The phrase "a distinguished intellectual" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe someone who is highly respected for their knowledge and contributions in intellectual fields.
Example: "The conference featured a distinguished intellectual who shared groundbreaking ideas on climate change."
Alternatives: "an esteemed thinker" or "a notable scholar".
He was born into a distinguished intellectual family.
A distinguished intellectual and proud Jew, he will be sorely missed by all who knew him.
Aunt Zhong is an opera scholar and librettist from a distinguished intellectual family; her father was a university vice-president, her mother a painter who studied with the famous master Qi Baishi.
A member of a distinguished intellectual family, Stephen was educated at Eton, at King's College, London, and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he was elected to a fellowship in 1854 and became junior tutor in 1856.
They told him that Fateh al-Qalaj was a distinguished intellectual and an independent thinker.
Some argue that Sen is the last heir to a distinguished Bengali intellectual tradition that owed as much to poets as it did to scientists, politicians and philosophers.
One of the country's most distinguished intellectual property attorneys, and owner of the BookHampton bookstores.
In Washington this past Monday, Wendell delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor the federal government has for "distinguished intellectual achievement" in the humanities.
In 1992, the National Council on the Humanities chose Professor Knox to deliver its yearly Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.
By nature or nurture, it is one contemporary reader's impulse to wonder what the memoirist was really like, what this distinguished intellectual really thought in the privacy of his dreams.
Shostakovich also joined a group of 25 distinguished intellectuals in signing a letter to Leonid Brezhnev asking not to rehabilitate Stalin.
