposed work by Botul — from which BHL quoted — was entitled The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant.
The philosopher’s school is known as Botulism and subscribes to his
theory of “La Metaphysique du Mou” — the Metaphysics of the Flabby.
Botul even has a Wikipedia entry that explains that he is a “fictional
French philosopher”.But Mr Lévy, a leader among the nouveaux philosophes school of the 1970s, was unaware…
Thinking in the 21st century: It's tougher than it looks on the Internet…
Kit Stolz 