-Coleman Hughes in The City Journal on Ibram X. Kendi’s ‘How To Be An Anti-Racist’-
‘How To Be An Anti-Intellectual’:
‘Kendi’s goals are openly totalitarian. The DOA would be tasked with “investigating” private businesses and “monitoring” the speech of public officials; it would have the power to reject any local, state, or federal policy before it’s implemented; it would be made up of “experts” who could not be fired, even by the president; and it would wield “disciplinary tools” over public officials who did not “voluntarily” change their “racist ideas”—as defined, presumably, by people like Kendi. What could possibly go wrong?’
One of the ways to challenge one’s own beliefs and sentiments, in the pursuit of truth, is to actually think through what an empirical test might look like. To make an hypothesis, identify relevant variables, and begin to imagine which questions can and can’t be answered satisfactorily.
It’s a start, anyways.
***Thomas Sowell used to work in Chelsea, apparently, for Western Union. He’d sometimes take the 5th avenue bus back up to Harlem, on 5th Avenue for a while, and wonder why there was such inequality from neighborhood to neighborhood.
Marxism seemed like a good explanation for a while he was in his 20’s.
As posted:
The Prospect has a good article here on Parmenides (no longer free). Stanford’s page here.
“By these arguments, Parmenides arrives at his picture of the world as a single, undifferentiated, unchanging unity. Needless to say, scholars have disagreed over exactly what he meant. They have questioned whether he meant that the universe was one thing, or only that it was undifferentiated.”
Here is a quote from this abstract:
“According to Hume, the idea of a persisting, self-identical object, distinct from our impressions of it, and the idea of a duration of time, the mere passage of time without change, are mutually supporting “fictions”. Each rests upon a “mistake”, the commingling of “qualities of the imagination” or “impressions of reflection” with “external” impressions (perceptions), and, strictly speaking, we are conceptually and epistemically entitled to neither.“
and also:
“Unlike Hume, however, he (Kant) undertakes to establish the legitimacy or objective validity of the schematized category of substance and, correspondingly, of the representation of time as a formal unity with duration as one of its modes.“
Via A Reader-‘Locke’s Empiricism, Berkeley’s Idealism’ …From Partially Examined Life-‘John Searle Interview Of Perception: Part One’
From The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy: Charles Sanders Peirce…Some Sunday Quotations: (On) Kant, Locke, and Pierce
Hilary Putnam On The Philosophy Of Science: Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On YouTube