Here's a quote from DQ's thread
Greatest thing of all (which ironically sounds like the medieval way of demonstrating god)
You've obviously chosen to value the true, but limited, perception that "nothing is fundamentally important" and place it above all else. That's your choice. But as I say, from my point of view, it is a very limited and uninteresting insight. It's kindergarten knowledge. Everyone already knows that nothing is intrinsically of value. Big deal. It's no great achievement to know this. What is far more challenging is trying to find that hidden thread of absolute knowledge which takes into account the truth that "nothing is fundamentally important" and uses it as a stepping stone to even greater truths. That's what I call philosophy.
The view that "nothing is fundamentally important" checks from a materialistic stand point, the idea that there is an ultimate truth out there to be discovered by language out of human sentient experience also checks with scientistic goals, and that there's a hierarchy of views where there is "hidden thread of absolute knowledge" instead of open knowledge accessible to everyone checks with the worst of academic myths. It's like David's view is just an extremer form of what he is trying to criticize.
And here's a quote from Kevin Solway's
review of a book which spouts similar views ( I don't know if it was prior to David's debate or not)
Upon reading “Wittgenstein reads Weininger”, a compilation of writings by various Western academic philosophers, I asked myself what impression it had left on my mind, and how I could express that. The answer immediately formed itself in my mind: “Nothing”.
There is no mistake. Indeed, from cover to cover, from one page to the next, and irrespective of author, the consistency is unmistakable. It is absolutely nothing. The theme is nothing, the execution is nothing, the intent, nothing. And there is absolutely nothing about the book that is not nothing.
For this reason “Wittgenstein reads Weininger” will only be of interest to the handful of Wittgenstein scholars, and then only grudgingly, since they already have more than enough of nothing to keep themselves occupied into the far future.
This all might sound unbelievable to some; for how could it be that such highly educated and handsomely paid professionals (who yet cry poor) conspire to produce a book that might as well have had all its pages left blank?
To illustrate how and why this happens, I will examine the actual “contents” of the book – remembering all the while, please note, that any expression I use describe this book, such as “having contents”, must necessarily be poetic only, since there is in fact nothing to be described, and no real contents at all.
And since the nothingness in question is precisely that spoken of by Otto Weininger when he says that people can indeed truly be nothing, and enact nothing (specifically the criminal and the feminine-minded[1]), it will serve for us to examine this book from the perspective of Weininger’s view. More specifically, I will examine how Weininger’s ideas are represented in this book as a way of demonstrating the essential nothingness of the whole book, and by logical extension the essential nothingness of the whole of Western academic thought.
I find it strange for David and others to be against thinking, even if academic, the view that academic thinking is not real thinking is not unpopular at all, but without comparison to other producers of thinking in society any critique seems baseless after all the academia is where 'science' seems to come from. David's demise of Aquinas and other thinkers seems more of a gimmick than anything else.