Heaney was a great artist and an exemplary public intellectual.
"Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy" presents Addams as an exemplary public intellectual, as serious as, say, her contemporary Herbert Croly.
While "Where the Stress Falls" won't do much to enhance her stature as a thinker, never before has she made such large claims for her moral pre-eminence, her exemplary fulfillment of the intellectual's mission as society's conscience.
In some ways one might explain Harlem poet Countee Cullen's first wedding to Yolande DuBois on Easter Monday in 1928, as the outcome of the extravagant hopes of his father-in-law and certain other blacks, for the formation of an exemplary dynasty of exalted intellectual accomplishment.
So there is something to be said for our more low-key intellectuals – someone exemplary such as Mary Warnock, who's not only a very punctilious and thoughtful moral philosopher but I think has been very positively influential in a number of areas of public policy without ever needing to have that kind of cachet.
An admixture of other cultural factors led to a certain moderation of confessional claims at the intellectual level also; exemplary in this regard would be the German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 81).
At eighteen, he had been an ambitious art student about to enter the nation's top art institute, but within a year his father, an exemplary member of the reactionary intellectuals, was demoted from professor to toilet cleaner, and Teacher Fei's education had been terminated.
Carroll is exemplary as the tormented, self-loathing intellectual, and Sue Jones as the harassed cook, Mrs Sibley, creates a classic White character, at once satirical and empathetic.
That's a complicated question, but it's hard to disagree with George Orwell, who thought that any exemplary book should not only be an intellectual but "also an aesthetic experience".
Unlike most of the great philosophers, Spinoza has a reputation for living an exemplary, almost saintly life, characterised by modesty, gentleness, integrity, intellectual courage, disregard for wealth and a lack of worldly ambition.
