My distinguished colleague is a doofus.

One of the greatest joys of philosophy has to be reading philosophers take cracks at each other. I just came across a nice one in Spinoza's Ethics. After quoting Descarte's opinion that we can always control our passions through sufficient excerise of the will (via the Pineal Gland, of course) he opines:

"If [this passage] hadn’t been so clever I would hardly have credited that it came from so great a man. DescartesŸ had firmly decided to draw conclusions only from self-evident principles and to affirm only things that he perceived clearly and distinctly, and Ÿhad often scolded the scholastics for trying to explain obscure things in terms of ‘occult qualities’; yet here he is adopting a hypothesis that is more occult than any occult quality! I am astonished at this performance by a philosopher of his calibre."

I just love that wonderful balance of utter respect and open ridicule.